Misrepresenting A Misunderstanding As Halliday's Suggestion

Fawcett (2010: 51-2):

We saw in Section 4.3 that many systemic linguists, including myself, welcomed Halliday's suggestion that we should regard the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on as constituting the level of semantics, and that where the networks had not yet been pushed to the semantics, we developed new networks that were explicitly semantic. This leads in turn to the question: "What changes did Halliday make to his own system networks in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a result of the realization that they should be regarded as 'meaning potential' of the language?"

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading in a way that exaggerates Fawcett's contribution.  In Section 4.3, Fawcett (p. 50) made no mention of anyone other than Halliday developing new networks, merely noting that he and his colleagues relocated Halliday's grammatical network to semantics:

… when we saw Halliday's system networks as still reflecting contrasts that were formal rather than semantic (e.g., his MOOD network, which has remained virtually unchanged since the 1960s, in contrast with his TRANSITIVITY network) we revised them by 'pushing' them towards the semantics …

[2] This misrepresents Fawcett's misunderstanding of Halliday as Halliday's suggestion; see the most recent previous posts.

[3] This is misleading.  Any changes that Halliday made to his grammatical networks were not as a result of the realisation that they represented language as meaning potential; see [4] below.

[4] This continues the confusion of language as meaning potential with meaning as a stratum of symbolic abstraction; see the most recent previous posts.

∞

In case it is not clear to the reader, the reason Fawcett is repeatedly misrepresenting Halliday's grammatical networks as semantic is in order to claim the theoretical space of grammar for his own model of syntax.  Note that Halliday published his semantic networks, for the ideational metafunction — Halliday & Matthiessen (1999) — one year before the first edition of Fawcett's book, and eleven years before this revised edition.  See Fawcett's assessment of Halliday & Matthiessen (1999) here.