Misrepresenting An Argument Against Parataxis As An Argument Against Hypotaxis

Fawcett (2010: 331):

In the second part of their case, M&M suggest a second analysis of Huddleston's example, i.e., as two co-ordinated clauses with ellipsis in the second, thus: He left before the debate or (he left) (at least) before the vote was taken. But again, I am afraid, I have to point out a problem. While their analysis appears at first to be another possible one, we need to take account of the fact that one can insert either to the left of before the debate, so that it becomes He left either before the debate or (at least) before the vote was taken. And this fact demonstrates clearly that the grammar must allow for the possibility of generating the prepositional group and the clause as jointly filling an Adjunct.

Thus M&M suggest that two possible analyses should be allowed (the first being Huddleston's and mine). They therefore do not address the question of which of the two is systemically preferable, and why. Moreover, Huddleston's criticism of IFG stands. In other words, he is right that Halliday's decision to treat all clauses embedded directly in clauses as 'hypotaxis' means that the Sydney Grammar cannot handle examples such as Huddleston's.

Finally, to demonstrate that Huddleston's example is not a 'special case', consider the following example with a simple 'additive' Linker: On average, people died earlier in those days, both from diseases such as diphtheria and because they worked such dreadfully long hours. Notice that here (as in Huddleston's example) the item both prevents the M&M analysis in terms of two co-ordinated clauses with ellipsis. The conclusion, then, must be that we should treat all such 'beta' clauses as embedded clauses. … Withe respect to the areas of the grammar described here, then, M&M fail to rebut Huddleston's critical comments. 

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is an argument about parataxis, and as such, not relevant to the question of hypotaxis. Moreover, this being the case, it could be equally directed against Fawcett's model of co-ordination.

[2] This is misleading, because it is untrue. On the one hand, Huddleston's criticism does not stand, with regard to hypotaxis, because it is an argument about parataxis. On the other hand, SFL Theory (IFG, Halliday) does not treat all such "embedded" clauses as hypotaxis. By distinguishing between embedding (rankshift) and hypotaxis, SFL Theory provides such explanatory advantages as distinguishing between

• defining relative clauses (embedded) and non-defining relative clauses (dependent), and
• pre-projected facts (embedded) and reported projections (dependent).

The conclusion, then, is the distinction between rankshifted and dependent clauses has explanatory advantages over the lack of distinction.