Robin Fawcett On Michæl Halliday's Grammatical Systems As Semantic

Robin Fawcett wrote to Sysfling on 23 Jun 2019 at 15:49:

My concern in my short memoir was to remind us all of his role in welcoming and re-enforcing the fundamental message of Halliday''s important 1966 paper — and in particular through his insightful introductions to the sections of the book. These were the first intimations of a concept that Halliday was exploring — and often seems completely committed to — in his writings on the late 1960s and early 1970s (and indeed in Halliday 1985, though less so in Halliday 1994). This was the concept that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and LOGIOC-SEMANTIC RELATIONS provide choices between meaning — i.e. semantic features), not forms …

Blogger Comments:

See the immediately preceding post.

For the second time in two days, Fawcett uses the tragic untimely death of a colleague as a pretext for promoting the SFL theoretical architecture that Halliday abandoned after 1978, largely because Fawcett mistakenly believes that Halliday's superseded model leaves room in the SFL architecture for his theory of syntax at the level below semantics.

For why Fawcett's model does not withstand close scrutiny, see the explanations here.

With regard to Fawcett and tragic untimely deaths, see here for Fawcett's public dishonest treatment of me at the time of my mother's cruel, premature death from mesothelioma.