David Rose Misrepresenting Halliday's Development Of SFL Theory

David Rose wrote to sys-func on 29/7/22 at 13:21:

As quoted earlier, axis was the breakthrough that opened up metafunctions and rank scale system/structure cycles, which I’ve tried to symbolise with this diagram (hexagons borrowed from Giacomo Figueredo)...

But there was a tension with the earlier model predating axis, that assumed the abstraction relation lay between grammar as form and semantics as substance, and kept being repeated alongside axis...

The term «meaning» has traditionally been restricted to the input end of the language system: the «content plane», in Hjelmslev's terms, and more specifically to the relations of the semantic interface, Hjelmslev's «content substance». We will therefore use «meaning potential» just to refer to the semantic options (although we would regard it as an adequate designation for language as a whole).

This historically nuanced conditional formulation then gets reduced to a catchphrase...

Grammar is what the speaker CAN SAY, and is the realisation of what he means. Semantics is what he CAN MEAN

...which is later cemented as the commonsensical triad ‘meaning, wording, sounding’.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is potentially misleading. Halliday (2002: 12) summarises the development of his theorising as follows:

The steps that have seemed to me perhaps most critical in this endeavour might be summarised as: the unity of lexicogrammar; the priority of the view ‘from above’, from meaning and function; the move into systemics (system networks), freeing the grammar from the restrictions imposed by structure; the metafunctional foundation, disentangling the strands of meaning that are woven together in the syntax; the construction of language by children, from protolanguage to mother tongue; the decoupling and recoupling of lexicogrammar and semantics – the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor; the conceptualising of the relation between system and text (instantiation) and the probabilistic nature of linguistic systems.

That is, according to Halliday, it was not axis, but giving priority to the view 'from' above (meaning and function over form), and to system over structure, that opened up the development of Systemic Functional Grammar.

[2] Some of the problems with this diagram were identified in the earlier post David Rose Misunderstanding Generalisation And Abstraction.

[3] To be clear, the notion of axis, system vs structure, has appeared in Halliday's work since his first paper Some Aspects of Systematic Description and Comparison in Grammatical Analysis (Halliday 1957), though the term 'axis' was not used until Class in Relation to the Axes of Chain and Choice in Language (1963). 

That is, there is no Hallidayan model that predates the notion of axis, and the model that predates the term 'axis' is not Systemic Functional Grammar, but a different theory: Scale & Category Grammar, expounded in Categories of the Theory of Grammar (Halliday 1961). Any supposed tension then, is between a discarded theory and its replacement.

[4] This bare assertion bears no relation to the quote from Halliday (1972) that follows it as its support. The quote makes no mention of axis, and merely specifies how the term 'meaning potential' will be used, relative to traditional usages of 'meaning' (interpreted in terms of Hjelmslev's model).

[5] To be clear, the quote from Halliday (1972) that follows this misrepresentation of the previous quote as a 'historically nuanced conditional formulation' is not a reduced "catchphrase" of it. Where the previous quote is concerned with the term 'meaning potential', the quote that follows is concerned with the distinction between lexicogrammar and semantics, explaining that lexicogrammar is what can be verbally projected (say), semantics is what we can mentally project (mean), and the former realises the latter.

[6] To be clear, there is no "cementing" here, and these folk terms also cover phonology (sounding), which is not mentioned in the quotes that precede.