Misrepresenting Halliday On Hypotaxis [2]

Fawcett (2010: 30):

There is a further problem about the proposed relationship of 'hypotaxis'. This is the question of what it actually means to say that the relationship is one of 'dependency without embedding'. The answer lies in Halliday's use of the terms 'modifier' and 'head' (IFG p. 217) to describe the relationship. Essentially, the relationship of 'hypotaxis' is the same the traditional 'modifier-head' relationship in a unit. The only differences are that Halliday narrows the definition, such that (1) each element must be filled by the same unit, and (2) the relationship between each element and the sister elements on either side of it is always the same. (And neither of these is the case, it can be argued, for the relationships between the modifiers and the head in the English nominal group, for which see Section 10.2.5 of Chapter 10.) Thus, despite this narrowing of the definition, 'hypotaxis' is still a relationship between sister elements — and this, you will recall, is essentially what a 'multivariate' structure is. So the distinction between 'multivariate' and 'univariate' structures is not in fact very clear.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, dependency is a relation between units of the same rank, whereas embedding is the functioning of a higher rank unit in the structure of a lower rank unit.  That is, dependency and embedding are mutually exclusive.

[2] This is misleading because it is not true.  Hypotaxis is not essentially the same as the traditional Modifier–Head relationship.  The Modifier–Head relationship in the nominal group additionally includes the relationship of subcategorisation.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 388-9):

We now need to consider the structure of the nominal group from a different, and complementary, point of view; seeing it as a logical structure. This does not mean interpreting it in terms of formal logic; it means seeing how it represents the generalised logical-semantic relations that are encoded in natural language. These will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7; for the purposes of the nominal group we need to take account of just one such relationship, that of subcategorisation: ‘a is a subset of x’. This has usually been referred to in the grammar of the nominal group as modification, so we will retain this more familiar term here.

[3] This is misleading because it is not true.  The Modifier-Head relationship in the nominal group is not one in which 'each element must be filled by the same unit'.  Like all univariate structures, it is generated by the iteration of the same functional relationship.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 390):

We refer to this kind of structure as a univariate structure, one which is generated as an iteration of the same functional relationship (cf. Halliday, 1965, 1979): α is modified by β, which is modified by γ, which is ... .

[4] This is only half true.  It is true that the Modifier-Head relationship in the nominal group is the iteration of the same functional relationship, subcategorisation, but the subcategorisations themselves vary according to the logico-semantic relations of expansion (elaboration, extension, enhancement) and projection.  See Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 183).

[5] This is misleading because it is not true.  In the promised discussion, Fawcett misconstrues the Epithet/Head of the nominal group very bright as Thing.  This misunderstanding will be explained in more detail in the critique of section 10.2.5.

[6] This is misleading because it is not true.  A "relationship between sister elements" is not "essentially what a multivariate structure is"; it describes structure in general, whether multivariate or univariate, and within univariate, whether hypotactic or paratactic.

[7]  This is misleading because it is not true.  The distinction between multivariate and univariate structures is very clear and simple.  Continuing from the quote in [3] above, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 390) explain:

By contrast, the type of structure exemplified by Deictic + Numerative + Epithet + Classifier + Thing we call a multivariate structure: a configuration of elements each having a distinct function with respect to the whole.