Anthropological vs Philosophical Approaches

Halliday (1994: xxviii):

Chomsky's 'Generative' Grammar

Halliday (1994: xxviii):

The View That Syntax Distorts Semantics: Universalist Arguments

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 447, 447n):

Such analyses ['surface x is really deep y'] were often supported by universalist arguments such as "negation is a verb in certain languages, so it is reasonable to claim that it is really a verb in all". … they tended to make deep structure, the 'real' structure, look like predicate logic. Surface structure came out looking like a (transformationally) twisted version of logical structures. But predicate logic had been derived from one particular area of the grammar, a simplified version of the experiential aspect of the clause; it could be used as an idealised model of certain types of figure, for the purpose of explicit rule-based reasoning, but it was not intended to be a tool for analysing the entire semantic structure of a natural language.² This view has largely been abandoned and the notion of a semantically irresponsible surface structure is no longer generally held.

 

² In terms of our model of a stratified metalanguage, we can see that taking the categories of predicate logic (or any other logical systems) to be linguistic ones constitutes a strata! slippage: categories from the level of representation in the metalanguage are imported into the theoretical account of the object language.

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In Chomskyan linguistics, this is the relocation of the universals of Platonic realism — which are said to exist outside and independently of human minds — into the res cogitans of Cartesian dualism.

The View That Syntax Distorts Semantics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 446):

The view that syntax distorts semantics implies that the relation of grammar to meaning is indirect and arbitrary. This view became tenable in modern linguistics, where meaning was either excluded from its scope altogether, as among structuralist linguists in the U.S., or, with Chomsky, kept at a distance by the metaphor of deep and surface structure in the syntax, only the former being semantically responsible. This paved the way for a number of analyses on the model of 'surface x is really deep y'. We find suggestions such as the following: adjectives are really verbs (e.g. Chafe, 1970), nouns are really verbs (cf. Bach, 1968), pronouns are really articles (Postal, 1966), negation is really a [higher] verb, tense is really a [higher] verb (cf. Huddleston, 1969), auxiliaries are really full verbs, verbal group complexes are really reductions of embedded clauses, moods are really separate clauses of saying, and so on.

Autonomous Syntax vs A Natural Relation Between Lexicogrammar And Semantics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 437-8):

In the logical-philosophical approach, within generative linguistics, interpretive semantics has focussed on the question of how semantic representations can be derived from below, from syntactic ones; and an important aspect of the debate in the late 60s and early 70s was precisely concerned with the directionality of interstratal mappings and the nature of the inter-stratal boundary.  

One key question that emerged, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s, was whether syntax is autonomous or not. In the standard Chomskyan theory it was; but this was rejected by Montague and those who were influenced by his idea of building syntactic and semantic specifications "in tandem" (as in the successive developments of GPSG and HPSG).  

Within the rhetorical-ethnographic approach, we have taken the position that not only is lexicogrammar not autonomous, but it is natural in relation to semantics: our approach to the ideation base rests on this theoretical assumption. This is what explains the further possibility of grammatical metaphor, opened up at the interface between semantics and lexicogrammar.

(Mind-Oriented) Cognitive Semantics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 424):

Cognitive semantics has emerged out of the generative tradition in the last ten to fifteen years. It is a natural development of the general cognitivist research program that began in the 1950s with the birth of cognitive science, Artificial Intelligence, and Chomsky's cognitively oriented linguistics.

Those adopting the cognitive approach to semantics share certain assumptions about semantic organisation as part of conceptual organisation, and tend to reject formal, Montague-style semantics, as indicated by the passages from Jackendoff and Lakoff quoted above. However, they seem to fall into two groupings, which can be conveniently described in terms of the US coastline [east vs west].

Interpersonal Effects Of Ideational Metaphor: Figure Realised By Group Or Phrase

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 718):

By the same token, when a figure is realised metaphorically by a group or phrase, it is deprived of the interpersonal status of a proposition or proposal, making it inarguable. It is thus presented as something already established; and any modifications, including interpersonal evaluative ones, have to be taken for granted:

A standard empirical hypothesis is that one component of the mind/brain is a parser, which assigns a percept to a signal (abstracting from other circumstances relevant to interpretation). [Chomsky, 1995, The minimalist program. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, p.18.]

Any serious approach to complex phenomena involves innumerable idealisations, and the one just sketched is no exception. [Chomsky, The minimalist program, p.19.]

But interesting (and conflicting) arguments have been presented. [Chomsky, The minimalist program, p. 22.]

Much of the fruitful inquiry into generative grammar in the past years has pursued the working hypothesis that UG is a simple and elegant theory, with fundamental principles that have an intuitive character and broad generality. [Chomsky, The minimalist program, p. 29.]

The Generativity Of System Networks

Halliday (2008: 120, 121):

One problem that has sometimes been raised in this connection is that the number of options seems too vast. […] But (as Wimsatt pointed out, criticising Chomsky’s notion of the innateness of grammar — what he referred to as “generative entrenchment” and the “developmental lock”), what is relevant is the number of choice points; […] The system network is not a modelling of neural processes — it is an analytical tool for the grammarian. But there is nothing improbable in the range of possibilities that such networks are able to represent.

Systemic Grammar As Generative Rather Than Contraceptive

Halliday (2008: 65):

In a systemic grammar, the most abstract representation takes the form of a system network, modelling the sets of options that the grammar makes available, and the interrelation between one set of options and another: whether they are simultaneous or dependent. The network is a theory of what the speaker can do: what he can mean, at the semantic stratum; what he can say, or “word”, at the stratum of lexicogrammar; what he can say, or “sound”, at the strata of phonology and phonetics. It is a more truly generative grammar, as distinct from the earlier Chomskyan kind of generative grammar which, as Peter Wexler once remarked, should really be called a “contraceptive grammar” since it was all about the enforcement of constraint.