Misrepresenting Halliday's IFG

Fawcett (2010: 79-80):

The second strand of work in SFL is the one that is more widely known: this is the text-descriptive strand of work. Like the term 'theoretical-generative', the term 'text-descriptive' is intended to evoke two types of work in linguistics that do not necessarily occur together, but which in SFL tend to be mutually supportive. The first is the description of languages, where the goal is to achieve a functional description of a language with a broad coverage (rather than, for example, the identification of particular syntactic phenomena as part of a search for syntactic 'universals', as in some other theories). … Works such as Halliday's IFG and Fawcett (in press) are also in the text-descriptive tradition.

It is a descriptive linguistics of this type that is needed by many researchers in many fields of 'applied linguistics' for use in the description of texts. … The term "text-descriptive" is therefore intended to cover both of these aspects of what is perceived here as one general strand of work: the text-based description of languages and the description of texts. …

The two editions of IFG (1985 and 1994) and the many spin-off publications are the main testimony to this strand of work in the Sydney framework.

Blogger Comments:

[1] As previously explained, Fawcett's notion of a 'text-descriptive aspect of theory' conflates the focus on instances of language ('text') with the practice of describing particular languages ('descriptive').

	theory	description
linguist as grammarian	language as potential	a language as potential
linguist as discourse analyst	language as instance	a language as instance

The failure to distinguish these "strands" leads to misunderstanding and misrepresentation, as demonstrated below.

[2] This is misleading.  Halliday's IFG uses a theoretical description of one language, English, to demonstrate his theory of language, Systemic Functional Grammar.  That is, in terms of Fawcett's dichotomy of 'theoretical-generative' vs 'text-descriptive', it is both 'theoretical' and 'descriptive', but not 'text', since it is concerned with language-as potential, not with language-as-instance.

[3] To be clear, this confuses the theory–description dimension with the potential–instance dimension.  The description of language-as-instance (text) requires a description of language-as-potential.  This is why linguists working on an undescribed language need to describe the language in terms of theory in order to describe (analyse) texts of the language.