Halliday originally proposed the concept of the 'rank scale' on the basis, one assumes, of his work on describing Chinese and English. In Section 4 of Appendix C I summarise the paper in which I show why the elements of the 'verbal group' proposed by Halliday for English should instead be treated as direct elements of the clause — and so, therefore, why words should be permitted to expound directly elements of the clause (Fawcett 2000 and forthcoming b). However, the example from Swahili suggests that a functional description of an agglutinating language requires a model in which the elements of clauses are allowed to be expounded by 'units' that are, in terms of the "Categories" concept of the 'rank scale', not two but three steps down the 'scale' — i.e., not by words, as I claim happens in English, but directly by morphemes.²⁶ Thus a general theory of syntax should provide that, when it is used for describing languages such as Japanese, Mohawk and Swahili, certain elements of clauses may be directly expounded by morphemes. See Tatsuki (1998) for a SF analysis of the Japanese clause in these terms.
²⁶ More precisely, the description of English in Fawcett, Tucker & Lin (1993) and Fawcett (2000 and forthcoming b) provides for certain clause elements to be expounded either by words (as in be and reach) or by the addition of a suffix (and so a morpheme), as in + ing.
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[1] To be clear, a rank scale is a means of modelling formal constituency in any language; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 9). It subsumes both syntax and morphology and provides a means of modelling formal constituents in terms of the function they serve at a higher rank. For example, an adverbial group (e.g. very tediously), as a constituent of a clause, may serve the function of Manner circumstance at the rank of clause.
[2] This is misleading, because Fawcett does not "show why", he merely makes an invalid argument based on false premisses, as will be demonstrated in the examination of Appendix C.
[3] As previously noted, Fawcett (forthcoming b) is still unpublished 21 years after the the first edition of this book.
[4] As demonstrated in the previous post, Fawcett's Swahili analysis shows that some clause functions in English operate at the rank of word in Swahili, which is why they are realised by units of the rank below word (morpheme). That is, Fawcett falsely assumes that such functions also operate at clause rank in languages other than English. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 9n)
Languages vary, however, with respect to the ‘division of grammatical labour’ among the ranks. In particular, certain languages do relatively more grammatical work at group (and clause) rank, while other languages do relatively more work at word rank. Thus, for example, Japanese, Turkish, and Inuit do relatively more work at word rank, whereas, for example, Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese do relatively more work at group rank. For instance, verbal affixes operating at word rank in one language may correspond to verbal auxiliaries operating at group rank in another, or even to modal particles operating at clause rank in yet another.
(1) The general principle of exhaustiveness means that everything in the wording has some function at every rank (cf. Halliday, 1961, 1966c). But not everything has a function in every dimension of structure; for example, some parts of the clause (e.g. interpersonal Adjuncts such as perhaps and textual Adjuncts such as however) play no role in the clause as representation.
(2) The general principle of hierarchy means that an element of any given rank is constructed out of elements of the rank next below. This is a feature of the constituent hierarchy made up of units and their classes: clause, verbal group, and so on. But the configurations of structural functions show further ramifications of this general pattern. Thus, in the clause as exchange there is slightly more layering in the structure, while in the clause as message there is rather less.
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