Misrepresenting Halliday On Lexicogrammatical Systems

Fawcett (2010: 54):

Whatever the reason, the fact is that Halliday felt justified at the time in presenting the existing networks as at least a first approximation to what was needed for a representation of the meaning potential of English. Thus the existing system networks had an ambivalent status between being at the level of form (for which they had been developed) and being at the level of meaning (which they were now said to represent). 

It may have been the ambivalence of the status of the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on that allowed Halliday both to think of his existing networks as 'semantic' and at the same time to explore the alternative approach to the representation of meaning to which we shall come shortly. But the point to note here is that Halliday himself never embraced fully the revolutionary change described above in Section 4.4 — despite the fact that it was his own proposal. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] See the previous post.

[2] To be clear, 'meaning potential' is Halliday's characterisation of language as system, as opposed to language as text.  It does not refer solely to the semantic stratum as a level of symbolic abstraction.

[3] This is misleading.  To be clear, Halliday's grammatical networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, and THEME did not, and do not, have ambivalent status with regard to stratal location.  This is Fawcett's misunderstanding, deriving from his mistaking 'meaning potential' for the stratum of meaning; see [2] above.

[4] This is misleading.  The claim that these networks are at the level of meaning is Fawcett's, not Halliday's.

[5] This is very misleading.  To be clear, 'Halliday himself never embraced fully the revolutionary change' of relocating his networks to semantics because the fact is that it was not his proposal, merely Fawcett's misunderstanding, as explained above.  The logical fallacy deployed by Fawcett continues to be proof by assertion.

[6] Trivially, this was discussed in Section 4.3; Section 4.4 was concerned with the notion of metafunction.