Misrepresenting Halliday On "Representations At The Levels Of Meaning And Form"

Fawcett (2010: 119):

It therefore seems that Halliday's answer to Question la above is, in principle, that there should be representations at the levels of both meaning and form. Moreover, this principle should clearly be applied to the analysis of texts as well as to the generation of texts. Indeed, the concept of 'priority to the system' is precisely what is implied by the fact that the name of the theory is "systemic functional grammar" — and not "structural functional grammar". So what, one might reasonably ask, does Halliday consider that the systemic representation of a clause would be like? The answer is that we do not know. 

Perhaps the most surprising fact of all about Systemic Functional Grammar as a theory of language is that that there is no generally agreed way of showing, in the representation of the analysis of a text, the features in the system network that have been chosen in generating it. What makes this fact even stranger is that all of the SF linguists who engage in the 'theoretical-generative' task of building such grammars recognise that it is not merely desirable to have a representation of the features; it is necessary. This is because the 'selection expression' is an integral part of the operation of the grammar, as we saw in Chapter 3 and as is demonstrated in Appendix A.

Blogger Comments:

Reminder of Fawcett's Question 1a (p117):

1a. Is it desirable — or indeed necessary — to have representations of a text at the levels of both form and meaning? 

[1] To be clear, the levels of meaning and form feature only in Fawcett's model; Halliday's model postulates the strata of semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology. So any suggestion of Halliday endorsing Fawcett's model of meaning and form is misleading.

[2] To be clear, one way to provide a systemic representation of a clause is to identify the systemic features that specify its structural realisation.  Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) provide examples for analyses of:

• theme (pp101-3), 
• mood (pp158-9), and
• transitivity (pp304-5).

[3] To be clear, 'selection expression' is "an integral part of the operation of the grammar" in Fawcett's model (p36):

However, as can be seen above, in Fawcett's flowchart, a selection expression is misunderstood as an instance of a system and restricted to only one level: meaning.  In SFL Theory, a selection expression is constituted by all the features that identify a given unit, of a given stratum, whether as potential or instance. This is most clearly demonstrated by the phonological selection expression [voiced, bilabial, stop] which identifies the phoneme /b/ as both potential and instance.