Sunday 28 May 2017

Misrepresenting Halliday (1985)

Fawcett (2010: 25):
It was only with the eventual publication of the first edition of IFG in 1985 that large numbers of examples of analyses in SF terms became generally available. By then, however, Halliday had introduced a completely different type of representation, as we shall see in Chapter 7. 
Even so, IFG has the same lack of integrated representations of structure as "Categories", i.e., representations that shows [sic] how the analysis of, let us say, a nominal group fits into the analysis of a clause.

Blogger Comments:

This negative appraisal is unwarranted and misleading.  Halliday (1985) provides a grammatical rank scale which sets out explicitly how the analysis of each rank relates to the analysis of another.

For example, in terms of constituency, a higher rank unit, such as clause, consists of one or more units of the rank below, group/phrase.

In terms of levels of symbolic abstraction, each element of the function structure of a higher rank unit, such as the Senser of a clause, is congruently realised by a unit of the rank below, in this case, by a nominal group.

The elements of nominal group structure function within the nominal group, not the clause, whereas the nominal group, as a whole, serves a function within the clause.

No comments:

Post a Comment