David Rose Misrepresenting Halliday On Meaning Potential

David Rose wrote to sys-func on 30/7/22 at 21:06:

This para bears reviewing as it seems pivotal to the history of the grammatico-semantic model...

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).

Interestingly, linguistic tradition is presented as point of departure, and the reason for restricting the use of ‘meaning potential’ to the semantic stratum. 

Its conflict with MAKH’s theoretical position is added almost apologetically in brackets. Was it too radical to say out loud that language as a whole makes meaning? At any rate, associating meaning with just one stratum, for whatever reason, had far reaching consequences for the model’s development.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The quote from Halliday (1972) merely specifies how the term 'meaning potential' will be used in the paper, relative to traditional usages of 'meaning' (interpreted in terms of Hjelmslev's model). It does not present linguistic tradition as the reason for the how the term 'meaning potential' will be used.

[2] This very misleading because it is very untrue. There is no conflict here. SFL models language as meaning potential, in terms of the dimension of instantiation, and stratifies the content plane of that potential into two levels of symbolic abstraction: meaning (semantics) and the wording (lexicogrammar) that realises meaning.

[3] Here Rose repeats Martin's confusion of semogenesis (making meaning) with stratification (wording realising meaning), encapsulated in Martin's characterisation of stratification as 'all strata make meaning'. As a consequence, Martin (1992) even misconstrues phonology as a stratum of meaning.

[4] This is potentially misleading. Even though semantics is the stratum of meaning, lexicogrammar is the stratum whose forms, modelled as a rank scale, are interpreted in terms of their functions in realising meaning. As Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 49) say:

it is a semanticky kind of grammar. But the focus of attention is still on the grammar itself.