Seriously Misrepresenting Halliday's Early Theorising

Fawcett (2010:71-3):

The example analysed in Halliday (1977) as an illustration of these principles is fairly complex, i.e., "I would as soon live with a pair of unoiled garden shears, " said her inamorata. Halliday's analysis of this text-sentence raises a number of interesting questions that would distract us from the main point, so we shall look instead at the simpler example from the second of Halliday's two papers that exemplify the type of analysis that reflects the above description, i.e, that in Halliday (1970/76b). This is shown in Figure 6. 

Notice first that there is a line of structure for each of the 'ideational' and the 'interpersonal' strands of meaning: with the usual two for the 'textual' meaning — i.e., one showing the 'thematic' structure, and one the 'information' structure. But the key feature of the diagram is the single line of structure which comes below these four lines, and which uses the names of the elements of the clause which were established as part of Scale and Category Grammar — i.e, at the time when the assumption was that the whole grammar was at the level of form. Some of the labels for the 'functions' are different from those found in later representations such as those in IFG, e.g., "Modal" and "Propositional" are later replaced by "Mood" and "Residue", but we shall find in Chapter 7 that the first four lines of Figure 6 correspond closely to the type of analysis found in all of Halliday's work since that time.

Figure 6 is exactly as it occurs in Halliday (1970/76b), with the exception of the word "COMBINED", which I have added (borrowing it from the equivalent diagram in Halliday (1977). It is clear that, even though there are few explanatory comments on the diagram in either Halliday (1970/76b) or Halliday (1977), Halliday's intention is precisely that of showing that the structures represented in the four 'strands of meaning' above are "combined" in the single integrated structure shown below them. In Halliday's words (1970/76b:24): "any element [e.g., the Subject] may have more than one structural role, like a chord in a fugue which participates simultaneously in more than one melodic line." 

Blogger Comments:

This is very misleading indeed, since it misrepresents Halliday's theorising at the time. Specifically, here Fawcett chooses to ignore the analysis in the 1978 edition of the Halliday paper — which puts a lie to the claims he makes about this stage of Halliday's theorising — and instead, returns to an earlier stage (1970) of Halliday's model.  Halliday (1978: 130):

As can be seen above, even at this stage, Halliday had recognised the categories of Scale and Category Grammar (Subject etc.) as interpersonal functions of the clause. 

As Halliday (1978: 129) makes very plain, it is the clause itself that combines the metafunctional structures:

Fifth, we shall assume that the lexicogrammatical system is organised by rank (as opposed to by immediate constituent structure); each rank is the locus of structural configurations, the place where structures from the different components are mapped on to each other. …

It follows from the above that each type of unit — clause, verbal group, nominal group etc. — is in itself a structural composite, a combination of structures each of which derives from one or other component of the semantics. A clause, for example, has a structure formed out of elements such as agent, process, extent; this structure derives from the system of transitivity, which is part of the experiential component. Simultaneously it has a structure formed out of the elements modal and propositional: this derives from the system of mood, which is part of the interpersonal component. It also has a third structure composed of the elements theme and rheme, deriving from the theme system, which is part of the textual component.