Misrepresenting Halliday On 'Element Of Structure'

Fawcett (2010: 292):

However one concept, that of element of structure, has survived virtually unchanged from its initial appearance, in 1956, in Halliday's "Grammatical Categories in Modern Chinese" (1956/76). It has survived via its slight demotion in "Categories" — and its apparently even greater demotion in "Systemic theory" — to be used in essentially the same sense in IFG as it originally had, and to become one of the two principle categories in the present theory. Perhaps this is not surprising, since it is the 'element' that most clearly corresponds to the concept of 'function' in syntax — so much so that it is often used instead of it.

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[1] This is misleading. For example, in the first paper (Halliday 2002 [1961]: 46ff), a structure is said to be made up of elements, and in the second, (Halliday 1995: 272-3), where the emphasis is on system, rather than structure, it is an element that is acted upon in all but one of the realisation statements.

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, an element is an element of function structure, and it is the relation between elements that constitutes the structure. Each element of clause structure is the function being served by a clause constituent, group or phrase, in that clause. The function of grammatical forms, such as groups or phrases, is to realise meaning.