"The Relevant Arguments From The Main Part Of The Book"

Fawcett (2010: 337):

We can summarise the relevant arguments from the main part of the book by saying that the essence of the new proposal for modelling syntax is 

(1) that classes of unit are defined in terms of their internal structures (this being quite different from the way in which Halliday defines 'classes of unit'), 

(2) that each of these classes of unit (or simply 'units') has an internal structure that reflects as directly as possible the types of meaning that they are required to realise, and 

(3) that for each such unit there is a set of statements about the general probability that it will fill each of the elements of each of the various units that are recognised in the grammar. In other words, it makes predictions as to what units will function as elements of what other units — rather as the 'rank scale' concept of 'accountability at all ranks' does, but in a far more flexible manner. 

Many of these predictions are absolute (just as the strong version of the 'rank scale' concept is), in the sense that many combinations are ruled out by not being mentioned as possibilities in summary diagrams such as those in Appendix B, but the vast majority of the statements in Appendix B are probabilistic. 

An important feature of this approach is that it allows for very low probabilities as well as for the high ones — so that it shows that a clause, for example, may occur occasionally (though typically in a truncated form) as a pre-head modifier in a nominal group, e.g., the underlined portion of her recently married sister and a very slowly running river.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in classifying units in terms of how they are structured, Fawcett is giving priority to the view 'from below'. This is in contradiction to the fundamental principle of SFL Theory of giving priority to the view 'from above' (system and function rather than structure and form).

[2] This is misleading, as demonstrated by the fact that, in Fawcett's model, the internal structure of the clause is the same regardless of the experiential meaning being realised. For example, the clause element Complement, in itself, does not distinguish between a Goal, Behaviour, Existent, Senser, Phenomenon, Verbiage, Target, Attribute, Token or Value.

[3] Again, this seriously misunderstands the concept of 'accountability at all ranks', which is the principle that everything in the wording has some function at every rank (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 84), and therefore is not concerned with "predictions as to what units will function as elements of what other units".

[4] This is misleading. On the one hand, there is no "strong" (or "weak") version of the rank scale; the rank scale is merely a way of modelling formal constituency. On the other hand, the rank scale makes no predictions about "what units will function as elements of what other units" because the rank scale is a model of form (units), not function (elements).

[5] To be clear, in SFL Theory, neither recently married nor very slowly running is a (rankshifted) clause: