David Rose On Incongruent Grammatical Realisations And 'Wording'

David Rose replied to Mick O'Donnell on sys-func on 11/7/22 at 20:10: 

I’m happy to be mistaken but my understanding is that incongruent grammatical realisations of speech functions are treated as delicate features in message semantic systems. That is, each feature in the semantic systems has a particular grammatical realisation. … 

One issue with your synopsis below, is a suggested correlation of form and meaning with grammar and semantics. This is also suggested by the oft-used terms ‘wording’ vs ‘meaning’, as though grammar was not meaningful in itself. What makes grammar meaningful is axis... features realised as structures. The features are the meanings of the structures. Or rather the features and structures are two faces of the meanings, that MAKH showed us are made by the grammar.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is clearly true, as 140+ posts on this blog demonstrate.

[2] This is a serious misunderstanding. Incongruent realisations are relations between strata, whereas delicacy is the ordering principle of the system of a stratum. Delicacy is the ordering of systemic features that may be realised congruently or incongruently on the stratum below.

[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue. To be clear, the "oft-used" distinction 'wording vs meaning' (Halliday 1970) does not correspond to the distinction between form and meaning. The term 'wording' is used in SFL Theory as the folk equivalent of 'lexicogrammar', and it refers to the interpretation of form in terms of its function of realising meaning, as when a formal constituent of a clause, a verbal group, is interpreted as serving the function of Process of a clause.

[4] This is misleading, because it is not true that axis makes grammar meaningful. This is demonstrated by the fact that axis is a dimension of every stratum, including phonology. As Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 20, 32) explain, on each stratum, the dimension of axis has two orders: the paradigmatic (the dimension of system) and the syntagmatic (the dimension of structure).

[5] This is misleading. In SFL theory, grammatical systems (e.g. PROCESS TYPE) and the structures that realise them (e.g. Senser ^ Process) are both interpreted in terms of the meanings they realise.

[6] Rose is here drawing on Martin's misunderstanding of stratification as 'all strata make meaning', which is a statement of semogenesis, not stratification. This confusion leads Martin (1992) to misconstrue even phonology as a level of meaning. Evidence here.