Fawcett's Approach To Realisation Rules As "The Only One That Is Workable In A Large-Scale SF Grammar"

Fawcett (2010: 68):

This second approach [i.e. Fawcett's realisation rules as form potential] is in fact the only one that is workable in a large-scale SF grammar. The reason is simple: it is that the number of realisation rules that require conditions grows as the grammar is extended to cover the less frequent linguistic phenomena. Thus it often happens that an action in building a part of the structure is dependent on the co-selection of one or more other features. 

As the coverage of the grammar grows fuller, then, it has to encompass more and more exceptions to the general rule, and the place of the general concept of 'conditions on realisation rules' becomes correspondingly more important. It is interesting to study the nature of the realisation rules presented in Fawcett, Tucker & Lin (1993) from this viewpoint.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, there may be many viable approaches to realisation rules, but Fawcett's is not one of them.  This is because, as previously demonstrated, his approach (Figure 4) confuses realisation with instantiation, and misconstrues one level of symbolic abstraction — grammatical features (in systems and rules) — as two distinct levels (meaning and form).

[2] This misunderstands the SFL notion of system.  A well-formed system, in principle, covers all linguistic phenomena of the domain stipulated by its entry condition, across all frequencies — or more precisely, since a system models potential, across all probabilities, since feature frequencies in texts are instances of feature probabilities in the system.

[3] As previously demonstrated, Fawcett's argument in this regard is based on one of his own system networks (Figure 2, Appendix 1), which is inconsistent both with SFL theory, misconstruing 'deixis' as a system of 'thing', and with the principles of a system network, misconstruing lexical items such as 'student' as grammatical features.  That is, Fawcett has merely demonstrated his own inability to devise system networks and to locate realisation statements in them at their point of application.

[4] Yes.  It is.