Fawcett Rests His Case Against The Rank Scale

Fawcett (2010: 338):

Thus the present book, together with Fawcett (2000) and (forthcoming b), contributes to the 'rank scale debate' in two ways: one negative and one positive. 

On the negative side, it provides a fuller set of reasons than is given by any previous presentation of the case for not building into the grammar the concept of the 'rank scale' (and its accompanying concept of 'accountability at all ranks'). 

On the positive side, it states clearly what the nearest equivalent concept is — i.e., that the model is built around the concept of a set of units, each of which is capable of filling several elements of one or more higher units in a tree representation of a text-sentence (including a unit of the same class). But the 'filling probabilities' vary greatly, and these probabilities are as much a part of the grammar as the bare fact that a unit may fill an element.

I rest my case that it is now time to replace the concept of the 'rank scale'.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Fawcett (forthcoming b) is still unpublished, 21 years after the first edition of this book.

[2] To be clear, as this blog has demonstrated over and over, Fawcett confuses the rank scale of formal constituency with relations between form and function, and misunderstands the notion of 'accountability at all ranks', the principle that everything in the wording has some function at every rank (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 84) as "predictions as to what units will function as elements of what other units".

[3] To be clear, 'filling probabilities' are not the nearest equivalent concept to the rank scale, because 'filling probabilities' are concerned with form-function relations, whereas the rank scale is a way to model formal constituency. The alternative ("nearest equivalent") to ranked constituent analysis is immediate constituent analysis, as explained in Halliday (1994: 20-9).

[4] To be clear, as the term 'higher unit' discloses, in Fawcett's Cardiff Grammar, units are ranked on a scale from higher to lower: from text-sentence to clause to group/cluster to item.

[5]  Case dismissed. Release the prisoner. No conviction recorded.