We come now to the most fundamental of the revisions to "Categories". Halliday's original claim was that there is a 'consists of' relationship between the units on the 'rank scale': clauses were said to 'consist of groups, groups to 'consist of words, and words to 'consist of morphemes — unless 'rank shift' occurred. This was said to happen when a unit occurred within a unit lower than itself on the 'rank scale'.
As we saw in Chapter 8, I have realised increasingly clearly, in the period between writing "Some proposals" and the writing of the present book, that the concept of the 'rank scale' has no practical role to play in either the theoretical-generative version of the Cardiff Grammar or in the text-descriptive version that is used for analysing texts.
As I made various other changes to the model, the value of the concept of 'rank' quietly diminished to the point where it now has no status in the theory at all. Let us ask, then, what replaces the concept of 'rank' in the new theory.
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The category set up to account for the stretches that carry grammatical patterns is the unit. The units of grammar form a hierarchy that is a taxonomy. To talk about any hierarchy, we need a conversational scale; the most appropriate here might seem that of size, going from “largest” to “smallest”; on the other hand size is difficult to represent in tables and diagrams, and may also trap one into thinking in substantial terms, and a vertical scale, from “highest” to “lowest”, has advantages here. For the moment we may use both, eventually preferring the latter. The relation among the units, then, is that, going from top (largest) to bottom (smallest), each consists of one, or of more than one, of the unit next below (next smaller). The scale on which the units are in fact ranged in the theory needs a name, and may be called rank.
[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, rankshift also includes the embedding of a unit of the same rank, as when a phrase or group realises an element of a group:
[3] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the grammatical rank scale is the means of modelling grammatical form: both syntax and morphology, and importantly, it is to these formal units that functions are assigned. For example, the highest rank unit, clause, consists of units of the rank below, group/phrase, and these constituent units realise functional elements of the clause, as when a nominal group realises a participant, a verbal group realises a process and a prepositional phrase realises a circumstance.
As demonstrated in previous posts, despite his claims to the contrary, Fawcett deploys the principle of ranked constituent analysis — as opposed to immediate constituent analysis (Halliday 1994: 27) — not only to form, but to function as well.
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