Ideational Metafunction: Construing Experience As Meaning

 Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 30):

It is clear that language does — as we put it — construe human experience. It names things, thus construing them into categories; and then, typically, goes further and construes the categories into taxonomies, often using more names for doing so. … and the fact that these differ from one language to another is a reminder that the categories are in fact construed in language … . More powerfully still, these elements are configured into complex grammatical patterns like marched out of the house; the figures can be built up into sequences related by time, cause and the like – there is no facet of human experience that cannot be transformed into meaning.