The grammar of everyday discourse thus clearly points to the significance of interpersonal meaning in the way we construct ourselves — the self is not only construed but it is also enacted. Cognitive scientists, however, have derived their object of study, and their model of this object from the ideational perspective alone, failing to take the interpersonal perspective — that of enacting — into account.
In the ideational mode we construe ourselves as conscious Sensers, while in the interpersonal mode we enact ourselves as speakers interacting with addressees; the metaphor [of modality] brings the two together in such a way that the ideational construal stands for the interpersonal enactment.
A projection mental clause such as I (don’t) think, since ideationally it realises a figure of sensing, construes the speaker as ‘Senser at the time of speaking’ (it occurs metaphorically only in the present tense); at the same time, it enacts the speaker’s own ‘intrusion’ into the dialogue — his or her judgement about how much validity can be attached to the proposition contained in the projected clause. Interpersonal metaphor is thus the hinge between the ideational and the interpersonal modes of constructing the self.
Painter (1993) documents how one child first learned to construe mental projection: he began with figures in which he himself was the Senser. The system made it possible for him then to generalise his own experience of consciousness by construing other persons in the Senser rôle, as he built up a model in which this role could be occupied by any conscious (prototypically human) being.
… the idea clause is projected, as the “content of consciousness”, by the Senser involved in the process of sensing. The content is brought into existence by the sensing process, as actualised through the Senser; and it is construed as being of a higher order of semiotic abstraction than the process of sensing itself (ie it is always at one further remove from the instantial context).
… ‘fact’ clauses [are] those where the idea clause is a projection but it is not the accompanying mental clause that is doing the projecting; such ready–made projections do function as constituents.
In our analysis (unlike that of the mainstream grammatical tradition), the projected clause is not a constituent part of the mental or verbal clause by which it is projected. There are numerous reasons for this; some of them are grammatical — for example, it cannot be the focus of theme–predication … it cannot be the Subject of a passive mental clause … it is presumed by the substitute so, which is also used to presume conditional clauses in clause complexes … But these, in turn, reflect the semantic nature of projection: this is a relationship between two figures, not a device whereby one becomes a participant inside another.
[A] figure of sensing is a configuration of a Process and the participant engaged in sensing, the Senser; that is, consciousness is construed as a complementarity of change through time and persistence through time — as a conscious participant involved in an unfolding process.
We have shown how the system of the ideation base construes consciousness: as conscious processing by a conscious being. Conscious processing can create a higher–order world of ideas (or, as we would say, meanings), comparable in certain respects to Popper’s World 3; this defines the essential distinction between projection and expansion as ways of relating one figure to another. Conscious processes themselves appear as the central figures in the construal of experience, and they are pivotal in differentiating among various types of participant. … Conscious processes are of two kinds: sensing, and saying.
When they are reconstrued as things, processes lose their location in time and often also their participants …
The most central aspect of the various changes that took place was the reification of experience — the grammatical metaphor whereby processes were construed as things.
This change in the grammar entailed a change in world view, towards a static, reified world — so much so that Bohm (1979) complains that language makes it hard to represent the kind of flux that modern physics likes to deal with. Bohm’s dissatisfaction is directed at language in general; but his real target is — or should be — the language of science. The everyday language of casual speech is, by and large, a language of flux, construing experience in much the way that Bohm seems to demand.
… we can interpret folk models and scientific ones as co-existing varieties of the same basic system within the ideation base. In the first instance, we will, of course, be aware of them as differing in particular domains — eg as operating with different lexical semantic organisations; but they also tend to construe experience differently in general terms — scientific models tend to rely on grammatical metaphor and thus embody a metaphorical construal of experience …
… folk models are part of the unconscious background of thinking in everyday situation types; they have evolved without any conscious design and are not associated with academic contexts. Folk models can also be more conscious, of course — these are the models that people talk about, that they believe they believe. Scientific models are consciously designed in more restricted situation types, usually with academic institutions, to serve as resources in reasoning about the world.
There will always be some complementarity of function between the more designed varieties and those that are naturally evolving. They may be allocated to different spheres of activity: for example, the language of bird–watchers vs the language of ornithologists. But in other cases the two are closely integrated as submotifs within a single sphere: for example, the use of both natural language and mathematical expressions side by side in the learning and practice of mathematics. This kind of interpenetration still entails a semiotic complementarity, but of a very sensitive kind, requiring a delicate interpretation of the context in order to bring it out.
As designed semiotic systems emerge, both the registers of the everyday language and the original specialist registers continue to exist and develop; folk models of the world will co-exist along the scientific ones. A certain degree of intertranslatability is likely to be maintained — linguistic renderings of logical or mathematical formulas, for instance; and this constitutes one of the contexts in which ordinary language is brought into explicit contact with more scientific varieties.
However, although they tend to be overlooked when one comes to build a ‘scientific’ model of language and the mind, these other metafunctions are no less important than the ideational.
In addition to the different degrees of awareness of different grammatical units, such as words and clauses, people are also not equally aware of the different kinds of functions in which the resources of language are organised. In particular, in constructing and reasoning about more conscious models, people are readily aware of those linguistic resources whose function it is to interpret and represent experience, those of the ideational metafunction; but they are less aware of those of the other two metafunctions, the interpersonal and the textual — no doubt because these do not embody representations of experience but reflect our engagement with the world in different ways.
It is the analysis of some of these more covert features embodied in the everyday grammar, in particular the theory of mental processes, that throws light on the domain of cognitive science.
Whorf (1956) distinguished between overt and covert categories and pointed out that covert categories were often also “cryptotypes” — categories whose meanings were complex and difficult to access. Many aspects of clause grammar, and of the grammar of clause complexes, are essentially cryptotypic.
… the study of words varying in form according to their case, number, aspect, person etc. Word-based systems such as these do provide a way in to studying grammatical semantics: but the meanings they construe are always more complex than the categories that appear as formal variants, and grammarians have had to become aware of covert patterns.
This is construed as an isolate, a ‘thing’ that can be counted and put into alphabetical order. … The taxonomic organisation of vocabulary is less exposed …
Certain aspects of language are closer to conscious awareness than others; these are the more exposed parts of language, which are also the parts that tend to get studied first. In Western thinking about language, the most exposed aspect of language has been the “word”: to talk is to “put things into words”.
Whatever the scope and sophistication of a model, however, we are likely to be more aware of a model as a cultural construct than as a linguistic construct, since language is typically further from our conscious attention.
There is thus a range of variation from our everyday folk models to scientific models, with expert models somewhere coming in between (Linde, 1987). Such models vary considerably in the degree to which we are consciously aware of them as models. We are more aware of models that ‘stand out’ as belonging to a particular subculture than those that are part of our everyday repertoire; and we are more aware of scientific models than of folk models.
The everyday folk models are more likely to be embraced unconsciously by everybody in a culture, because they are everyday models, instantiated in casual conversation, and because they are construed as congruent in the cryptogrammar. The general model of the phenomena of our experience, including those of our own consciousness — seeing, thinking, wanting, and feeling — is of this highly generalised kind.
In contrast, scientific models are much more contextually constrained: they are developed, maintained, changed and transmitted within those situation types that we associate with scientific language. … these situation types are quite restrained relative to the context of culture as a whole … In this respect, scientific models are clearly sub-cultural models: contextually they are located somewhere between the potential and the instance.
… an inherent property of instantiation is variation; and scientific models (like other subcultural models) vary one in relation to another. Sometimes they are complementary, sometimes they conflict.
‘Text’ or ‘discourse’ here has to be understood not just at the lowest level of abstraction in language as a realisation in speech and writing, but primarily as configurations of linguistic [i.e. semantic] and higher–level cultural [i.e. contextual] meanings.
At both these strata [context and semantics], models are also located along the cline of instantiation, running between the potential — the overall resources for making meaning, within the context of culture, and the instance — instantial ‘texts’ constituted of meanings that have been selected from this potential, within particular contexts of situation. The potential end of the cline of instantiation embodies all the contextual–semantic models that a culture embraces.
Any given model of experience exists at different orders of abstraction. It is a configuration of higher–level meanings within the context of culture; at the same time, it is also construed semantically, in the ideation base. The relationship between these two orders of abstraction, contextual and semantic, is a stratal one; hence a model is a cultural construct that is construed in language (together with other language–dependent semiotic systems such as expository drawings and diagrams.)
Cognitive science operates with a scientific model of the individual mind; but, we shall suggest, it is one that is based fairly uncritically on certain aspects of the folk model, in particular in its selection of, and perspective on, its own domain of enquiry.
we shall suggest that the domain of cognitive science is construed ideationally within the folk model; but that this model is extended metaphorically in cognitive science itself, and this extension in fact invites the interpretation of knowledge as meaning.
… we are offering the ideation base as a conceptual alternative [to] the mind, knowledge, cognition … the concerns of cognitive science.
The ideation base, by dint of being polysystemic, accommodates variation along this cline, not only from folk to scientific but also across alternatives: it embodies both congruent and metaphorical construals of experience, and it provides elasticity within the overall construction space.
As a resource for making sense of experience, the ideation base enables us to construe a range of different theories, commonsense as well as scientific. There is a cline between folk, or commonsense, theories and scientific, or uncommonsense, ones; and at any point along the cline alternative theories may be in competition.
To say that the ideational system is polysystemic means that it can support these different theoretical angles on experience: semantic variation of all kinds is the manifestation of the different theoretical interpretations that language places on experience.
From an educational point of view, the most fundamental complementarity is the move from the registers of everyday life to the registers of education: this is a move from folk or commonsense models to “uncommonsense” models of systematic and technical knowledge.
Now, just as the overall ideation base is a theory of our total experience of the world around us and inside us — the theory that is shared by the culture as a whole, so also the different registerial variants constitute different ‘subtheories’ of our experience. These ‘subtheories’ may complement one another by simply being concerned with different domains of experience … This complementarity is purely additive, although for society as a whole it constitutes the semiotic aspect of the division of labour, whereby different people construe different facets of the overall cultural experience. But such subtheories may also be concerned with more or less the same domain, bringing alternative perspectives on the construal of experience that is shared.
The overall ideation base thus comprises many different registerial variants — register-specific systems that we called domain models.
In addition, the ideation base is polysystemic in another sense: registerial variation. We have seen that such variation can be construed in terms of the probabilistic nature of the linguistic system, as variation in the probabilities associated with terms in systems. Seen in this light, a register is a particular probabilistic setting of the system; and the move from one register to another is a re-setting of these probabilities. What is globally the ‘same’ ideational semantic system can thus appear as a collection of different systems, as one [i.e. our viewpoint not the speaker] moves along the cline of instantiation from potential to instance… . As we noted above, the effect is quantitative; but it is also qualitative, in the sense that it provides different perspectives on experience within the same system.
Such complementarities [metafunctional, fractal, systemic and metaphorical] constitute one form of indeterminacy of the system — one that allows it to be "polysystemic" in the particular sense of embodying more than one way of construing experience.
… beyond its congruent mode, there is a metaphorical complementarity: the ideational model offers a complementarity between the congruent mode itself and the metaphorical mode, making it possible to take some phenomenon as already construed and then reconstrue it as if it was a phenomenon of a different kind.
… still in the congruent mode, there are systemic complementarities: the ideational potential offers systemic complementarities such as the ergative and transitive models of participation in processes, and the mass and count (singular/plural) models of quantity …
… within this congruent mode, there is a fractal complementarity: the highly generalised semantic types of projection & expansion are manifested in complementary domains — those of sequences, figures, and participants; so that, for example, some phenomenon of experience construed as having temporal expansion might appear either as a sequence or a configuration …
… in the congruent mode of construing experience, there is a metafunctional complementarity: the ideational potential offers two complementary modes for construing experience — the highly generalised logical mode, with projection & expansion as the dominant semantic motifs, and the more particularised experiential mode, with its typology of processes, things, qualities, and circumstances …
The ideational meaning potential embodies not one single semantic system but rather several such systems coexisting; in Firth’s terms, it is a “system of systems” — in two distinct but related ways [internal complementarities and registerial variation].
It seems likely that all these different kinds of indeterminacy are what make it possible for the grammar to offer a plausible construal of experience — one that is rich enough, yet fluid enough, for human beings to live with. We should stress once again that the examples cited here are features of the ideation base of one particular language, namely English. No other language will be identical. Indeed the distribution of indeterminacies is likely to be precisely one of the features in which languages differ most, and even perhaps varieties within one and the same language. But every language depends on indeterminacy as a resource for meaning — even if our grammatics is not yet very clever at teasing it out.
There are of course many different contexts for all these indeterminacies, in different regions of the total semantic space. Certain types of ambiguity appear to be not so much artefacts of the realisation (not just grammatical puns, so to speak) but rather another kind of complementarity, where the grammar is as it were "having things both ways" — both interpretations have to be accepted at one and the same time. This is sometimes the case with Token + Value structures, in figures of being. These clauses are always ambiguous, if the verb is be, since this verb does not mark the passive; yet some depend on being interpreted both ways — particularly, perhaps, some proverbial sayings, Thus, one man's meat is another man's poison is both Token ^ Value 'what one person likes may displease another' and Value ^ Token 'what one person dislikes may please another'; contrast what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, which can be interpreted only as Token ^ Value.
An intermediate degree of specificity, with partial neutralisation, can be seen in the non-finite clause with accompanying preposition, as in they get caught for taking bribes. What happens here is that the fact that there is a connection between the two figures is unequivocally construed by the dependency; but the nature of this connection — what kind of logical relationship is being set up — does not enter the picture.
When two figures are linked into a sequence, by some logical semantic relation, there is a rather wide range of possible semantic relations between the two: the relations of time and of cause and condition are particularly elaborated in this respect, but there are others besides — the manner, the matter, and so on. The distinctions among these relationships, however, may be to a greater or lesser degree neutralised, where one clause is construed as dependent on the other; this happens as the dependent clause moves from finite to non-finite status. For example, in they get caught taking bribes the distinction that would be made in the agnate finite clause, among, say they get caught if they take bribes, they get caught when they take bribes, they get caught because they take bribes, is simply neutralised — it is not a blend of all three, nor is there any ambiguity involved.
In those figures where there is a second direct participant, some form of agency runs through all the different types of process; but agency is such a complex aspect of human experience that the grammar does not delineate it by a single stroke, but construes it by means of a fundamental complementarity, that between the transitive and the ergative perspectives. Thus figures involving two direct participants, such as Actor + Goal in the material, are aligned along two different axes: the transitive one, based on the potential extension of force (mechanical energy) from a doer to another entity; and the ergative one, based on the potential introduction of agency (causal energy) from another entity as external source. Thus the earthquake shook the house is construed both as 'earthquake + shake' plus optional Goal 'house’, and as 'house + shake' plus optional Agent 'earthquake’. As always in cases of complementarity, certain parts of the region are more strongly aligned to one perspective, other parts to the other, but the total picture requires the confrontation of the two.
… the grammar distinguishes a number of types of process, material, mental, verbal and relational; the distinctions are made by a cluster of syntactic variables… . But since these variables "draw the line" at different places, there are areas of overlap, with mixed categories that share some characteristics with one group and some with another. We gave the example of behavioural processes; these are a mixed category, formed by the overlap of the material, on the one side, and the mental or verbal on the other. Behaving is construed as a type of figure that (like the mental) typically has a conscious participant as the central rôle, and does not extend beyond this to a second participant; but, on the other hand, it does not project, and it has a time frame like that of the material. Thus behavioural processes lie squarely athwart a fuzzy borderline.
… the grammar distinguishes a number of types of process, material, mental, verbal and relational; the distinctions are made by a cluster of syntactic variables —
the valency of associated participant rôles,
the class of entity that takes on each rôle,
the potential for combining with other figures,
the associated tense systems and the like.
But at the opposite corner, so to speak, if we combine low value with oblique (remote), the result is typically blending rather than ambiguity: e.g. it couldn't hurt you to apologise is a blend of 'it would not be able to hurt you' (readiness: ability), 'it is unlikely that it would hurt you' (probability) and even perhaps 'it would not be allowed to hurt you' (obligation). In other words, looking at it from the point of view of blending, in the region of 'what I think’/ 'what is wanted', it is easiest to blend the low values 'what I can conceive of’ with 'what is permitted', especially in 'remote' conditions (hypothetical, projected or tentative) [realised as could, might]; and hardest to blend the high values 'what I am convinced of’ with 'what is required', especially when 'immediate' [realised as must].
There is a great deal of indeterminacy throughout the region; but it is of more than one kind. At one "corner", if we combine value with neutral (immediate), then the resulting wordings are ambiguous, as to the type of modality expressed: thus must has three clearly distinct meanings, (a) as probability (e.g. that must be Mary 'certainly that is Mary'), (b) as obligation (e.g. you must wear a helmet 'it is essential that you wear a helmet'), (c) as readiness: inclination (e.g. if you must make all that noise 'if you insist on making all that noise’). That these are truly ambiguous can be gathered from an example such as she must complain, which has to be interpreted in one or another of these different meanings — the context will of course usually make it clear which;
Modality, the speaker's angle on what is or what should be, is notoriously fluid and shifting in its categories, probably in every language. In English, there is a fairly clearly defined semantic region construed at the intersection of a number of grammatical systems, including (1) type: probability / usuality // obligation / readiness: inclination / ability; (2) value: median // high / low; (3) orientation: objective / subjective; (4) immediacy: immediate (neutral) / remote (oblique); (5) polarity: positive / negative; and one or two others. These are realised synthetically in various ways, one of which is by the modal finite operators can, could, may, might, will, would, should, must, ought-to (and one or two other fringe members).
But, thirdly, within the overall construction of experience, the diversity of spheres of social action is realised by variation in the line-up of semantic features — that is, by variation in register. The probabilities are reset; and in some cases one or two "critical systems" are strongly affected in this way, such that the local norm skews the system, or perhaps even reverses the skewing set up by the global norm. It is here that we find future taking over as the unmarked primary tense in weather forecasting. As we said above, we define register variation in just these terms, as the ongoing resetting of probabilities in the lexicogrammar, which then functions to construe the ongoing variation at the level of the social process.
Secondly, systems have varying probability profiles, so that (in terms of information theory) they carry differential loads of information: the skewer the probabilities of the terms in a system, the greater the redundancy that it carries — hence the less we need to attend to its unmarked state.
How would we summarise the significance of indeterminacy, from the point of view of the semantic construal of experience? It lies first and foremost, perhaps, in the general principle that is being proclaimed, if indeterminacy is a typical and unremarkable feature of the grammar: that 'this is the way things are’. Our “reality” is inherently messy; it would be hard to construe experience, in a way that was beneficial to survival, with a semiotic system whose typical categories were well-defined, clearly bounded, and ordered by certainty rather than probability. This is the problem with designed systems, including semiotic ones: as a rule, they fail to provide adequately for mess.
… when choice is made in two systems simultaneously, such that each serves as the environment for the other, there is often a conditioning effect on the probabilities. This may be an indication of a change in progress, or it may be a stable feature of the overall system.
Synchronically (that is, viewed synoptically in this way as a meaning potential) a language is, as we have said, a probabilistic system: if we say that, in the grammar, there is a system of primary tenses past/ present/ future, we assume the rider 'with a certain probability attached to them’. But we do not, of course, speak or write with one grammatical system at a time. Systems intersect with each other simultaneously (we choose tense along with voice, polarity, mood, transitivity and so on), and they follow each other in linear succession (we choose tense in clause 1, again in clause 2, again in clause 3 and so on). Each instance has its environment, both of previous instances, and of simultaneous instances of systems with their own sets of probabilities.
At the “instance” end, a single highly–valued instance may exert a disproportionate effect: quotations from the Bible and from Shakespeare are familiar triggers of this “Hamlet factor” in English … But such qualitative effects take place against a background of microscopic quantitative pressures, the sort of nanosemiotic processes by which a language is ongoingly restructured as potential out of the innumerable instantial encounters of daily life — the “sheer weight of numbers”, as we sometimes call it.
… what we call “system” and “instance” are one and the same phenomenon, being observed from different depths in time.
Historical change in language is typically a quantitative process, in which probabilities in systems at every level are gradually nudged in one direction or another, now and again becoming categorical so that some systemic upheaval takes place. Each instantiation of a tense form, say, whenever someone is speaking or writing in English, minutely perturbs the probabilities of the system …
We can in fact define register variation as the resetting of probabilities in the lexicogrammatical and semantic systems ….
… we define register variation as the ongoing resetting of probabilities in the lexicogrammar, which then functions to construe the ongoing variation at the level of the social process.
… variation in register: the way in which meaning selections in texts tend to vary systematically with their contextual function — their value in the social process.
… the diversity of spheres of social action is realised by variation in the line-up of semantic features — that is, by variation in register.
We have sometimes referred to the relative frequency of a particular feature of the grammar. For instance, in our two examples of the meaning base as a resource in language processing, certain patterns characteristically recurred: future tense in the weather forecasts, imperative mood in the recipes. In each case this was a special feature pertaining to the register in question: in weather forecasts, the future tense is especially frequent relative to the other primary tenses. To say this means that there is a general expectancy in English discourse that, again relative to the other primary tenses, future will occur less frequently than it does here. In other words, there is some global expectation, in the grammar of English, about the relative frequency of the different terms in the primary tense system, past, present and future. Similarly there is some global expectation about the relative frequency of imperative and indicative mood. Frequency in the text is to be interpreted, therefore, as the manifestation of underlying probability in the system.
Local indeterminacies of all these types are found in all regions of the content plane, either within one stratum or at the interface between one stratum and another (including of course puns, which are formed at the interface of content and expression). Some of them involve very general categories, and hence resonate across wide stretches of semantic space, like the transitive/ergative complementarity. We may call them "local", however, in contrast to one global form of indeterminacy which is a feature of the entire system of language, and probably of any evolved semiotic system, namely its probabilistic character.
Behavioural processes such as listen, watch share some features with material processes ('present-in-present' as unmarked tense; no projection), other features with mental processes (the Medium/Behaver is a conscious being). They lie on the borderline between 'doing' and 'sensing’ (so can be re-iterated as do in some contexts but not in all).
(1) ambiguities (‘either a or x’): one form of wording construes two distinct meanings, each of which is exclusive of the other.(2) blends (‘both b and y’): one form of wording construes two different meanings, both of which are blended into a single whole.(3) overlaps (‘partly c, partly z’): two categories overlap so that certain members display features of each.(4) neutralisations: in certain contexts, the difference between two categories disappears.(5) complementarities: certain semantic features or domains are construed in two contradictory ways.
We have tried to make the point that the human condition is such that no singulary, determinate construction of experience would enable us to survive. We have to be able to see things in indeterminate ways: now this, now that, partly one thing, partly the other — the transitivity system is a paradigm example, and that lies at the core of the experiential component of grammar.
But even non-metaphorical forms of writing construe with greater determinacy. We may cite two very pervasive distinctions between spoken and written discourse. On the one hand, writing construes the text into clear-cut constituents, marked off by spacing and other forms of punctuation; in spoken language there are no clear beginnings and endings in the expression (we cannot refer to pauses, since they tend to occur at transition points before something that is less predictable; pauses seldom mark the text's grammatical boundaries). On the other hand, many interpersonal and textual systems are realised in speech by intonation, and most intonation contrasts are gradual rather than categorical. Thus both syntagmatically and paradigmatically written language tends towards greater determinacy; hence our received model of language, in the mainstream grammatical tradition, emphasises clear-cut constituents and classes. Not that it has no tolerance at all for mixed and intermediate categories; but it treats them as the exception, not the norm.
Grammatical metaphor objectifies our experience, transforming its being and happening into things; in so doing, it privileges order, since experience can now be categorised into classes and hierarchies of classes, which are significantly more determinate than the processes and properties favoured by the grammar in its congruent form.
The immediate appearance of order in written language — the fact that it is presented to us in neat blocks and rows upon a page (or the equivalent, in other forms of technology), whereas speech is notorious for its hesitations, false starts, backtracking, clearing of the throat and whatever — is simply a consequence of the fact that we do not display its history: we leave out the provisional attempts and early drafts, and "publish" only the finished product. When analogous measures are taken with spoken language there is no significant difference between the two: speech is just as orderly as writing (cf. Halliday, 1985/9).
What does it mean to say that a natural language is an indeterminate system? In the most general terms, it suggests that the generalised categories that constitute language as a system — as "order", rather than as randomness or "chaos" (let us say randomness rather than chaos, since chaos in its technical reading is also a form of order) — are typically not categorical: that is, they do not display determinate boundaries, fixed criteria of membership, or stable relationships from one stratum to another. We could refer to them as "fuzzy", in the sense in which this term is used in fuzzy logic, fuzzy computing, etc.; but we prefer to retain the term "indeterminate" for the phenomena themselves, since "fuzzy" is usually applied to the theoretical modelling of the phenomena (it refers to meta-fuzz rather than fuzz).
We have not here explicitly foregrounded the concept of indeterminacy in language. But there is a reason for this. To foreground indeterminacy is to treat it as something special, as a marked feature that stands out from, and hence distorts and destabilises, the phenomenon under scrutiny. Here however we take indeterminacy for granted, as a normal and necessary feature of an evolved and functioning semiotic system. Rather than being something that needs to be especially remarked on, it is something that should be built in to our ways of representing and interpreting language: part of the background, rather than the foreground, to our account of the construal of experience.
But it [grammatical metaphor] shaped it [our humanist world] in a way which soon came to be felt as decidedly inhuman. Already at the end of the eighteenth century, within a hundred years of Newton's "Opticks", people were reacting against the rigidity of the world of physics; what they could not accept were the ideological constraints set up by scientific discourse, by a grammar which construed all experience in terms of things. In our own twentieth century the scientists themselves have become weary of it, finding that it prevents them from engaging with the indeterminacy and the flow that they now regard as fundamental — let alone with the concept of the universe as conscious and communicating, as something itself to be interpreted as a semiotic system–&–process. Once we conceive of reality in semiotic terms, it can no longer surprise us that language has the power to construe it, maintain it, and transform it into something else.
In the world of classical physics, the flux of experience was held under control: reality had to be prevented from wriggling, while it could be observed and experimented with. The control over experience is partly a physical matter; but it is also in part semiotic, and the semiotic control of experience is achieved by the nominalising power of the grammar. Since it is the grammar that has construed it in the first place, the grammar is able to transform it by reconstruing it in other terms. Grammatical metaphor played an important rôle in shaping our humanist world.
This reconstrual of experience is complex: what were first construed as happenings have become things, with the original things now serving merely as their appendages; but at the same time what were first construed as logical relationships between processes have been reconstrued as processes in their own right. So the transformation of diamond into graphite is caused by ... . It is also complex in another way: the original status accorded to the phenomenon is not lost, but enters into a metaphorical nexus with the new one. So transformation is still a process, as well as being a thing; is caused by, as well as being a process, is still a logical relation between processes. But, as we have seen, the overwhelmingly predominating effect of this reconstrual is a nominalising one, in which other phenomena are transformed into things. This is a major shift in ideational terms, and plays a significant part in the historical semiotic.
We have shown that the motive for reconstruing experience in this way was in the first instance a textual one: in the grammars of these languages, when one is developing a reasoned chain of logical argument such that complex phenomena have to be given a clearly defined status in the organisation of information (the clause as "message"), such phenomena have to be constructed in nominal form. But there is no insulation between one part of the grammar and another, and this inevitably has ideational effects. Any semantic construct that appears as topical Theme has a function in transitivity; if it is formed as a nominal group, it is potentially a participant in some process, and therefore at some level it is an entity, a thing. If we say diamond is transformed into graphite, this is a process involving two things, diamond and graphite; if we reconstrue this as the transformation of diamond into graphite it has become one thing, transformation, with diamond and graphite serving only circumstantially to qualify it as a thing of a certain kind.
But to say that the semantic relations have become less explicit is to imply that these relations themselves have not changed. In one sense, this is true: we can "unpack" the metaphor, and experts will generally agree on how to do it. But in another sense it is not true. Scientific discourse began, as we saw, with the creation of technical taxonomies and mathematical constructs; these were already modulating the semiotic construal of experience, even if only at the margins, by creating a new realm of abstract things that had not existed before. But the transformation brought about by the renaissance was a more fundamental one; not only was this realm of abstract things greatly extended, but, more significantly, phenomena hitherto construed as processes and properties were now transformed into things — they were reconstrued, by grammatical metaphor.
… one effect of grammatical metaphor is to render many of the semantic relationships implicit: if the happening is construed as a clause, the semantic relations are spelt out in the configuration of grammatical elements, whereas if it is construed as a nominal group they are not, or only partially so … On the whole, the greater the degree of metaphor in the grammar, the more the reader needs to know in order to understand the text.
We have suggested that the immediate context for this change was a discursive one: the evolution of a register of experimental science, in which certain forms of argumentation were highly valued. This is usually interpreted simply as the emergence of a particular genre, the scientific article; but that is only one side of the story — no such genre could have come into being without these changes in the grammar of the clause.
The reason is to be found in the grammar of the textual metafunction. In order to function with the requisite value in the message, which means either as Theme or as focus of information, they cannot remain as complete clauses; they have to be "packaged" into single elements of clause structure, and the only available constituent for this purpose is the nominal group. … It can then take on a clearly defined status in the grammatical construction of the discourse.
It is with the "new learning" of the Renaissance that a distinct language of science begins to emerge, with a vastly greater dependence on grammatical metaphor. The earlier exercises in nominalisation had been abstract but only minimally metaphorical; there is a trace of grammatical metaphor in expressions like conclusion and the same number of altitude, but no more than is found in the language of daily life.
The second of the resources that was brought into play was a syntactic one, the structure of the nominal group. The nominal group of ancient Greek was very like that of modern English: it had a similar arrangement of elements around the Head noun, allowing both prepositional phrases and clauses in modifying function (with some difference of ordering), and included among its deictic elements one which was very close to the English the. Thus any noun could accumulate qualifying clauses and phrases which were explicitly signalled as defining, analogous to English the electrons in an atom, the angles which make up a triangle. One context which demanded elaborate nominal group structures of this kind was that of mathematics, as scholars conducted more and more sophisticated measurements, for example in their attempts to understand planetary motion.
For systematic scholarship it is necessary to technicalise some of the words that are used, and this imposes two requirements: the words must be interpretable in an abstract sense, since they need to refer not to outward appearances but to the properties and principles that lie behind them; and they need to relate to one another in a regular and systematic way, so as to form stable taxonomies.
Why did such a significant development take place? The most important single factor was undoubtedly the evolution of science and technology. It is possible to trace the emergence of this pattern of grammatical metaphor back to the origins of western science in ancient Greece, and to follow its development step by step; each stage in the evolution of the grammar realises a stage in the evolution of a world view.
The philosopher-scientists of the ancient Greek world, Thales, Pythagoras, Anaximander and their successors, inherited a language with a grammar of the kind outlined above, in which experiential meanings were construed in clausal patterns as a balanced interplay of happenings and things; nouns enjoyed no special privileged status. In the course of their writings (and no doubt first of all in the course of their sayings, only we have no access to these) they distilled this into a language of learning. We do not know how much they reflected on this process; it is unlikely they engaged in any very explicit language planning. What they did was to exploit the resources of everyday Greek, its fundamental semogenic potential. In particular, they exploited two of its grammatical powers: the power of forming new words, and the power of extending grammatical structures.
The second problem is that of sheer scale. If only odd, more or less random instances of this kind of metaphor occurred, they could have little effect on the system as a whole. But given the massive scale of this shift in the grammar, affecting as it does entire registers of modern English, it cannot simply be dismissed as meaningless variation. As we saw in Chapter 6, the metaphoric processes themselves are highly systematic; moreover they occur in typical syndromes, so that it is not just one aspect of the construction that is affected. Rather, the entire perspective is shifted sideways, so that each element in the configuration is reconstructed as something else. When this pattern comes to predominate throughout a large proportion of the discourse of adult life, it amounts to a fairly major resemanticising of experience.
It might be maintained that a pair of expressions such as in times of engine failure and whenever an engine failed are simply synonymous, and do not imply any reconstruction of experience. But there are two problems with this view, One is that of history, referred to above. If neither had preceded the other, they could simply be free alternatives (though language is seldom so extravagant with its resources as this would imply!). But since one form of wording came first, it inevitably acquired a rich semantic loading. Since nouns evolved as names of classes of things, anything which is represented as a noun inevitably acquires the status of a thing, with the implication of a concrete object as the prototype. Thus in engine failure, the grammar has construed a thing called failure; and the nominal group then accommodates classes of failure (with another noun as Classifier), such as crop failure, heart failure and engine failure. Thus engine failure and engines fail are precisely not synonymous, because in engine failure the happening fail has acquired an additional semantic feature as the name of a class of things.
Under certain historical conditions, such a [congruent] theory [of experience] may come to be modified or reconstructed. No doubt there have been various more or less catastrophic changes in earlier human history which have brought about relatively rapid changes in language — relatively, that is, to the gradual evolution of the system that has taken place all the time. We have no means of knowing about these. But it seems likely that what we are here calling grammatical metaphor represents one such partial reconstruction, in which, in the context of science and technology, a rather different kind of "reality" is being construed.
"Congruent" is of course a contingent term. What it is saying is that, at the present moment in human history we can recognize forms of language which seem to represent a common coding of experience: this is the configuration that we referred to as "process + participant + circumstance" which is construed in grammars through some version of the trichotomy of verb, noun and the rest. If we relate this to English, it is the form of English that is learnt as a mother tongue, in which phenomena are interpreted clausally, in a kind of dynamic equilibrium of happenings and things. The prototypical thing is a concrete object which can be related by similarity to certain other objects, such that taken together they form a class, like engines. The prototypical happening is a change in the environment that is perceptible to the senses, or a change in the senser's own consciousness. A process is a happening involving one or two such objects, or one object and a conscious being. When children move from their own constructed protolanguage into the mother tongue, this provides a theory which they can use to give a plausible construction to their own individual experience.