Misrepresenting Halliday (1993) On Rank And Halliday (1994) On Unit

Fawcett (2010: 188-9):

We should therefore ask how far the concepts of 'unit' and 'rank' are still actually used in Halliday's current framework. As we noted in Sections 5.3 and 5.4 of Chapter 5, the concept of a 'rank scale of units' is surprisingly absent from the list of "basic concepts" of Halliday's authoritative "Systemic theory" (1993), where the focus is mainly on the grammar as a generative device. However, we also noted that in IFG it continues to be used in virtually the same way as in "Categories". Thus Halliday writes, as part of the opening sentence of Chapter 1 of IFG (Halliday 1994:3), that "a passage of English [...] consists of larger units made up out of smaller units, [and] these smaller units, in their turn, are made up out of units that are smaller still." On the other hand, the index of IFG shows that the term "unit" is not used after the introductory chapters (as we saw in Section 6.2.2 of Chapter 6), and nor is "rank", except in the two brief discussions of 'rank shift'. Matthiessen (1995) goes even further, only mentioning the concept of 'unit' twice in his work of almost a thousand pages (though he has rather more to say about 'rank' and 'rank shift').

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is still misleading, because it is still untrue. Halliday (1995[1993]: 272):

[2] This is still misleading, because it is still untrue. As the title 'Systemic Theory' makes plain, Halliday (1993) is focussed on outlining Halliday's theory of language to a general readership — in an encyclopædia article.

[3] To be clear, this is explicitly stated in Halliday (1993); see [1] above.

[4] This is still misleading, because it is still untrue. Halliday (1994) is organised on the basis of rank. Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 7 are concerned with clause rank, and Chapters 6 and 7 Additional are concerned with group/phrase rank.

[5] To be clear, 'unit' refers to form, whereas Systemic Functional Linguistics is concerned with identifying the functions of forms.

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189 pages into this publication, Fawcett is repeating his previous misrepresentations of Halliday instead of getting on with outlining his own theory.