Misrepresenting Halliday On Conjunction Groups

Fawcett (2010: 234):

Let us be clear from the start of this discussion that the general concept of 'rank' and the specific concept of 'total accountability at all ranks' are interdependent. In other words, the concept of a 'rank scale of units' makes no theoretical claim if it does not imply 'total accountability at all ranks' — or at the very least 'accountability at all ranks, with only a few justifiable exceptions'.

However, the strict application of the 'total accountability' principle leads to problems with certain classes of word. This has led to what might loosely be termed 'the rank scale debate', and I provide an account of this debate in Appendix C. Here I shall restrict the discussion to just those points that are central to establishing why I myself have abandoned the concept of the 'rank scale' in favour of a different concept.

As Matthews (1966) and others have pointed out, Halliday's principle of 'accountability at all ranks' requires that, in a clause such as after we left Henry's, the word after must be treated as a group, since it is an element of the clause. And the same would be true of the word and in ... and we left Henry's and therefore in we therefore left Henry's. In IFG Halliday introduces the concept of a 'conjunction group' to model structure within a Linker or a Binder, but see Section 1 of Appendix C for a dismissal of this concept as a possible solution to the problem of satisfying the principle of 'accountability at all ranks'. (For a start, it is highly unlikely that Halliday would wish to analyse every one-word Binder as a group with one element.) See Section 10.2.8 of Chapter 10 for how the Cardiff Grammar handles Binders with an internal structure (when they occur), and see Section 11.6.2 for the relevant concept of "variation in depth of exponence".

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the principle of exhaustiveness holds that everything in the wording has some function at every rank. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 84):

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] For context, Matthews is on record as describing the Chomskyan revolution as "the best thing that has happened to linguistics in the past 2500 years". Matthews' misunderstandings will be identified in the examination of Appendix C. In the meantime, see The Concept Of Rank: A Reply (Halliday 1966).

[3] This is not misleading, because it is true. In SFL Theory, the word after in this instance serves as the Head element of a conjunction group.

[4] This is misleading, because it misrepresents Halliday's model. The conjunction group does not "model structure within a Linker or Binder". Instead, linker and binder are subtypes of conjunction, and a conjunction serves as the Head of a conjunction group.

[5] See the forthcoming examination of Fawcett's Section 1 of Appendix C for the validity of Fawcett's dismissal. In the meantime, consider the serious misunderstandings identified in this post.

[6] To be clear, this is misleading, because it is the direct opposite of what is true. For Halliday, every "one-word binder" serves as the Head element of a conjunction group.