Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 30):
Johnston's insight into the power of representation embodied in Sign is central also to the general challenge of representation in metalanguage. We noted above that the semantics/ lexicogrammar of natural language is itself a 'realisation' (an abstract construction) of daily experience. Likewise, the system we use to explore the semantics/ lexicogrammar — our theory of semantics and our grammatics — is a 'realisation' of that part of daily experience that is constituted by semantics and lexicogrammar; that is, it is an abstract construction of language. This system is itself a semiotic one — a metalanguage; in Firth's more everyday terms, it is language turned back on itself. So whereas a language is (from an ideational point of view) a resource for construing our experience of the world, a metalanguage is a resource for construing our experience of language.
Blogger Comments:
Here Matthiessen confuses 'a realisation' with 'a construal' (an abstract construction). To be clear, a realisation is the Token of an identifying relation; that is, it is less abstract than the Value it signifies. On the other hand, a construal is an intellectual construction that is the Value of an identifying relation; that is, it is more abstract than the Token that signifies it. The first two sentences above can be made consistent with the final sentence above by re-expressing them as:
We noted above that the semantics/ lexicogrammar of natural language is itself a 'construal' (an abstract construction) of daily experience. Likewise, the system we use to explore the semantics/ lexicogrammar — our theory of semantics and our grammatics — is a 'construal' of that part of daily experience that is constituted by semantics and lexicogrammar; that is, it is an abstract construction of language.
Language is a construal of daily experience, not a realisation of it.