Misrepresenting Halliday's Writing As Indecisive And Lacking Specificity

Fawcett (2010: 54-5): 

In evaluating the lack of specificity that is sometimes found in Halliday's writings — which at times risks being interpreted as indecisiveness — it is important to understand the spirit in which he 'does his linguistics'. Essentially, he is an explorer. His typical practice is to suggest some new idea, and then to explore its possibilities in text-descriptive terms to see how far it fits in with other concepts in the theory, rather than to present the world with new 'truths'.

The idea that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on are choices between meanings — and that they are therefore essentially semantic choices — was initially just one such tentative proposal, as we saw in Section 4.3, but the warmth of its reception by many systemic linguists at the time (though not all; compare Hudson 1971) did not prevent Halliday from exploring, in parallel, an alternative approach to the representation of meaning. It is significant that his 1973 book, in which the two alternative positions on 'meaning' are discussed, was entitled Explorations in the Functions of Language. From the early 1970s onwards, then, Halliday has consistently held open the possibility of exploring two alternative models of the stratification of meaning. But the fact that each makes 'meaning' central to understanding language means that they can easily be confused and the distinctions blurred.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here Fawcett misrepresents his own inability to understand Halliday's writing as deficiencies on Halliday's part, appraising it in terms of negative appreciation, 'lack of specificity', and negative judgement, 'indecisiveness'.

[2] Here yet again Fawcett repeats his own misrepresentation of Halliday's grammatical networks as semantic networks, as if multiple repetitions of the claim have established it as valid (the logical fallacy of proof by assertion).  To be clear, in SFL theory, grammatical networks realise semantics; that is, as networks of wording, they are construed as a lower level of symbolic abstraction than meaning.

[3] This is misleading.  To be clear, the approach that Fawcett labels as "alternative" is Halliday's only view on the matter: that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME are grammatical systems that realise semantics, rather than semantic systems.

[4] The wording 'stratification of meaning' betrays Fawcett's misunderstanding of stratification.  It is language that is stratified, not meaning; meaning is but one stratum in this hierarchy of symbolic abstraction.

[5] As demonstrated over and over here, the confusions and the blurring of distinctions in this regard arise solely from Fawcett's inability to understand Halliday's writing.