Apologies if this is reposted. My last 3 posts in this string were received by individuals but apparently blocked from "sys-func (oz)"....This makes it clear that Halliday saw formalism as the dominant tradition in linguistics from its beginnings. His inversion is an historic step towards abandoning the form/content dualism altogether.
I think this further step will take longer, because the container metaphor, from which the form/content dualism derives, is so deeply enmeshed in modern thinking. Matthiessen 1993 explores the 'long tradition of regarding language as a vehicle, container or wrapper of thoughts which arise in the individual’s mind.'
SFL has abandoned the container model of language, but the form/content dualism it produced persists, re-construed as strata of 'wording' and 'meaning'.
Blogger Comments:
[0] Rose's messages to sys-func were not "blocked" — there is no filter in place on messages sent from subscribed addresses, and the list manager (muggins) received no "bounced message" alerts from the system software. No-one is keener than the list manager to see Rose's messages, since he is the most prolific contributor of misconstruals of theory to this blog.
[1] To be clear, there is no form/content dualism to abandon, because form contrasts with function, and content contrasts with expression. Moreover, form is a feature of both content (lexicogrammar) and expression (phonology), and at each level, form is modelled as a rank scale.
[2] To be clear, since there is no form/content dualism, it is not derived from the 'container metaphor'.
[3] By 'container metaphor', Rose may mean Reddy's conduit metaphor:
[4] To be clear, SFL Theory has never embraced the container model of language, and so has not abandoned it. This would be a trivial point, were it not for the fact that Rose is setting up this "abandonment" as a precedent for a second abandonment.
[5] This is very misleading, because it is very untrue, since the strata of wording (lexicogrammar) and meaning (semantics) are not a construal of form/content dualism, not least because the notion of 'form/content dualism' is a serious misunderstanding on Rose's part, as explained above ([1]).
More specifically, both wording and meaning constitute content, modelled as a content plane, and wording is grammatical form, modelled as a rank scale, interpreted in terms of its function of realising meaning, as exemplified by a verbal group (form) being interpreted as realising a process (function).
Halliday (1994: xvii, xx):
Halliday (2008: 180):
Thus the lexicogrammar — linguistic form — dimensionalises semantic space; and the grammatical system network theorises this process.
