Misrepresenting Halliday (1993) On Delicacy

Fawcett (2010: 84):

Let us begin with delicacy. I suggested in Section 2.4 of Chapter 2 that this concept belongs essentially with that of 'system' (and so with 'system network'), such that one system is more "delicate" than another if its entry condition is a feature in that other system — and so on, across a chain of such dependencies (as illustrated on a small scale in Figure 1 of Appendix A). It follows, then, that the elevation of the 'system' to model contrasts in 'meaning potential' rather than contrasts between forms brings with it a similar change in the meaning of 'delicacy' — so that 'delicacy' has similarly become a partly different concept. It is therefore not simply "retained", as Halliday says (p. 4505); it has been adapted, just as the concept of 'system' has been adapted. However, there is what we might term a "second order" manifestation of the concept, i.e., its use to describe the relationship between 'primary' and 'secondary structures'. (See Figure 7 in Section 7.2 of Chapter 7 for the presentation of MOOD as having both a 'primary' and a 'secondary' structure, and see Section 10.3.4 of Chapter 10 for a critical discussion of this concept.) With these substantial provisos, then, we may say that the term "delicacy" is used in "Systemic theory" in a roughly similar sense to that which it had in "Categories". 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading. To be clear, the theoretical meaning of systemic 'delicacy' is Halliday's formulation, not Fawcett's suggestion.

[2] This is misleading because it seriously misunderstands the notion of delicacy.  Because the scale of delicacy is a dimension of systems — semantic, lexicogrammatical, phonological — the stratal location of systems does not change the meaning of systemic delicacy.

[3] Here again Fawcett confuses language as system (meaning potential) with semantics as stratum (meaning).

[4] This is misleading.  To be clear, delicacy is a dimension of system, not structure.  To anticipate the examination of Chapter 7, compare Fawcett's Figure 7 with the delicacy of the MOOD system of Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 162):