Misrepresenting Halliday (1994) On The Rank Scale

Fawcett (2010: 235):

The situation is therefore that Halliday seems on the one hand to wish to maintain the general principle of the 'rank scale' — and with it the view that "the guiding principle is exhaustiveness at each rank" (IFG p. 12 — and on the other to allow for exceptions. Indeed his statement of the "exhaustiveness" principle in IFG is closely followed by these words:

At the same time, there is room for manœuvre: in other words, it is an integral feature of this same guiding principle that there is indeterminacy in its application (Halliday 1994:12).

Thus the "exhaustiveness" principle seems to be one that can be breached. But the examples that Halliday cites are all cases of borderline judgements, and there will always be such cases in text analysis. The greater problem is the existence of many clear cases of exceptions, such as those cited above and in Appendix C. And even if the principle is only breached to the extent that I argue to be required in Fawcett (2000) and (forthcoming b), it is in effect dead.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading. What Halliday (1994: 12) actually says is that there is indeterminacy in the application of this principle, and the "borderline judgements" that he cites is the question of whether there is one sub-sentence layer (group/phrase) or two (phrase and group):

[2] This is doubly misleading, because it is untrue in at least two respects. On the one hand, indeterminacy in the application of the principle is not a breach of the principle, and on the other hand, the "many clear cases of exceptions" that Fawcett cites are not exceptions to the notion of a rank scale and the principle of exhaustiveness because Fawcett confuses the rank scale of formal constituency — clause, group/phrase, word, morpheme — with the relation between function (e.g.Finite) and form (e.g.word), as demonstrated in the previous post. Accordingly, reports of the rank scale's death have been greatly exaggerated.