Doran (2021):
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To be clear, to cite an author, rather than the argument on which the conclusion of the author is based, is a fallacious use of the appeal to authority (argumentum ad verecundiam).
Moreover, in 1965,
- Systemic Functional Grammar had not yet been devised by Halliday,
- the metafunctions had not yet been devised by Halliday, and so
- the favoured structure types of the metafunctions had not yet been devised by Halliday.
As previously noted, the first statement on structure types varying according to metafunction appears 14 years later: Modes of meaning and modes of expression: types of grammatical structure and their determination by different semantic functions (Halliday 1979).
On the other hand, in 1965, Halliday did publish his first paper on the distinction between multivariate and univariate structures, though the focus was primarily on univariate structures, and the distinction between hypotaxis and parataxis. However, importantly, his characterisations of these structure types at that time were inconsistent with the view he eventually arrived at.
For example, as previously noted, Halliday (1965) classified a Head°Modifier structure as multivariate, rather than univariate, and defined a multivariate structure as comprising 'a specific set of variables each occurring once only', though the stipulation on the number of occurrences plays no part in any descriptions since the formulation of SFL Theory.