The Other Types Of 'Form' In Fawcett's "Some Proposals" (1974)

Fawcett (2010: 163):

"Some proposals" was written as a short description of the syntax of English, and it concludes with a summary of the theory that the description presupposed. The structure of the paper therefore reflects the view that theory should grow out of description — or, more accurately, out of the attempt to apply the concepts of an earlier theory (here "Categories") in a description. In my view, this interleaving of theory and description is one of the more effective ways to improve one's theory — as well as through the use of corpora and, as suggested in Section 1.2 of Chapter 1, large scale computer implementations. (See also the discussion of the relationships between theory, description and application in Halliday & Fawcett 1987b:1f.).

We must begin by relating the model of syntax to the model of language as a whole. Within a model of the sort presented in Figure 4 in Section 3.2 of Chapter 3, "Some proposals" sees syntax as one of three ways in which meanings are realised as forms — the other types of 'form' being items and intonation or punctuation (depending on the channel of discourse).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Fawcett's "Some proposals" (1974) presupposed Halliday's first theory, Scale and Category Grammar, after it had been superseded by Halliday's second theory, Systemic Functional Grammar.

[2] To be clear, a linguistic theory is a model of language, and a linguistic description is the application of a theory to a particular language. For example, Halliday's IFG (1985, 1994) presents a theory of language which is applied to a description of English. That is, theory precedes description, and the description of data tests the theory that is designed to account for the data.

[3] To be clear, computer implementations of a theory, large or small, are concerned with adapting a theory of language to the limitations of machines. This is distinct from modelling language as a system that has evolved in the human species.

[4] Reminder:

[5] To be clear, Fawcett's "Some proposals" (1974) locates some aspects of the content plane — syntax and items (words and morphemes) — and some aspects of the expression plane — intonation or punctuation — at the same level of symbolic abstraction: form.

The omissions in these characterisations of phonology (rhythm and articulation) and graphology (orthography) will be examined when Fawcett eventually discloses his current model. For the moment, it can be seen, from Figure 4, where system networks are limited to his level of meaning, that Fawcett does not model phonology and graphology as systems.