Misrepresenting Halliday On Semantics

Fawcett (2010: 89-90):

One reason may be that he was not sufficiently confident of its place [i.e. the semantic stratum] in the overall theory at the time of writing "Systemic theory" to give it this status. Another possible reason may be that he limited himself, in what was necessarily a short paper, to just those concepts that he believed to be common to all 'dialects' of SFL. In other words, he may have omitted the concept of a 'higher semantics' on the grounds that some other systemic functional linguists (including those working in the framework of the Cardiff Grammar) consider that the existing system networks (or replacements for them that are more explicitly semantic) are all that is needed to model those aspects of 'meaning' that it is appropriate to model as lying within language. Either way, the absence of this concept from this key summary of the theory seems to signal that at the time of writing Halliday was less confident of its centrality in his view of language than he appears to have become in subsequent works, such as Halliday & Matthiessen (1999).

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is untrue.  The "subsequent" work, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999), was first conceived between 1980 and 1983 when Matthiessen was a research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, more than a decade before Halliday (1993). Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: ix):

This book was conceived dialogically: it started as notes on discussions between the two authors when CM was working at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and MAKH was visiting there as a consultant.

 Moreover, Fawcett was the series editor for the publication.

[2] This is misleading.  Here Fawcett has falsely attributed his own view on the matter to Halliday.

[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue, as demonstrated in the previous post.