Misrepresenting Halliday And Deploying A Logical Fallacy

Fawcett (2010: 59):

I am therefore as confident as it is ever possible to be in science that it is indeed possible to make a reality of Halliday's original proposal that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on should be, to adapt Halliday's metaphor (1994:xix) "pushed all the way to the semantics". We who work in the framework of the Cardiff Grammar — together with all of the many other systemic functional grammarians who take the view that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME etc. constitute the major level of meaning in language — have therefore come to a different conclusion from Halliday on this matter.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, since it misrepresents Halliday.  As previously explained, Halliday's systems have, from their beginnings, been presented as grammatical systems, not semantic systems.

[2] The citing of others who share Fawcett's view is here presented as an argument in its favour.  In terms of logical fallacies, this is another instance of the fallacy of relevance known as an appeal to popularity:

Appeals to popularity suggest that an idea must be true simply because it is widely held. This is a fallacy because popular opinion can be, and quite often is, mistaken.

[3] To be clear, on the SFL model, there is only one level of meaning in language: semantics.  Lexicogrammar constitutes the level of wording, the lower stratum of the content plane.

The Hypothesis That Grammatical Systems Can Be Developed Into A Model Of Semantics

Fawcett (2010: 58-9):

In the work done over the last fifteen years by my colleagues and myself at Cardiff, one of our main goals has been to develop a new model of a SF grammar that tests the hypothesis that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on are capable of being developed into a fully adequate model of semantics. Indeed, the very large computer implementation of a grammar (including lexis, intonation and punctuation) that we have built at Cardiff operates on precisely these principles. The first stage of this work was described in Fawcett, Tucker & Lin (1993) and related papers, and many aspects of the later stages have been reported in the many other papers listed in Fawcett (1998).  As a result of all this work by the many members of the team, I am convinced that, in Halliday's own words (1994:xix), the "choices in the grammar [i.e., the system networks] can be essentially choices in meaning without the grammar thereby losing contact with the ground".

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the theoretical motivation for distinguishing semantic systems (e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen 1999) from lexicogrammatical systems (e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen 2014) is the resultant ability to systematically account for grammatical metaphor as an incongruence between the two levels of symbolic abstraction.  As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 237) explain:

Of course, what we are recognising here as two distinct constructions, the semantic and the grammatical, never had or could have had any existence the one prior to the other; they are our analytic representation of the overall semioticising of experience — how experience is construed into meaning. If the congruent form had been the only form of construal, we would probably not have needed to think of semantics and grammar as two separate strata: they would be merely two facets of the content plane, interpreted on the one hand as function and on the other as form.

[2] The citing of work carried out in Fawcett's framework is here presented as an argument in its favour.  In terms of logical fallacies, this is the fallacy of relevance known as an appeal to popularity:

Appeals to popularity suggest that an idea must be true simply because it is widely held. This is a fallacy because popular opinion can be, and quite often is, mistaken.

Misrepresenting Halliday's Grammatical Systems As Semantic

Fawcett (2010: 58):

The perception that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME etc. represent the meaning potential of a language is, in my view, the most significant of all of Halliday's insights. As I pointed out above, one important result of accepting this major claim is that it challenges us to develop our system networks further, with the explicit goal of making them represent choices between meanings (rather than forms), and so to model the level of semantics in language.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This continues the misrepresentation of Halliday's grammatical systems as semantic systems, and the misrepresentation of meaning potential (language as system) as semantics (meaning as a level of symbolic abstraction).

[2] To be clear, in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the system network is the theoretical formalism for modelling all strata.  In SFL, language is stratified as meaning (semantics), wording (lexicogrammar) and sounding/writing (phonology/graphology) — not meaning and form — with grammatical form incorporated through the rank scale of clause, group/phrase, word and morpheme.

For system networks that represent choices between meanings, see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999); for system networks that represent choices between wordings, see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014).

A False Claim Invalidly Inferred From A False Claim

Fawcett (2010: 58): 

In terms of the change from "Categories" to a modern SF grammar, we may say that the effect of the fundamental change in the theory in the late 1960s was that the concept of 'system' was removed from the account of language at the level of form, and made the central concept at the level of meaning. As a result there were now the two levels of 'instances' shown in Figure 4 of Chapter 3: the selection expression at the level of meaning and the richly labelled tree structure at the level of form.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This continues the misrepresentation of Halliday's grammatical systems as semantic systems and meaning potential (language as system) as semantics (meaning as a level of symbolic abstraction).

[2] This is a non-sequitur, since the latter claim is not entailed by the former, regardless of the validity of either claim.  That is, the relocation of grammatical systems to the level of meaning does not necessarily result in Fawcett's model of "two levels of instances".

[3] As Figure 4 shows, Fawcett's model confuses the dimension of instantiation: the relation between system and instance (selected features) with the dimension of axis: the relation between system and structure (tree structure).  (It also proposes that systems are realised by realisation rules.)

See also the critique of Figure 4 here.