Misrepresenting Halliday (1994) On Constituency, Metafunction And Structure

Fawcett (2010: 98):

From the viewpoint of our purposes in this book, it is a matter of regret that Halliday did not use a greater proportion of the "Introduction" and the two introductory chapters to provide a guide to the theoretical framework that underlies the description of English in the rest of the book. Indeed, a number of readers of the book — and indeed reviewers of the book — have expressed the view that the general discussions of 'constituency' are not what the reader needs at that stage of the book (if at all).

Surprisingly, Halliday himself drastically downgrades the importance of 'constituency' at the end of Chapter 1 when he suggests that, "as one explores language more deeply, constituency gradually slips into the background, and explanations come more and more to involve other, more abstract kinds of relationship" (IFG p. 16). (Readers will only understand what Halliday is hinting at here if they are familiar with his idea that the meanings of the different metafunctions' are realised in different types of structure — a view that we shall explore in Section 7.1.1 of the next chapter.) 

Blogger Comments:

[1] As Halliday (1994: xxvii, xxvi) explicitly states in the Introduction:

This is not an account of systemic theory… No attempt is made to 'teach' the categories.

[2] To be clear, mere opinion — even if sourced — is not reasoned argument based on evidence.  More importantly, the reason Halliday begins with the notion of constituency is in order to to guide the reader gently from the more familiar and less abstract to the less familiar and more abstract.

[3] This is misleading. To be clear, this is not at all surprising to any reader who understands what Halliday has written in the chapter (which is Chapter 2, not Chapter 1).  As Halliday (1994: 27-8) explains:

With minimal bracketing (ranked constituency analysis), only those items are identified that have some recognisable function in the structure of the larger unit. This means that the notion of constituency is being made to carry less of the burden of interpretation. The concept of constituent structure is much weaker in a functional grammar than a formal one.

[4] The wordings 'only understand' and 'hinting at' here are very misleading indeed, and pettily so. To be clear, Halliday introduces the notion of metafunction and the different types of structure immediately after the discussion of grammatical constituency — in the very same chapter.