Fawcett's Grammatical Metaphor As An Incongruent Relation Between Ideational Meaning And Non-Language

Fawcett (2010: 209-10):

I have referred in previous sections to correspondences between 'syntactic', 'semantic' and 'conceptual' units. Let us now consider the relationship between the syntactic units and their 'higher' equivalents. We shall focus upon the two main classes of syntactic unit: the clause and the nominal group.

How do these come to be generated? The answer is that they originate (typically) at the level of logical form, in the planner (which draws in turn on the belief system). They are typically represented as events and the objects that occur in events. These are then processed in the semantics, where an event is typically expressed as a situation and an object as a thing — and these in turn are then realised as a clause and a nominal group. However, there is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship between logical form, which is extralinguistic) and the intra-linguistic level of semantics. Figure 12 gives an overview of the two possibilities for incongruent correspondences between these. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] As this makes plain, Fawcett's theory of language is actually a model of text generation by computer.

[2] To be clear, Fawcett nowhere elaborates on the organisation of logical form, but it can be noted that his location of it outside language is inconsistent with its conception in linguistics, philosophy and mathematics. In linguistics, it refers to a syntactic structure that is interpreted semantically:

In generative grammar and related approaches, the logical Form (LF) of a linguistic expression is the variant of its syntactic structure which undergoes semantic interpretation.

whereas in philosophy and mathematics, it is the semantic interpretation of a syntactic expression:

In philosophy and mathematics, logical form of a syntactic expression is a precisely-specified semantic version of that expression in a formal system.

[3] To be clear, Fawcett's events and objects are ideational meanings relocated outside language. Interpersonal and textual meanings are absent, and so are not accounted for here at the level of belief system (or semantics).

[4] To be clear, Figure 12 misrepresents relations between levels, expression and realisation, as levels.

[5] To be clear, here Fawcett is interpreting grammatical metaphor — an incongruent relation between semantics and grammar — as an incongruent relation between ideational semantics and a higher level of meaning outside language. The possibility of interpersonal metaphor is not entertained.