Fawcett's Use Of 'Exponence'

Fawcett (2010: 254):

The relationship between categories of exponence has a different theoretical status from any other, because it takes us out of the abstract categories of syntax and into the more concrete (but still abstract) phonological or graphological "shape" of items. Thus we may say that the head of a nominal group is expounded by the item mountain. As I pointed out earlier, the present use of the term is essentially a return to the sense in which it was used by Firth (1957/68), from whom Halliday borrowed it before greatly extending its meaning in "Categories". (Later, as we have seen, he re-named it 'realisation').

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, from the perspective of SFL Theory, Fawcett's 'item' confuses:

• grammatical word (consisting of morphemes) that realises an element of group structure,
• lexical item that synthetically realises the most delicate lexicogrammatical features, and
• the graphological/phonological configuration that realises a word.

[2] To be clear, the following characterisation by Firth's student, Palmer (1995: 271), would suggest that Firth used 'exponence' for the relation between a level of abstraction within theory and data, which is not the sense used by Fawcett:

Grammatical categories are abstracted from the linguistic material, but 'renewal of connection' via their 'exponents' is essential, though these exponents may be discontinuous or cumulative.

In terms of SFL Theory, this usage combines realisation (level of abstraction within theory) with instantiation (the relation of theory to data). Fawcett's use of 'exponence' is closer to the non-Firthian usage: the relation between a morphosyntactic category and its phonological expression — which is but one example of 'realisation' in SFL Theory.

[3] As previously explained, the meaning of exponence in the superseded theory, Scale & Category Grammar (Halliday 1961), covered both of what became realisation and instantiation in SFL Theory.