Misunderstanding Huddleston On Halliday's Group

Fawcett (2010: 322-3):

But Huddleston goes even further, apparently dismissing the concept of the 'group' (or 'phrase') altogether. So it is yet more surprising that he states:

Clause, word and morpheme are commonplace categories in syntactic theory; it is the group, among Halliday's basic ranks, that has no significantly close analogue in non-rank grammars, and it is difficult to see that this innovation has anything to recommend it" (Huddleston 1988:155).

Here Huddleston seems to be denying the value of the concept of the group (or 'phrase'). Presumably he would replace them with various types of 'word complex', each built up of simple 'modifier-head' relationships.¹⁵ Yet he himself uses the concept of 'phrase' throughout Huddleston & Pullum (forthcoming). It is therefore hard to understand what prompted him to make the statement cited above, unless he has moved from that position to a more conventional one in the period since 1988. But if the above remarks stand, he would not only do away with the 'rank scale', but also with any units other than the clause, the word and the morpheme. This would indeed be radical.

¹⁵ This passage reads as if Huddleston is suggesting that the concept of the 'group' (or 'phrase') is an "innovation" by Halliday, whereas it is in fact a commonplace of descriptive grammars — including Huddleston's own current grammar of English. Perhaps the "innovation" is intended to be the placing the group on the 'rank scale'? In any case, the syntax in Huddleston & Pullum (forthcoming) makes full use of familiar concepts such as 'noun phrase', 'adjectival phrase' and 'prepositional phrase' (Huddleston, personal communication 2000).

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here Huddleston uses the logical fallacy of relevance known as argumentum ad populum: a proposition is claimed to be false solely because a majority or many people believe it to be so.

And from another angle, the absence of a component from Newton's Universal Gravitation in Einstein's General Relativity is clearly no argument against Einstein's theory.

[2] To be clear, here Huddleston uses the logical fallacy of relevance known as the argument from incredulity: 'I cannot imagine how it could be true; therefore it must be false'.

[3] This is misleading. To be clear, it is only the group that Huddleston identifies as Halliday's innovation — not the phrase.

[4] To be clear, the innovation is simply Halliday's concept of the 'group'. As demonstrated above and previously, Fawcett does not understand the distinction between group and phrase.