On Halliday's 1972-6 Model

Fawcett (2010: 75):

Finally, I showed that there was one temporary phase in the development of Halliday's theory in which he showed the Scale and Category elements of the clause as serving the function of integrating the various strands of meanings that are always shown in any IFG-style analysis — very much as the Cardiff Grammar does, in general terms, and as this book argues that all systemic functional grammars should. Yet it is a model which Halliday quickly abandoned for reasons that are far from clear, inserting the 'integrating' elements in the 'interpersonal' strand of meaning instead, as we shall see in Chapter 7. And, as we shall also see in Chapter 7, this leaves the considerable problem of how these semi-semantic 'multiple structures' are to be integrated into a single structure.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as previously demonstrated, this hangover from Halliday's pre-Systemic theory, Scale and Category Grammar, had already been re-theorised by the time of the second edition (Halliday 1978) of the paper that Fawcett used (Halliday 1977 — written 1972-6) to exemplify the "temporary phase in the development of Halliday's theory".

[2] To be clear, this "abandonment" was a direct consequence, in Halliday (1978), of identifying units of the rank scale — clause, group, word, morpheme — as the locus onto which the structures of metafunctional systems are mapped.

[3] As will be demonstrated in the examination of Chapter 7, the "problem" here, as elsewhere, is with Fawcett's difficulty in understanding Halliday's theory.