Sunday 7 February 2016

Ideational Metafunction: Experiential And Logical

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 511):
Ideationally, the grammar is a theory of human experience; it is our interpretation of all that goes on around us, and also inside ourselves. There are two parts to this: one the representation of the processes themselves, which we refer to as the “experiential”; the other the representation of the relations between one process and another, and it is this that we refer to as the “logical”. The two together construe the “ideational” metafunction, whereby language construes our experiential world.  The word “construe” is used to suggest an intellectual construction — though one that, of course, we then use as a guide to action.