The Problem Of Halliday Excluding What Fawcett Recognises As Embedding

Fawcett (2010: 269-70):

However, there is a further problem with Halliday's specification of the permitted types of embedding. This is that it excludes very many of the types of embedding that are recognised in the present grammar. These are shown in Appendix B, where the symbols at the top of the diagram for each class of unit show the elements of structure that it can fill.

It is of course precisely Halliday's purpose to exclude many of these — especially the ways in which a clause may occur within a clause). The reason is that he has changed his mind since "Categories" (as we saw in Section 2.6.1 of Chapter 2), so that he now wishes to handle such cases as 'hypotaxis' (in the way to be described in Section 11.9). 

Secondly, however, his specification excludes many of the ways in which a clause fills an element of a group, as is also shown in Appendix B. Finally, the specification excludes the many ways in which a group may fill an element of a group (or cluster), again as shown in Appendix B. In the last two cases the omissions may in part be due to the great emphasis in IFG on the clause, so that groups are inadequately covered.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading. On the one hand, as previously demonstrated, Fawcett misrepresents Halliday's specifications of the types of embedding because of his failure to understand the rank scale and the principle of exhaustiveness. On the other hand, excluding the types of embedding recognised by the Cardiff Grammar is only a problem for SFL Theory if the types of embedding recognised by the Cardiff Grammar are valid in terms of SFL Theory.

[2] To be clear, Appendix B does not identify the classes of unit that are embedded, merely the elements that may be "filled" (realised) by them.

[3] This is misleading. It is not "Halliday's purpose" to exclude 'ways in which a clause may occur within a clause'. Instead, Halliday makes the distinction between (i) cases in which a rankshifted clause is embedded in a ranking clause, and (ii) cases in which a ranking clause is tactically related to another ranking clause.

[4] To be clear, on the one hand, it is true that IFG (Halliday 1994), in contradistinction to Fawcett's Cardiff Grammar, places more emphasis on the clause than the group. This is because the clause, unlike the group, is the semogenic powerhouse of the grammar. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 10):

The clause is the central processing unit in the lexicogrammar – in the specific sense that it is in the clause that meanings of different kinds are mapped into an integrated grammatical structure. For this reason the first half of this book is organised around the principal systems of the clause: theme, mood and transitivity. In Part II we move outward from the clause, to take account of what happens above and below it – systems of the clause complex, of groups and phrases, and of group and phrase complexes; and also beyond the clause, along other dimensions so to speak.

On the other hand, the question of whether or not groups are adequately covered in IFG (Halliday 1994) cannot be resolved by anyone demonstrably incapable of understanding Halliday's explication of the model.