Four Of Matthews' Five Specific Problems For Halliday's Proposals On 'Rank'

Fawcett (2010: 310):

When Matthews' pejorative evaluations and misunderstandings are stripped away, five specific problems for Halliday's proposals on 'rank' remain. The first concerns Yes and No, but I see these as functioning outside the main grammar, so I shall set them aside.  

The second problem is that a Binder such as after in after we left Henry's clearly invites analysis as a word rather than a group. Yet according to the 'accountability at all ranks' principle it should be a group, since it is an element of the clause. And the same is true of those types of Adjunct that cannot be 'expanded' such as therefore. Fourthly, a Linker such as and and or is similarly a direct element of the clause (for me but not for Matthews). For Matthews (p. 107) it "cannot reasonably be said to go with" either the preceding or the following clause.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the source of Fawcett's misunderstanding here is his assumption that a constitute requires more than one constituent.  Halliday (2002 [1966]: 123-4) explains the theoretical advantage of his approach as follows:

Multiple rank assignment, in fact, is merely a formulation in rank-grammatical terms of the notion that a constitute may have only one constituent; if systems and structures are stated for each rank, constituents being assigned on this basis to the rank appropriate to them, the multiple assignment of constituents is not only simpler than the restatement of relations but also avoids making the relatively surface notion of constituency as the basis of grammatical organisation.

On the other hand, the view that Fawcett espouses is critiqued by Halliday (2002 [1966]: 124) as follows:

There is an analogy in the orthographic hierarchy. In the orthographic sentence I, it does not seem strange to say that this is a sentence consisting of one orthographic word and that this word consists of one letter. … If we say that the sentence consists of one letter, complications arise: we have to restate the structure of the orthographic sentence in terms of letters as well as in terms of orthographic words, thus requiring among other things a second and much more complex statement of the distribution of punctuation marks; the form I will not appear at all in the set of orthographic words, but only in that of letters, of which we must then define a subset consisting of those that can operate in the structure of the sentence; and so on.

That is, if Fawcett's view were consistently applied, the instance Go! would be have to be analysed as a clause realised directly by a morpheme.

In SFL Theory, Fawcett's examples of after, therefore, and, or are each conjunctions that serve as the Head of a conjunction group.

[2] To be clear, as presented, this is a bare assertion unsupported by evidence. Moreover it is untrue, since the constituency relations of conjunctions like and and or is shown by

• their initiation of primary clauses, such as And I said to her…, and
• their conjoint absence with a secondary clause, as in She went home or so I thought.