Misrepresenting Scale & Category Grammar (Halliday 1965) As Representative Of Systemic Functional Grammar In 2023

Martin & Doran (2023: 22-3):

Halliday’s original paper on types of structure was prepared in 1965 as a Working Paper for the O.S.T.I. Programme in the Linguistic Properties of Scientific English (and later published as Halliday 1981 [1965]). In this paper he draws a basic distinction between multivariate structures involving “a specific set of variables each occurring only once” (1981[1965]: 33) and univariate structures involving a single variable occurring an unlimited number of times. The contrast here is illustrated in (9) and (10). The structure of the clause in (9) is a canonical multivariate one – consisting experientially of one Carrier, one Process and one Attribute, with none of these functions repeatable. The structure of (10), by contrast, is a canonical univariate one – realised by an indefinitely extendable complex of words grading appreciation of the argument (featuring hypotactic dependency, notated as δ γ β α).

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, Halliday (1965) was an exploratory paper in Scale & Category Grammar — written before Halliday had formulated Systemic Functional Grammar — and does not feature in his collected works. Importantly, it predates the notion of metafunctions and their structural types, and contains inconsistencies with later work, such as categorising Head°Modifier structures as multivariate, instead of univariate (p230):

The question then arises as to why the authors would choose a pre-Systemic, pre-metafunctional publication, instead of the most recent work, as a springboard for improving the current state of the theory.