Confusing Formal Constituent With Functional Element In Misrepresenting Halliday (1994)

Fawcett (2010: 101):

To summarise; while the evidence of the index is that only one of the "Categories" concepts, i.e., 'element', is referred to throughout the description of English in IFG, the fact is that, if we supplement these references by all of the many other times when terms such as "constituent" and "function" are used to express essentially the same concept, we find that the concept of 'element of structure' occurs frequently throughout the book. And we saw in Section 6.2.1 that 'class of unit' is presupposed throughout the book, even though it is barely mentioned. We can therefore at least say that the two concepts that will be foregrounded in Part 2 as the central categories of syntax also play a central role in IFG. The only caveat — and it is an important one — is that we shall use different criteria for identifying the class of a unit from Halliday's — so that the concept itself is significantly different. 

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[1] To be clear, Fawcett has used a word count, based on the index of Halliday (1994), to determine the salience of theoretical concepts in Halliday's superseded 1961 theory ("Categories") in Halliday's theory that replaced it, Systemic Functional Grammar.

[2] This is misleading. In SFL theory, constituency is modelled as a rank scale of form, whereas 'element' refers to a function in a structure.  For example, a nominal group is a constituent of a clause, whereas a Sayer is an element of the function structure of a verbal clause.

[3] As previously demonstrated, this is misleading, because it is not true. For example, the notion of 'class of unit' provides the underlying organisation of chapters on both groups and phrases and group and phrase complexes. Moreover it is misleading in another way, since Halliday (1994: 12) explicitly states, with regard to the notion of grammatical form in general:

One of the aims of this initial chapter has been to introduce the notion of constituency, so that it becomes familiar as a general principle of organisation in language and can be taken for granted throughout the subsequent discussion.