Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 1):
The construction of experience is usually thought of as knowledge, having the form of conceptual taxonomies, schemata, scripts and the like. We shall offer an interpretation complementary to this, treating experience not as knowing but as meaning; and hence as something that is construed in language. In other words, we are concerned with the construal of human experience as a semantic system; and since language plays the central rôle not only in storing and exchanging experience but also in construing it, we are taking language as our interpretive base.