Misrepresenting Halliday On Lexicogrammatical Systems

Fawcett (2010: 53-4):

So why, we may wonder, did Halliday not carry out such a programme of semanticising his system networks? We may make a number of guesses at the possible reasons. These might have included:

1. The enthusiastic welcome already given to the existing networks by new converts to systemic linguists;
2. the lack of serious criticism of the networks by his immediate colleagues — a lack that is perhaps not surprising, given that Halliday's main collaborators at the time were Hudson and Huddleston, both of whom were more 'form-centred' than Halliday himself (as they have continued to be); 
3. Halliday's preoccupation in that period with various other aspects of the burgeoning work, both in the theory and its applications in many fields, to many of which he contributed personally; 
4. the concern that the features in the new networks would be so much further removed from their realisations at the level of form that the new realisation statements (to use Halliday's term) would be very hard to write; 
5. sheer lack of time to undertake this task, given its size and his other commitments.

Blogger Comments:

As previously explained, the system networks in question were and are grammatical networks, and that is the reason why Halliday didn't "semanticise" them.  This is another instance of the logical fallacy of proof by assertion.