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

Fawcett (2010: 235-6):

Encouragingly, Halliday displays his usual willingness to allow for alternative approaches when he adds the following to the above passage:

Such issues will be decided empirically. [...] The issue is whether, in a comprehensive interpretation of the system, it is worth maintaining the global generalisation because of its explanatory power, even though it imposes local complications at certain places in the description (Halliday 1994:12).

This is sound advice on the question of how to go about describing a language. Let us see how it applies in the present case. The Cardiff Grammar certainly counts as a "comprehensive interpretation of the system", and there have been decades of "empirical" work by researchers using this framework. It has involved the exploration of alternative SF description of English (and other languages) for both the large scale analysis of texts and for the computer generation of language. The view to which it has led is that the "global generalisation" that the 'rank scale' was intended to express has less "explanatory power" than the theory of syntax described here. So we who work in the framework of the Cardiff Grammar have, following the principles suggested by Halliday, "decided empirically" that the 'rank scale' is no longer needed. (For a fuller account of the 'rank scale' debates, see Appendix C.)

Is there a hint in the passage cited above that Halliday would now make a less strong claim for the 'rank scale' concept? If so, this might explain why it is omitted in "Systemic theory", and why it receives so little space in IFG.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is a bare assertion unsupported by argument. Moreover, there are many reasons for thinking the opposite to be true, as demonstrated by the arguments presented on this blog.

[2] To be clear, this is a bare assertion unsupported by argument. Fawcett has nowhere demonstrated that his model of syntax, his development of Scale & Category Grammar (Halliday 1961), has more explanatory power that SFL Theory.

[3] This is misleading. Fawcett and his colleagues reject the rank scale on the basis of their misunderstandings of the principle, as demonstrated on this blog, not on the basis of empirical findings. Clearly, the validity of empirical findings depends on having an accurate understanding the principle being tested. See the examination of Appendix C for more of the misunderstandings involved.

[4] These are still misleading, because they still untrue. On the one hand, as previously observed, rank is not omitted from the (very brief) encyclopædia article, Systemic Theory (Halliday 1993), where the following point is explicitly made:

On the other hand, IFG (Halliday 1994) is organised on the basis of rank, with 4 chapters devoted to clause rank and 2 chapters to group/phrase rank. Moreover, the third edition of IFG (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: 20) explicitly puts the lie to Fawcett's claim: