"My Theory Of Syntax"

Fawcett (2010: 162-3):

The following words provide the key to understanding my original motivation for developing a framework for representing structure — a framework that was very different from the 'multiple structure' model that Halliday was developing at about the same time:

the syntactic categories [...] are those [...] needed to state with the greatest economy the realisation rules that express the options in the semantics (Fawcett 1974:4-5). 

Over twenty-five years later, my theory of syntax and the consequent description of English syntax have both developed in various ways, but those words still express exactly what I wish to say on this matter. It is because the description of the functional structure is necessarily complemented, in my approach, by a description in terms of a functional semantics that the syntax can — and should — be less "extravagant" (Halliday 1994:xix) than it is in Halliday's IFG. Moreover, I have discovered in the intervening time that this general principle holds just as strongly for the version of the grammar that is used for the computer model of natural language generation as it does for the version used for text analysis. The clear implication of all of this work is that we cannot provide a complete description of a text without providing both an analysis of its functional syntax and an account of the semantic features that have been chosen in generating it. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is a statement that only applies to Fawcett's own model (Figure 4), in which structure is misunderstood as an "instance" of realisation rules which are, in turn, misunderstood as the form that realises systems. Both of Halliday's theories model syntax as a compositional rank scale on the stratum of lexicogrammar. As will be seen, Fawcett rejects the theoretical value of a rank scale.

[2] To be clear, as previously explained, Fawcett's syntax is only "less extravagant" than Halliday's function structures because Fawcett exports the majority of Halliday's grammatical functions to his level of meaning. When these exported functions are counted in the description, Fawcett's "less extravagant" model of the clause involves at least seven lines of description (Figure 10), compared with Halliday's "more extravagant" three (theme, mood, transitivity).

[3] To be clear, this is a personal recount presented as if reasoned argumentation.

[4] To be clear, this is again a statement of Fawcett's model, not Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. In Systemic Functional Grammar, there is no "functional syntax", and what Fawcett terms 'semantic features' are features of lexicogrammatical systems. In the absence of grammatical metaphor, lexicogrammatical features are congruent with (agree with) semantic features. It is grammatical metaphor that motivates the distinction between semantic and lexicogrammatical systems.