The Reason For Using Structural Representations

Halliday (1994: xxvii):

Systemic vs Structural Grammars

Halliday (1994: xxvii):

The Formalism Of Systemic Theory

Halliday (1994: xxvi-xxvii):

The Tradition Of Systemic Theory

 Halliday (1994: xxvi):

Bringing Semantic Distinctions To Consciousness

Halliday (1994: xxvi):

The Ineffability Of Grammatical Categories

Halliday (1994: xxv-xxvi):

…

The Unconscious Nature Of Spontaneous Speech

Halliday (1994: xxv):

The False Notion That Speech Is Less Organised Than Writing

  Halliday (1994: xxiv-xxv):

The Second Reason Why Speech Is Important

 Halliday (1994: xxiv):

The First Reason Why Speech Is Important

Halliday (1994: xxiii-xxiv):

A Grammar Of Written Language vs Speech

Halliday (1994: xxiii):

Text As Product vs Process

Halliday (1994: xxii-xxiii):

Discourse Analysis

Halliday (1994: xxii):

System, Text And Saussure

Halliday (1994: xxii):

Probabilities As A Property Of The System

Halliday (1994: xxii):

The Larger the Syntagm The More Likely It Is To Be Original

Halliday (1994: xxi):

Groups And Phrases

Halliday (1994: xxi):

The Fundamental Unit Of Grammatical Organisation Is The Clause

Halliday (1994: xxi):

Below And Above The Sentence

Halliday (1994: xx-xxi): 

Why A Functional Grammar And Not A Functional Semantics?

Halliday (1994: xx):

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Nevertheless, for a sketch of a functional ideational semantics, based on the grammar, see Construing Experience Through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999).

The Realisation Relation Between Semantics And Lexicogrammar

Halliday (1994: xx):

A Grammar Is An Interpretation Of Linguistic Forms

Halliday (1994: xix-xx):

The Line Between Semantics And Lexicogrammar

Halliday (1994: xix):

The Distinction Between Congruent And Metaphorical Expressions Of Meaning

Halliday (1994: xviii-xix):

What A Natural Symbolic System Of Lexicogrammar Enables

Halliday (1994: xviii):

The Natural (Non-Arbitrary) Relation Between Word Classes And The Meanings They Realise

Halliday (1994: xviii):

The Natural (Non-Arbitrary) Relation Between Semantics And Lexicogrammar

Halliday (1994: xvii-xviii):

The Largely Non-Natural (Arbitrary) Relation Between Lexicorammar And Expression

Halliday (1994: xvii):

A Functional Grammar Interprets Wording By Reference To What It Means

Halliday (1994: xvii):

Language: A Semantic System With Other Systems For Encoding Its Meanings

Halliday (1994: xvii):

The Central Place Of Grammar In Discourse Analysis

Halliday (1994: xvi-xvii):

Lower And Higher Levels Of Achievement In Discourse Analysis

Halliday (1994: xv-xvi):

Systemic Theory: Meaning As Choice

Halliday (1994: xiv-xv):

Why 'Grammar' Rather Than 'Syntax'

Halliday (1994: xiv):

The Three Distinct Senses In Which SFG Is A Functional Grammar

Halliday (1994: xiii-xiv):

IFG Is A Short Introduction Because Language Is Inexhaustible

Halliday (1994: xiii):

The Developmental Dynamic Of Generalisation — Abstractness — Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 618):

The developmental dynamic of "generalisation — abstractness — metaphor" provides the semiotic energy for the grammar, enabling it to serve as the powerhouse for construing experience in the form of scientific knowledge. Presented in this very sketchy fashion the movement may seem catastrophic and discontinuous; but this is misleading. Rather, it is a steady progression, marked by three periods of more rapid development at the transitions: 

from protolanguage to language (generalisation, associated with bipedal motion), 

from commonsense (spoken) language to written language (abstractness: the move into primary school), and 

from non-specialised written language to technical language (metaphor the move into secondary school). 

There is a clear grammatical and semantic continuity between the various versions of experience, which we can bring out by analysing the grammar of particular instances (such as those cited above). At the same time, the ontogenetic perspective shows that in fact our experience is being ongoingly reconstrued and recategorised as we grow from infancy to maturity.  

This is the outcome of processes taking place in human history — evolutionary events that are at once both material and semiotic, and that cannot be reduced to either purely physical processes driven by technology or purely discursive processes driven by ideology. 

There is no point in asking whether the ideation base of our technologised natural languages necessarily had to evolve the way it did. But it is extremely pertinent to ask, given the enormous demands now being made on both the material and the semiotic resources of the human species, what the options are for the way it may evolve in future.

Grammatical Metaphor As A Prerequisite For The Semiotic Construal Of Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 617-8):

But there is a further transformation still to come, when experience is once again reconstrued, this time as technical knowledge. This reconstrual too is institutionalised, in the transition from primary to secondary education: when children move into secondary school, as adolescents, they learn to organise their experience according to the disciplines — mathematics, science (chemistry, physics, biology), geography, history, and so on. 

Semiotically, the critical factor is that of metaphor; the semiotic bonds that had enabled the child to learn the mother tongue in the first place, bonds between figures and their elements on the one hand and clauses and their transitivity functions on the other, are systematically (and more or less ceremonially!) untied. The categories of experience are deconstrued, to be recategorised over the remaining years of schooling in the "objectifying" framework of grammatical metaphor. … 

By the time children reach the 11th and 12th year of education their experience is being construed in terms such as these:

Every similarity transformation, if not a translation, reflection, rotation, or enlargement, is the product of two or more such transformations.

What would be the order of magnitude of the moment of inertia of the Earth about its axis of rotation?

The elements are processes and qualities that have been metaphorically reconstrued to become participants: rotation, magnitude, enlargement, and so on; together with the relation of identity construed as a process by the verb be. When our adolescents' ideation base comes to accommodate a meaning potential of this technicalised kind, we consider that they have reached semiotic maturity.

Abstractness As A Prerequisite For The Semiotic Construal Of Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 615-6):

But there are two further developments to come before the ideation base can take the form it has to take if it is to produce discourse of the kind we have been assuming throughout the book; and there is some elapse of time before children take these further steps. The first of these developments is abstractness; the second is (grammatical) metaphor. 

General terms are not necessarily abstract; a bird is no more abstract than a pigeon. But some words have referents that are purely abstract — words like cost and clue and habit and tend and strange; they are construing some aspect of our experience, but there is no concrete thing or process with which they can be identified. 

Small children simply ignore them, but by the age of about four or five they begin to cope with abstract meanings; in literate societies, this is the time we consider that children are "ready to start school", no doubt because you have to cope with abstractness in meaning in order to be able to learn to read and write (cf. wordings like spell, stand for, beginning of a sentence). 

But it is not only the written medium; rather it is the whole world of educational knowledge that demands such abstractness in meaning. Consider examples taken from primary text books such as Some animals rely on their great speed to escape from danger, or The time taken by the earth to rotate once on its own axis is a day. 

What happens here is that experience is being reconstrued in order to build up a form of knowledge that is systematically organised and explicit. Children already know that animals run away because they're frightened, and that the sun goes round the earth once in a day; but they have to learn these things over again in a new, more abstract semiotic frame.  

Generalisation As A Prerequisite For The Semiotic Construal Of Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 615):

A prerequisite for the semiotic construal of experience is generalisation: the move from "proper" to "common" as the basic principle of referring. The protolanguage, as already remarked, is non-referring; children move into reference by gradually deconstruing the proto-linguistic sign in a sequence of steps such as 'I want Mummy to ...', 'I want Mummy!', 'Where is Mummy?', 'Mummy' (see Halliday, 1992). The sign has now become a word, functioning as a proper name.  

Typically one or two other signs have been deconstrued at the same time in similar fashion, e.g. 'I want my (toy) bird!', 'Where is my bird?', 'My bird'; and by a further step these then become common names 'bird(s)'. The child has now learnt to name a class of things; this then opens the way 

(i) to constructing hierarchies of classes — a 'pigeon' is a kind of 'bird', and so on, and 

(ii) to naming other kinds of element, processes and qualities, which can be construed only as "common" terms. 

Since these other elements have distinct and complementary functions it becomes possible to combine them into organic structures, as complex elements or as figures, such as 'blue bird', 'birds flying', 'tiny bird flew away'. The resources are now in place for construing experience in lexicogrammatical terms.

 This principle of generalisation — that is, naming general classes rather than specific individuals — is what makes it possible to construct an ideation base. When they have reached this stage, children can make the transition from protolanguage to mother tongue, building up figures and sequences of figures, and simultaneously structuring these as moves in dialogic exchanges (question, statement, etc. — the interaction base), and as messages or quanta of information (the text base). In other words, they learn "how to mean" according to the metafunctional principle of adult human semiosis.