Misrepresenting Halliday On The Separation Of System And Realisation Rules

Fawcett (2010: 65):

There was no such problem with Halliday's early systemic functional grammars (e.g., 1969/81 and 1970/76b). Each contains two components: (1) the system network and (2) the realisation rules — very much as in Figure 4 in Chapter 3. In Halliday (1969/81), for example, the system network is shown on page 141, and the 'realisation statements' that convert any selection expression that is chosen in traversing the network into a structure are set out in a table on page 142. Thus the two figures illustrate each of the two components of the model. And the same pattern is found in Halliday (1970/76b) — with some minor changes in the detail of the realisation rules, as is to be expected at this early stage in the development of generative systemic functional grammars. In other words, the components of these grammars and their outputs correspond directly to the two components and two outputs shown in Figure 4 of Section 3.2 of Chapter 3.

Blogger Comments:

This is very misleading indeed.  Here Fawcett refers to the separate display of system and realisation rules in early Halliday publications and misrepresents this visual separation as consistent with the theoretical separation of them his own model (Figure 4), which, unlike Halliday, misconstrues systems and their realisation rules as different levels of symbolic abstraction (meaning and form).