Misrepresenting Halliday (1966) On Reasons For The Value Of The Rank Scale

 Fawcett (2010: 311):

However, the main thrust of his defence of the 'rank scale' is to make a set of claims for the general insightfulness of working with the concept of the 'rank scale' — as a means of relating units and their associated system networks to each other, as a hypothesis that raises interesting questions about language, and as a tool that may be useful in fields of applied linguistics such as translation and others that involve text analysis. 

In other words, the defence is an empirical one: if the concept proves to be useful in advancing our understanding of how language works, it is a hypothesis that is worth making. And it has to be said that, whatever one's view of the 'rank scale' today, there is little doubt that, for those doing descriptive work in the theory and those using it in various fields of application in the 1960s and 1970s, the 'rank scale' did indeed provide a framework for describing languages that was an advance over unrestricted constituency relations. And, despite the drawbacks of its excessively strong claim, it has for several decades provided one dimension of the 'matrix' model of Systemic Functional Grammar (the other dimension being Halliday's four 'metafunctions', i.e., the 'experiential', the 'logical', the 'interpersonal' and the 'textual'). 

From this viewpoint, it may seem to some that it is 'politically' important to defend the 'rank scale' concept.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is potentially misleading. To be clear, what Halliday (2002 [1966]: 120) argued was as follows:

We must then ask whether it is worth making in the first place, and basically there are two grounds for thinking that it is: its descriptive advantages, and the questions that follow from it. Among these, I suggest, are the following.

It defines a point of origin for structures and systems, so that the assignment of any item to a given rank, as also the assignment of the structures and systems themselves, becomes an important step in generalisation. To show that a system operates at a given rank is the first step in stating its relationship to other systems; likewise to assign an item to a given rank is the first step in stating the systemic and structural relations into which it may enter and those which it may embody within itself. On the structure axis, rank is a form of generalisation about bracketing, and makes it easier to avoid the imposition of unnecessary structure. It also serves frequently to distinguish between similar structures, for example between defining and non-defining relative clauses in English. It may contribute towards a significant measure of depth (Huddleston 1965). It provides a point of reference for the description at other levels, such as phonology. These and other considerations suggest to me that the rank hypothesis, if valid, leads to a gain in descriptive power.

Among the further questions that would follow from it are these. If some such form of hierarchical organisation is universal, is the number of units also a universal, or is it a typological variable (in either case it is of interest)? Are certain paradigmatic or syntagmatic relations universally associated with specific ranks? Is there any statistical association among the relative frequencies of items of different rank? Is there any type of aphasia characterised by progressive, rank-by-rank loss of grammatical structures? Is there any reason why different languages have institutionalised different grammatical units in their orthographies or the same unit in different ways?

[2] This is misleading, because it is not true that "the defence is an empirical one" since empirical means 'based on what is experienced or seen rather than on theory'.

[3] To be clear, 'excessively strong' is an interpersonal Epithet, merely an enactment of Fawcett's attitude, instead of reasoned argument, supported by evidence.

[4] This is misleading, because it falsely reduces the architecture of SFL Theory to just two dimensions: rank and metafunction. The four dimensions unknown to Fawcett — stratification, instantiation, axis and delicacy — are included with these two by Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 32):

[5] This is very misleading indeed, not least because the word 'political' can mean 'done or acting in the interests of status or power within an organisation rather than as a matter of principle'. 

To be clear, Halliday (1966) provides reasons why grammars with a rank scale have an explanatory advantage over rank-free grammars.