Misrepresenting Halliday On Stratification

Fawcett (2010: 45):

Then in the second half of the chapter I shall describe how, in the 1970s, Halliday tentatively explored two contrasting approaches to meaning — one of which adds a second level of meaning — and how in the 1990s he finally decided in favour of what we may call the 'two-level model of meaning'. Although I shall not present here the full set of arguments against his decision (which deserve a paper or even a book of their own) I shall show why, even if you accept Halliday's position, it does not seriously affect my claim that the model of language presented in Figure 4 of Chapter 3 is common to all systemic functional grammars. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading on two counts.  On the one hand, Halliday has never proposed two levels of meaning in any of his models, and on the other hand, the two levels of content that Halliday does propose, meaning and wording, are labelled as such as early as Halliday & Hasan (1976: 5):

[2] As shown in numerous previous posts, the model of language presented in Figure 4 of Chapter 3 cannot be "common" to any systemic functional grammars, not least because of its serious internal inconsistencies.  Moreover, Fawcett's model conceives of human language as a Fordian production line in which operations are performed in separate modules, producing outputs — largely because it is designed, instead, for the purpose of text generation by computers.