Seriously Misrepresenting Halliday On Embedding In A Footnote

 Fawcett (2010: 240n):

⁵ The clear implication of Halliday's concept of 'rank shift' that, when it occurs, the 'natural order' has in some sense been disrupted. The extensive use that he makes of 'hypotaxis' for modelling relations between units (and especially clauses) can be seen as a way of minimising the role of embedding in the grammar. (See Section 2.6.1 of Chapter 2, Section 11.9 of this chapter and Section 3 of Appendix C for discussions of 'hypotaxis'.) I have never understood why Halliday should see embedding as something to be avoided in a model of language and its use. I suspect that a strong influence on the formation of his position has been the difficulty that users of any language have in processing texts — in either production or understanding — when the depth of embedding (especially non-final embedding) becomes a strain on short-term memory. 

So far as I know, Halliday has never discussed the reason for his distrust of the concept of embedding in any publication. This is perhaps not surprising, given the fact that he would regard himself, if pushed to choose, as a sociolinguist rather than a psycholinguist. Indeed, the substantial literature on embedding takes the viewpoint of the cognitive processing of language (and for good reasons). Halliday, then, leaves psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics to others. However, this has not prevented some psycholinguists from using his insights in their own work in modelling language and its use, e.g., the excellent psycholinguistics textbook by Clark & Clark (1977), now sadly out of print.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as previously noted, in SFL Theory, rankshift (embedding) is seen as a powerful semogenic resource. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 10):

The units below the clause on the rank scale are all groups (nominal, verbal adverbial, etc.) or phrases (prepositional phrases), or else clauses that are shifted downwards on the rank scale to serve as if they were groups or phrases. Such down-ranking is known as rankshift. This has the powerful effect of expanding the resources of grammar by allowing the meaning potential of a higher-ranking unit to enrich that of a unit of lower rank. … Such rankshifted clauses construe what we call macro-phenomena.

[2] This is very misleading indeed. Hypotaxis is not a means of minimising the role of embedding in the grammar. Halliday's use of the traditional term 'embedding' excludes hypotaxis, which is the main reason why he prefers the term 'rankshift'. In IFG (Halliday 1994: 242) he makes the important theoretical distinction between the two:

[3] This is very misleading indeed. The important place of rankshift in SFL Theory puts the lie to Fawcett's claim that Halliday sees embedding as something to be avoided in grammatical theorising.

[4] This is misleading, because it is untrue, though, in this case, harmlessly so. For how Halliday views cognitive semantics and cognitive science in relation to SFL Theory, see Chapters 10 and 14 of Construing Experience Through Meaning: A Language-Based Approach To Cognition (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999).

[5] This is doubly misleading, because, on the one hand, as previously demonstrated, Halliday does not "distrust" the concept of embedding, and on the other, Halliday explains his distinction between embedding and hypotaxis in IFG (Halliday 1994), the very same book that Fawcett makes constant reference to in this work.