Misrepresenting Halliday (1994) On Structural Representations

Fawcett (2010: 119-20):

The recognition of this situation leads us to ask a new question. This is: "Since the grammar is is systemic as well as functional, why doesn't Halliday show representations of the features in IFG?' Halliday gives a partial answer to this question when he writes in the "Foreword" to IFG that, because he wrote this book "specially for those who are studying grammar for text analysis purposes, I did not include the systemic part" (1994:x). Later he explains that "structures are less abstract; they are so to speak 'nearer the text'" (1994:xxvii). In other words, the clear implication is that Halliday decided that IFG should present the structural representations of texts rather than the systemic representations, on the grounds that the structural representations are likely to be easier for the reader to understand. Notice, however, that here Halliday is describing a strategy for overcoming the difficulties of communicating the theory's concepts for a particular class of readers, not making a statement about the status in the theory of the structural representations shown in IFG.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the presentation of structural representations in Halliday (1994) was not motivated by any supposed deficiency in the intellectual ability on the part of those who analyse texts ("easier for a particular class of readers to understand").  As Halliday (1994: x, xxvii) points out, structures are more directly related to the analysis of text:

The reason the present work is not called an introduction to systemic grammar is that that is not what it is. Since it was being written specifically for those who are studying grammar for purposes of text analysis, I did not include the systemic part: that is, the system networks and realisation statements, which constitute the main theoretical component (and would be central if the book was an introduction to systemic grammar). What is presented here is the functional part: that is, the interpretation of the grammatical patterns in terms of configurations of functions. These are more directly related to the analysis of text. …

The reason for using structural rather than systemic representations for discourse analysis is that structures are less abstract; they are so to speak 'nearer' the text. The most direct move in the analysis of a text is to give it a structural representation, and this is what is done here. All the structural analyses could be interpreted in terms of the features selected.

[2] To be clear, here Fawcett misleads through selective omission. On the second of the two cited pages, Halliday does indeed make "a statement about the status in the theory of the structural representations shown in IFG — one that is inconsistent with the Fawcett model (Figure 4) that gives equal weight to system ("meaning potential") and structure ("instances of form"). Halliday (1994: xxvii):

This is not an account of systemic theory, nor does it present the system networks for English grammar (there is a brief foray into network representations at the end of Chapter 10). It presents the structures which are the 'output' of the networks — which collectively realise the sets of features that can be chosen. But it is not a 'structural' grammar (still less a 'structuralist' grammar in the American sense). Such grammars are syntagmatic, having structure as their main organising concept, and bringing in special devices to relate one structure to another. A systemic grammar is not syntagmatic but paradigmatic; hence there is no difference in describing something and relating it to everything else, because the description of any feature is its relationship to all the others. Obviously we have to describe one part of the grammar at a time; but it is important to think of every section as being part of the network as a whole.