Fawcett's Functional Semantics Handbook

Fawcett (2010: 294):

This 'syntax handbook' will be complemented in due course by a 'semantics handbook', i.e., my Functional Semantics Handbook: Analysing English at the level of meaning. (Fawcett forthcoming a). This 'semantics handbook' will build on the syntactic analyses provided in the 'syntax handbook', to provide an equivalent framework for the analysis of texts in terms of eight 'strands of meaning'. In the past, users of systemic functional grammars have often found it hard to locate and interpret system networks, so it may be useful to add that those in the Functional Semantic Handbook are designed to be easy to consult and to inte[r]pret — both as an introduction to the systemic-semantic level of language (here English), and for use when analysing a text in systemic-semantic terms. This approach to text analysis solves the difficulty of how to show the multifunctional nature of language in a representation of a text without using the theoretically problematical 'multiple structures' used in IFG.

We have seen an example of an analysis that draws on the two handbooks in Figure 10 in Chapter 7. In such a representation, the multifunctional nature of language is shown in terms of the features that have been chosen at the level of meaning (rather than as 'multiple structures' that lie somewhere between meaning and form, as in IFG). The major feature of the Functional Semantics Handbook will be a full set of system networks that define the meaning potential of English, presented in such a way that they can be used for text analysis.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this promised work is still unpublished, 21 years after the first edition of this book.

[2] To be clear, as previously demonstrated over and over, it is not the 'multiple structures' that are problematic, but Fawcett's understanding of them.

[3] To be clear, as previously demonstrated over and over, Fawcett's representation (Figure 10) confuses paradigmatic features with syntagmatic elements, and provides no metafunctional structures for a theory claimed to be functional.

[4] This is misleading. To be clear, the 'multiple structures' are functions of clause constituents interpreted in terms of the meanings they realise.