David Rose Seriously Misrepresenting Halliday On Semantics And Context

David Rose wrote to sys-func on 15/6/22 at 15:54:

His own research focused on phonology and grammar, expanding the model into metafunctions, axis and delicacy. This helps explain why phonology becomes an inner language level by 2004, rather than an ‘interlevel’. Both grammar and phonology are fleshed out as metafunctional, axial systems.

In contrast, semantics remains as ‘interlevel’, lacking the axial relations of LG and PH systems. Instead, its organisation is realised only interstratally by lexicogrammatical systems. Its descriptions derive from grammatical research, including H&M 1999, and RH’s ‘message semantics’.

As an ‘interlevel’ semantics ‘interfaces’ with the tenor, field and mode of contexts. As context is ‘extra-textual’, tenor, field and mode are not organised systemically, but are described instead as notes on ‘settings’, in various publications from the 1970s on.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading. To be clear, Halliday's initial notion, in Scale & Category Grammar, of phonology and semantics as 'interlevels' arises from taking substance, form and situation as the levels of his model. Halliday (2002 [1961]: 39):

Importantly, the notion of phonology and semantics as 'interlevels' does not feature in any subsequent publication, and in his very next paper (Halliday 1963), phonology is explicitly identified as a 'level'. Halliday (2002 [1961]: 39):

Such problems are probably most acute at this level, but similar ones arise also at other levels, notably phonology, which has other additional classification problems of its own.

[2] To be clear, the notion of 'axial systems' is nonsensical. System is simply ordering on the paradigmatic axis (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 20, 22).

[3] This is very misleading indeed. On the one hand, the term 'semantics' has always referred to a level of language, a stratum, in SFL Theory. On the other hand, it seriously misrepresents the SFL model of semantics. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 429):

… in our model there are two system-structure cycles, one in the semantics and one in the lexicogrammar. Terms in semantic systems are realised in semantic structures; and semantic systems and structures are in turn realised in lexicogrammatical ones. As we saw in Chapter 6 in particular, grammatical metaphor is a central reason in our account for treating axis and stratification as independent dimensions, so that we have both semantic systems and structures and lexicogrammatical systems and structures.

[4] This confuses theory with description. To be clear, the SFL model of semantics is a theory of the meanings that lexicogrammar makes possible. Description, in contrast, is the application of the theory to linguistic data.

[5] To be clear, in SFL Theory, semantics both realises context and construes it. On the latter point, culture is modelled as an intellectual construction of language (and other social semiotic systems).

[6] This is very misleading indeed, because it is the opposite of what is true. In SFL Theory, context is modelled as system, subsystem/instance type and instance, as set out in Halliday (2005 [1995]: 254): 

[7] This confuses (material) setting with (semiotic) context of situation. Halliday, in Halliday & Hasan (1989: 14), provides one example of a situational description: