"This Little Grammar"

Fawcett (2010: 302):

Clearly, this little grammar leaves out a rather large proportion of the many complex meanings that can be expressed through the nominal group in English. Equally clearly, it ignores various problems, such as the plurals of words like box and the irregular plurals of men and women, etc. All of these matters are covered in the full lexicogrammar from which this simplified one has been taken. The fact that this little lexicogrammar is very limited in its coverage of English nominal groups is unimportant, because our purpose here is simply to illustrate the basic principles of how a grammar that is founded on the concept of 'choice between meanings' actually works. The key concept, then, is that the system network of a language (or any other sign system) defines the meaning potential of that language, and the realisation component defines the form potential. But when such a lexicogrammar is set to work it also specifies the instances that are possible at the levels of both meaning (in the selection expression of semantic features) and form (in the structured strings of word forms that are the output).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this little grammar leaves out almost all of the grammar of English.

[2] To be clear, this has to be taken entirely on trust, because Fawcett has not produced any evidence of "the full lexicogrammar" in a book that is purported to set out his theory.

[3] To be clear, the fact that this little lexicogrammar is very limited is important, because the absence of a full description casts serious doubt on Fawcett's claim that his theory is a viable alternative to SFL Theory.

[4]  To be clear, this is merely a pretext for not supplying a full description, because explaining the formalism does not preclude the possibility of supplying the systems that model the content of this book.

[5] To be clear, here Fawcett once again confuses 'meaning' as a level of symbolic abstraction (vs form) with language as 'meaning potential' (vs instance): the system pole of the cline of instantiation.

[6] As previously explained, selection expressions — like [voiced, bilabial. stop] — constitute potential as well as instance.

[7] As previously explained, Fawcett's model misconstrues syntactic structures as instances of realisation rules.