Misrepresenting Halliday On Rankshift

Fawcett (2010: 267-8):

In "Categories" Halliday referred to the phenomenon of embedding as "rank shift". The concept of 'rank shift' is, of course, directly dependent on the concept of the 'rank scale', i.e., the general expectation that a unit will fill an element of structure of a unit higher on the 'rank scale' than itself. According to "Categories", 'rank shift' down the 'rank scale' is allowed (e.g., a clause can fill an element of another clause or of a 'lower' unit, but 'upward rank shift' is not allowed (i.e., a word cannot operate as an element of a clause, and a morpheme cannot operate as an element of a group or a clause).

Halliday later replaced the term "rank shift" by the more widely used term "embedding", and in my view this second term is indeed greatly preferable. This is because the term 'rankshift' can be interpreted in two ways that are misleading. The first is the implication that something has been "shifted", perhaps from its typical place in a structure to some other place, whereas in fact the unit has not been moved at all. The second possible misleading inference is that there is something unusual about a 'higher' unit filling an element of a 'lower' unit. But for virtually all linguists other than those who work in the IFG framework, embedding is a natural and frequently occurring phenomenon.²¹

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it confuses form (a rank scale of units) with function (element of structure). The rank scale is a hierarchy of formal constituency — clause, group/phrase, word, morpheme — whereas as elements are the functions realised by forms in the structure of a unit of a higher rank.

[2] To be clear, it is not a matter of whether types of rankshift are allowed or not, but of what types of rankshift are consistent with the rank scale model.

[3] This is misleading, because it is the exact opposite of what is true. Halliday explicitly prefers the term 'rankshift' because the term 'embedding' elsewhere includes hypotaxis, which is not a type of rankshift. In the publication most cited by Fawcett, Halliday (1994: 188) explains:

[4] To be clear, the reason why Fawcett prefers the term 'embedding' to 'rankshift' is because (a) he treats hypotactic clauses as embedded (see [3]) and (b) he claims not to use a rank scale along which units can be shifted.

[5] This is misleading, because it is Fawcett's two interpretations that are misleading; see [6] and [7].

[6] This is misleading, because it is untrue. A rankshifted clause is shifted from clause rank to a lower rank; a rankshifted group is shifted from group rank to a lower rank. For example, the embedded clauses in [[what you see]] is [[what you get]] are shifted from clause rank to group rank, where they serve as elements, Token and Value, of the experiential structure of a ranking clause.

[7] This is misleading, because it is untrue. In SFL Theory, there is no suggestion that rankshift is unusual. On the contrary, rankshift is explicitly recognised as a common feature of written MODE where it is a major contributor to the increased lexical density that distinguishes written language from spoken language. Here Fawcett has not only misrepresented Halliday's theory, but additionally misrepresented the linguists who use the theory.