Misrepresenting Halliday On Meaning Potential

Fawcett (2010: 38-9):

First, our model of language has, at the level of meaning, a component that specifies the meaning potential of the language — as Halliday has aptly named it (e.g., Halliday 1970:142). This is the core of a systemic functional grammar, and it consists of a vast system network of choices between meanings. In other words, the system networks model the language's potential at the level of meaning. Figure 1 in Appendix A introduces a simple system network for 'things', thus exemplifying the standard way of representing a system network in diagram form. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This again misrepresents Halliday in order to give credence to Fawcett's model in which all system networks are located at the level of meaning.  For Halliday, 'meaning potential' is the entire language system, not merely the systems at the semantic level of symbolic abstraction (stratum).

[2] The system network of Figure 1 in Appendix A (below):

• confuses features (singular, plural) with what are specified by the synthesis of the most delicate features (water, bread etc.);
• confuses the semantics of things with the grammar of nouns (mass vs count, singular vs plural);
• confuses experiential 'thing' with both interpersonal deixis (near vs un-near) and textual cohesion (recoverable).