Fawcett's Important Principle

Fawcett (2010: 332):

An important principle is involved here. It is that, when one is deciding which patterns of similarity and contrast to assign to the system network of meaning potential within the grammar, one should give priority to those choices which are realised directly at the level of form. And one should recognise that other similarities and contrasts may first need to be modelled at a higher level in the process of generation, and then at a later point be mapped, often incongruently, onto the choices in the grammar itself. Thus, when a text-sentence such as (1a) is used to express a relationship between two events in a narrative, that decision should be modelled as part of the rhetorical structure, and predetermination rules should then ensure that the relationship gets mapped onto the choices in the grammar that present one event as locating the position in time of another.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, Fawcett's 'important principle' is the direct opposite of the SFL approach to modelling grammar. Halliday (2002 [1984]: 307-8):

To understand [grammatical] categories, it is no use asking what they mean. The question is not ‘what is the meaning of this or that function or feature in the grammar?’; but rather ‘what is encoded in this language, or in this register (functional variety) of the language?’ This reverses the perspective derived from the history of linguistics, in which a language is a system of forms, with meanings attached to make sense of them. Instead, a language is treated as a system of meanings, with forms attached to express them.

That is, where SFL Theory adopts the view 'from above', giving priority to the meanings that are expressed by form, Fawcett adopts the view 'from below', giving priority to the forms that realise meaning. It is this fundamental difference in theoretical approach that is the driving force making the Cardiff Grammar inconsistent with SFL Theory, and it is Fawcett's ignorance of this fundamental difference that prevents him from understanding SFL Theory in its own terms, as this blog has demonstrated over and over and over.