Misrepresenting Halliday And Matthiessen On Lexicogrammatical Systems

Fawcett (2010: 53): 

We saw in Section 4.3 that in the mid-1960s Halliday changed the theoretical status of the system networks, so that they came to be seen as modelling choices between meanings. And yet a close study of the system networks in Matthiessen (1995) shows that many are essentially the same as Halliday's 1964 networks (as published in Halliday 1976). In other words, system networks that Halliday had originally developed on the assumption that they were at the level of form were re-interpreted as being at the level of meaning. Is it really possible, one has to ask, that networks that were developed for one level of representation should be able to be transported, unchanged, to function at another level of representation? After major theoretical changes of the sort described above, the next logical steps should surely be a critical reexamination of the existing networks to discover where they were and where they were not already sufficiently 'semanticised', followed by the careful semanticisation of those parts that needed it, in order to turn a brilliant insight into a practical reality.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is manifestly untrue.  As demonstrated in the critiques of Section 4.3, Halliday did not reinterpret his grammatical networks as semantic networks.  This was merely a misinterpretation of Fawcett and his colleagues.  The continual repetitions of this falsehood are instances of the logical fallacy known as 'proof by assertion'.

[2] This is misleading, because it is manifestly untrue.  The networks in Matthiessen's Lexicogrammatical Cartography (1995) are grammatical networks, and so, not re-interpretations of Halliday's networks as semantic networks.  See also (the title of) the immediately preceding post.

[3] Here Fawcett is chiding Halliday for not acting according to Fawcett's misunderstanding.