A Second Motivation For Fawcett's "Some Proposals" (1974)

Fawcett (2010: 162):

There was a second motivation, however. This was that my attempts to apply Halliday's categories in the analysis of text at the level of form had led me to modify his description in a number of ways — and so in due course to think about the consequences of these descriptive changes for the theory upon which the description rested.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, neither Halliday's first theory, Scale and Category Grammar, nor his second, Systemic Functional Grammar, postulates a level of form. The fact that Fawcett attempted to apply Halliday's categories at "the level of form" demonstrates that Fawcett did not understand either of Halliday's theories, and that his modifications to Halliday's "descriptions"  — and their consequences — derive from his inability to understand them.

[2] To be clear, as Fawcett acknowledges (p161) his "Some Proposals" (1974) presented his set of revisions to the concepts of "Categories", an outline of Halliday's first theory, Scale and Category Grammar, after Halliday had already devised an early version of his second theory, Systemic Functional Grammar. Scale and Category Grammar is not the theory on which Systemic Functional Grammatical descriptions rested.