Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 18-9):
In all these histories, the wordings and the meanings emerge together. The relationship is that of the two sides of the Stoic-Saussurean sign — best represented, perhaps, in the familiar Chinese figure yin & yang (which is in fact just that, a representation of the sign):
Thus, to return to our earlier illustration of the noun: what evolved, in the history of the system, was an entity on the content plane which had a structure as follows:
The relationship between the two sides of the sign is that of realisation: thus the meaning 'participant in a process: conscious or non-conscious being' is realised as the wording (class of wording) 'noun'.
Blogger Comments:
The dualities associated with yin & yang are of the same level of symbolic abstraction, whereas the Stoic-Saussurean sign involves two different levels of symbolic abstraction.