Metalanguage: Theoretical Construal Stratum

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 32-3):

Thus any account of the ideation base has to be metalinguistically stratified It has to be constructed as a theoretical model out of the resources the theory provides and according to the constraints imposed by these resources. From a systemic-functional point of view, this means that the ideation base is construed as a multidimensional, elastic semantic space. This space is organised as a meaning potential, with an extensive system of semantic alternatives; these alternatives are ordered in delicacy. Each set of alternatives is a cline in semantic space rather than a set of discrete categories, and any alternative may be constituted structurally as a configuration of semantic roles. The meaning potential is thus differentiated axially into (i) systems of options in meaning and (ii) structural configurations of roles by which these options are constituted.

The meaning potential itself is one pole on the dimension of instantiation: it is instantiated in the unfolding of text, with patterns of typical instantiation (specific domains of meaning) lying somewhere in between the potential and the instance. At the same time, this overall ideation base can be expanded by various semogenic strategies, among which we are foregrounding that of grammatical metaphor.

The Stratification Of Metalanguage

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 30):

Metalanguage has the same basic properties as any semiotic system. This means that it is stratified. It construes language in abstract theoretical terms; but this construal is in turn realised as some form of representation — either language itself, in discursive constructions of theory, or some form of designed semiotic (system networks, constituency rules, conceptual networks, logical formulae, and so on).

Metalanguage

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 30):

Johnston's insight into the power of representation embodied in Sign is central also to the general challenge of representation in metalanguage. We noted above that the semantics/ lexicogrammar of natural language is itself a 'realisation' (an abstract construction) of daily experience. Likewise, the system we use to explore the semantics/ lexicogrammar — our theory of semantics and our grammatics — is a 'realisation' of that part of daily experience that is constituted by semantics and lexicogrammar; that is, it is an abstract construction of language. This system is itself a semiotic one — a metalanguage; in Firth's more everyday terms, it is language turned back on itself. So whereas a language is (from an ideational point of view) a resource for construing our experience of the world, a metalanguage is a resource for construing our experience of language.

Blogger Comments:

Here Matthiessen confuses 'a realisation' with 'a construal' (an abstract construction). To be clear, a realisation is the Token of an identifying relation; that is, it is less abstract than the Value it signifies. On the other hand, a construal is an intellectual construction that is the Value of an identifying relation; that is, it is more abstract than the Token that signifies it. The first two sentences above can be made consistent with the final sentence above by re-expressing them as:

We noted above that the semantics/ lexicogrammar of natural language is itself a 'construal' (an abstract construction) of daily experience. Likewise, the system we use to explore the semantics/ lexicogrammar — our theory of semantics and our grammatics — is a 'construal' of that part of daily experience that is constituted by semantics and lexicogrammar; that is, it is an abstract construction of language.

Language is a construal of daily experience, not a realisation of it.

The Parallelism Of The Semantics And Spatial Expression Of Sign Languages

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 30):

This parallelism is even more foregrounded where the modality of expression is spatial, as in the Sign Languages of deaf communities (see Johnston, 1989; 1992 on AUSLAN). Here the domain of expression is a 4-dimensional signing space-time in a field of perception shared by signer and addressee (though clearly perceived from different angles). The spatial orientation and the shared perception increase the potential for iconicity in the expression; Johnston (1992) points out: "Despite an oral-aural language being suited to iconically encode sounds, the fact that our experience as a whole is visual, temporal and spatial means that a language which has itself visual and temporal resources for representation has greater means than an auditory one to map onto itself those very visual and spatial qualities of the world it wishes to represent."

The Parallelism Of Semantics And Phonology

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 30):

The phonological representations are still abstract; they have to be manifested in bodily movements — in the ongoing movement of the parameters of the articulatory system. The sound system thus categorises bodily processes; and in this respect, it is similar to the semantic system: both are ways of construing human experience. Meaning is thus represented by modes of organisation that are similar to its own.

The Relation Between Content And Expression

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 29-30):

Grammatical representations are in turn represented in linguistic expressions — prototypically, in sounding. Here the relationship is more complex than it is between semantics and grammar, in that it is both natural and conventional. 

In the interpersonal and textual domains of content, it is often natural: thus interpersonal content tends to be represented prosodically by movements or variant levels in pitch, and textual content tends to be represented by prominence achieved phonologically (e.g. by the major pitch movement in an intonation contour) or sequentially (e.g. by using distance from initial position in the clause as a scale of prominence). 

In the ideational domain, the representation is usually conventional; but, even here there is a relationship of analogy, where we find in the sounding modes of organisation similar to those of wording (and therefore of meaning). 

Systemically, we find that the system construes a phonetic space — notably the vowel space; and that this provides a model for semantic space. 

Structurally, we find that sound is structured both as chains of segments (e.g. rhythmic units interpreted as syllable complexes) and as configurations of segmental constituents (e.g. syllables interpreted as configurations of phonemes).

Blogger Comments:

This is clearly Matthiessen, rather than Halliday. For Halliday, the natural relation between semantics and grammar is between meaning (e.g. participant) and grammatical form (e.g. nominal group). To be consistent with Halliday's formulation, the relation between grammar and phonology is the conventional relation between grammatical form (clause, group, etc.) and phonology (tone group, foot, etc.), where relations can not be said to be natural. (If the relations were natural, the phonological expressions of all languages would considerably more similar than they are.)

However, Matthiessen switches track in this exposition from the relation between the grammatical stratum and the phonological stratum to the relation between the content plane and the expression plane, where relations between interpersonal and textual meanings and prosodic phonology can be said to be natural.

The Natural (Non-Arbitrary) Relation Of Semantics To Grammatical Form

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 29):

… the realisation in lexicogrammar, is natural, in the sense of being nonarbitrary: for example, the grammatical constituency structure of a clause provides a natural representation of the semantic configuration of a process, participants and circumstances. By attending to grammatical representations, we can thus learn a good deal about the more abstract organisation of meaning at the higher stratum of semantics. We can learn about the different modes of meaning — logical, experiential, interpersonal, and textual — by exploring their different modes of representation in the grammar — chaining, constituency, prosody, and wave. Grammar is thus a hybrid system for representing meaning in the sense of embodying different modes of representation; but it is this that allows it to maintain a natural relationship with respect to semantics, with each mode of representation realising a different mode of meaning.

The Paradigmatic Orientation Of SFL Theory

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 28):

A functional grammatics thus allows us to approach semantics from a deeper and more wide-angled perspective. To this general property, systemic functional grammar adds another characteristic— its paradigmatic orientation. For instance, while more formally oriented accounts may approach transitivity patterns essentially in terms of sequences of grammatical classes such as 'nominal group + verb (+ nominal group)' and speak of classes of verb followed by one nominal group ('mono-transitive') or two nominal groups ('di-transitive'), a systemic grammar interprets such sequences in terms of systems of distinct and contrasting process types.

The Gateway To Semantics Is The Clause Rather Than The Word

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 28):

The gateway to semantics is the clause rather than the word. Consequently, grammatical categories will typically be interpreted 'from above', within their context in the clause or the group, rather than 'from below' within their context in the word. This has rather far-reaching consequences for the understanding of the semantic systems realised by the grammar. Systems that are approached 'from above' in this way include:

projection — clause complex: traditionally a form of 'subordination' within clause; reinterpreted as distinction between hypotaxis in clause complex vs. rankshift in clause, laying the foundation for a semantic distinction between reports and facts.

transitivity — clause: traditionally a word category, transitive = verb taking object/ intransitive = verb not taking object; reinterpreted as (i) process types (material/ mental/ verbal/ relational) and (ii) an ergative system (middle/ effective) in the clause.

tense — group: traditionally a mixture, because the model was taken over from Latin with richer word-rank realisations than English, but more recently in this century often a word category, past/ non-past; reinterpreted (relative to this) as (i) past/ present/ future and (ii) recursive, with secondary tense.

Taking the clause as starting point facilitates the exploration of cryptotypes: the chain of realisation often starts cryptotypically in the clause, whereas the final stages of realisation at word and morpheme rank are more oven — although, as noted in connection with tense and number, the oven marking is seldom the only factor involved.

Reactance

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 27-8):

The concept of reactance is particularly significant for our purposes where it involves a relationship between an ideational category and features of other metafunctions, interpersonal or textual. For instance, the interpersonal grammar provides for participants, within the ideational dimension of the clause, to function as Subjects; but this potential is not in general open to circumstances, and this is a principal reason for distinguishing these two classes within the ideational metafunction. Among reactances from the interpersonal and textual components of the grammar, we could mention the following:

interpersonal:

can/ cannot serve as Subject

can/ cannot serve as 'focus' of alternative question

can/ cannot serve as Wh element

textual:

can/ cannot serve as Theme

can/ cannot serve as 'focus' of theme predication (it is... that...)

can/ cannot be presumed by substitution/ ellipsis

Examples Of Cryptotypes (Cryptoclasses And Cryptosystems)

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 27):

There are many examples of cryptotypes in this sense, both as classes and as systems (i.e., cryptoclasses and cryptosystems), in our ideational semantics. For example:

process types: doing & happening/ sensing/ saying/ being & having
transitivity model: ergative/ transitive
projections: locutions/ ideas
expansions: elaboration/ extension/ enhancement
number: plural/ non-plural; singular/ non-singular

Overt Categories (Phenotypes) vs Covert Categories (Cryptotypes)

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 26-7):

The understanding of covert categories in the grammar is due to Whorf (1956: 88 ff), who made the distinction between overt categories or phenotypes and covert categories or cryptotypes; he is worth quoting at some length:

An overt category is a category having a formal mark which is present (with only infrequent exceptions) in every sentence containing a member of the category. The mark need not be part of the same word to which the category may be said to be attached in a paradigmatic sense; i.e. it need not be a suffix, prefix, vowel change, or other 'inflection', but may be a detached word or a certain patterning of the whole sentence. ...

A covert category is marked, whether morphemically or by sentence pattern, only in certain types of sentence and not in every sentence in which a word or element belonging to the category occurs. The class membership of the word is not apparent until there is a question of using it or referring to it in one of these special types of sentence, and then we find that this word belongs to a class requiring some sort of distinctive treatment, which may even be the negative treatment of excluding that type of sentence. This distinctive treatment we may call the reactance of the category. ... 

A covert category may also be termed a cryptotype, a name which calls attention to the rather hidden, cryptic nature of such word-groups, especially when they are not strongly contrasted in idea, nor marked by frequently occurring reactances such as pronouns. They easily escape notice and may be hard to define, and yet may have profound influence on linguistic behaviour. ... Names of countries and cities in English form a cryptotype with the reactance that they are not referred to by personal pronouns as objects of the prepositions 'in, at, to, from'. We can say 'I live in Boston' but not 'That's Boston — I live in it'.

Traditional Grammar vs Functional Grammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 26 , 28):

In traditional grammar, only certain grammatical categories were taken into consideration; these categories were (i) overt and (ii) word-based. In particular, inflectional categories of the word such as tense, case, and number were described and then interpreted semantically. In a functional grammar, while such categories are not ignored, they tend to play a less significant role, appearing at the end point of realisational chains. 

For instance, it is not possible to base a functional interpretation of number in English simply on the presence or absence of 'plural' as a nominal suffix (as in grammar+s); the category of number is rather more complex, involving two complementary systems (see Halliday, 1985: 161-2). 

Similarly, the general properties of the construal of time embodied in the English tense system are not revealed by only looking at the overt suffixal past tense marker- (as in laugh+ed); again the scope of the semantics of tense in English is far greater than this oven word category would suggest (see Halliday, 1985: 182-4; Matthiessen, 1996). In general our move into semantics from grammar differs from the traditional one along the following lines.

(i) We consider not only overt categories but also covert ones. …

(ii) The gateway to semantics is the clause rather than the word.

Why Semantics Is Not A Relabelling Of Lexicogrammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 26):

Thus when we move from the lexicogrammar into the semantics, as we are doing here, we are not simply relabelling everything in a new terminological guise. We shall stress the fundamental relationship between (say) clause complex in the grammar and sequence in the semantics, precisely because the two originate as one: a theory of logical relationships between processes. But, as we have shown, what makes such a theory (i.e. an ideation base as the construal of experience) possible is that it is a stratal construction that can also be deconstructed, every such occasion being a gateway to the creation of further meanings which reconstrue in new and divergent ways. Thus a sequence is not 'the same thing as' a clause complex; if it was, language would not be a dynamic open system of the kind that it is. This issue will be foregrounded particularly in our discussion of grammatical metaphor.

Every Scientific Theory Is A Stratal-Semiotic System

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 25):

Every scientific theory is itself a stratal-semiotic system, in which the relation among the different levels of abstraction is one of realisation. This is to be expected, since all such theories are modelled on natural language in the first place; and, as we have seen, the semantics of natural language is itself a theory of daily experience.

Realisation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 25):

We have retained the term 'realisation' to refer to the interstratal relationship between the semantics and the lexicogrammar: the lexicogrammar 'realises' the semantics, the semantics 'is realised by' the grammar. … In any strata! system (i.e. any system where there are two strata such that one is the realisation of the other) there is no temporal or causal ordering between the strata. It makes no sense to ask which comes first or which causes which. That would be like taking an expression such as x = 2 and asking which existed first, the x or the 2, or which caused the other to come into being (it is not like the chicken and the egg, which are temporally ordered even though in a cycle). There is a sense in which realisation is the analogue, in semiotic systems, of cause-&-effect in physical systems; but it is a relationship among levels of meaning and not among sequences of events, … the relationship is an intensive one, not a causal circumstantial one.

Blogger Comments:

This unexplained analogy is potentially misleading, given that the identifying relation between strata is intensive (elaborating), not circumstantial (enhancing: causal).

One possible explanation is that, as an identifying relation, if semantic values are encoded by reference to lexicogrammatical tokens, the lexicogrammar serves as the agent (causal participant) of the identifying process, with semantics as the medium through which the process unfolds. And this is essentially Halliday & Matthiessen's theoretical method: construing a semantics by reference to the lexicogrammar.

However, whether this is what Halliday & Matthiessen mean by this unexplained analogy is anyone's guess.

Semantics Unfolds By Semogenic Principles In Three Semohistories

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 25):

Thus an interpretation of semantics must account not merely for the system at some particular point in its evolution but also for the processes by which it got there and the changes that will shape it in the future. As far as text is concerned, the changes in semantic styling that take place in the course of a text cannot be dismissed as simply ad hoc devices for making the text shorter (or longer!), more interesting or whatever, they should be seen as the operation of general semogenic principles in the specific context which is engendering and being engendered by that text.

The Interaction Between Recycling Meanings And Constructing New Ones

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 24):

Of course, not every instance of the use of language involves the creation of new meanings. The greater part of most discourse consists of wordings which have been constructed on countless previous occasions — in the language, in the individual, and even in the course of the text. When we come across the sentence Rain is expected in the northern part of the region, falling as snow over high ground we recognise probably all of it as something that is ready to hand: not only has it occurred in the English language many times before, but the same writer has probably written it many times before, and many of these instances could be seen as forming part of the same discourse (that is, day-by-day weather reports in a sense constitute one continuous text). The storing of meanings for repetitive use and reuse is just as important as the potential for creating new ones. 

The production of discourse by an individual speaker or writer can be seen as a dialectic between these two semiotic activities: between 

(i) recycling elements, figures and sequences that that individual has used many times before, and so for him or her are already fully codified, and  

(ii) constructing new ones that are being codified for the first time (and some of which may remain codified for future use — especially with a child who is learning the system).

Codifying As Generalisation: Syntagmatic Compacting vs Paradigmatic Condensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 24):

In general the process of creating meaning involves constructing some kind of lexicogrammatical generalisation — some form of wording that is in some respect unique. It is not possible to quantify the degree to which any semantic feature or domain has been codified at any one moment in semohistory; but meanings that are more highly codified are those that have been to a greater extent condensed and/or compacted, where 'compacting' is generalising on the syntagmatic axis (e.g. animal that has four legs > quadruped), while 'condensing' is generalising on the paradigmatic axis (forming into a system at some point along the scale of delicacy). The evolution of language (i.e. of specific languages in their various registers), the learning of language by children, and the production of language in the form of discourse constitute the historical contexts in which meanings are continuously being created along these lines.

Codifying: From Grammaticalisation To Lexicalisation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 23-4):

This process of codifying may take place at any point along the cline from grammar to lexis, from grammaticalisation at one end (cf. Hopper & Traugott, 1993) to lexicalisation at the other. Perhaps the most highly coded meanings are those which are fully grammaticalised: that is, organised into grammatical systems, such as tense and polarity in English. This does not mean that they must be overtly signalled in syntax or morphology; some of them are, but others are uncovered only through systematic analysis, such as the different types of process configurations in English.

Lexicalisation may take the form of the instantaneous creation of new lexicalised meanings; like sputnik in 1958 or gazumping sometime in the seventies. But more often it is the end point of a process of lexical compacting, as in the example of quadruped above. Since lexicalised meanings do not form clearly defined and bounded systems in the way that grammaticalised ones do, we might consider meanings of this kind less highly codified, although the process of codification is the same in both cases.

Somewhere between the two extremes of grammar and lexis we may recognise the emergence of distinct grammatical structures and lexical classes. In the course of the history of English the meaning 'it is precipitating' became highly codified, in that types of precipitation came to be lexicalised as verbs (rain, hail snow, sleet, thunder, lighten) in a unique class having no participants associated with it e.g., it's raining, where the it functions as Subject but has no role in transitivity. (Note humorous back-formation on model of Actor-Process: What's it doing ?—Raining.)

Codifying Example

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 23):

Consider a series of examples such as the following:

What happens here is that a meaning has gradually crystallised, as it were, out of the total meaning potential of the system so that it can be deployed in codified form instead of being constructed afresh each time. In an animal that has four legs, each of the component elements animal four & legs is codified separately, as are the various grammatical relations involved; but the complex is not codified as a whole. When we come to quadruped, it is. Again, this codifying progression takes place in all the three dimensions of history: quadruped evolves later in the system, is learnt later by a child, and typically at least appears later in the text (cf. an animal that has four legs is called a quadruped).

Codifying

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 22-3):

Semogenic processes of the kinds just described take place in all three dimensions of semohistory: as the system of language evolves, as children develop their language, and as the language of a text unfolds. Hence language embodies the potential for its own ongoing expansion; and since the system at any moment is the repository of its own history, we can sometimes recognise disjunctions or interstices that offer a likely context for new meanings to appear. For example, the 'double -ing ' form of the English verb, which has recently been establishing itself (e.g. being raining, as in it seemed better to stay at home with it being raining), could have been predicted from a knowledge of the present state and recent history of the tense system. A change of this kind will propagate steadily throughout the system: sometimes very rapidly, but more often in an irregular and rather uneven flow.

Let us refer to this process as that of codifying, noting that as always it is at once both semantic and lexicogrammatical: there is no implication that meanings are already there and waiting to be codified.

Semogenic Processes And Markedness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 22):

Typically processes of this type leave their traces in the form of marking, as marked/unmarked oppositions. The original member of the set remains the unmarked one. (One could say 'the unmarked term in the system'; but this formulation assumes that the offspring combine with the parent to form a system. Sometimes they do, but not always.) In these first set of examples, the unmarked mapping is that of participant ^ noun; when the noun realises some other element in the figure, it is a marked variant (grammatical metaphor). Presumably many 'unmarked' variants originate in this way, although in most instances we no longer have the evidence which would enable us to judge.

Deconstructing The Two Components Of The Sign: The Dissociation Of Associated Features In Wording

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 21-2):

A common variant of this process is that of the dissociation of associated features in the wording. We could represent this as:

Here again one meaning has been replaced by three: we now have (say) question₁ ↘ interrogative x rising tone, question₂ ↘ interrogative x falling tone, and question₃ ↘ declarative x rising tone, e.g. is she cóming? is she còming? she's cóming?

Expanding Meaning Potential: Deconstructing The Two Components Of The Sign

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 20-1):

(iii) There is also a third kind of semogenic process which arises from the nature of the sign itself. Our "sign" is not the Saussurean sign: we are not talking about the relationship between a word and its phonological representation (between content and expression, in Hjelmsiev's terms). The relationship is within the content plane, between a meaning and a wording — the non-arbitrary relationship between the system of semantics and the system of lexicogrammar.

This process, then, takes the form of deconstructing the two components of the sign. How is this possible? This can happen because, once a 'pair' of this kind has come into being, each component takes on an existence of its own. To pursue the example of the complex 'participant ^ noun' above: the category of 'participant becomes detached from that of noun, so that we can have participants realised by other things than nouns, and nouns realising other things than participants.

We now have three meanings instead of one: participants constructed by nouns, as hitherto, but now contrasting (a) with participants constructed by something other than nouns, and (b) with nouns constructing something other than participants. (Of course, neither of these two entails the other; there might be just many to one, not many to many. To take this actual example, there are many cases of nouns realising things other than participants; but relatively few cases of participants being realised otherwise than by a noun.)

Expanding Meaning Potential: Elaborating A Semiotic Domain In Delicacy

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 20):

(ii) Secondly, we may expand the meaning potential by increasing the semantic delicacy; for example

Here the semiotic domain has not been extended but rather has been brought into sharper focus, so that further shades of meaning are differentiated. A finer grid has been applied to the given semantic space.

Expanding Meaning Potential: Extending The System By Constructing New Semiotic Domains

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 19-20):

Suppose we now consider the semogenic processes whereby this potential expands. (i) We may, for example, construe new participants by creating new thing/name complexes: thus

Of course, the 'thing' may have been 'there' all along but it is only newly observed and semanticised:

Here we are extending the system by constructing new semiotic domains.

Wordings And Meanings Emerge Together

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 18-9):

In all these histories, the wordings and the meanings emerge together. The relationship is that of the two sides of the Stoic-Saussurean sign — best represented, perhaps, in the familiar Chinese figure yin & yang (which is in fact just that, a representation of the sign):

Thus, to return to our earlier illustration of the noun: what evolved, in the history of the system, was an entity on the content plane which had a structure as follows:

The relationship between the two sides of the sign is that of realisation: thus the meaning 'participant in a process: conscious or non-conscious being' is realised as the wording (class of wording) 'noun'.

Blogger Comments:

The dualities associated with yin & yang are of the same level of symbolic abstraction, whereas the Stoic-Saussurean sign involves two different levels of symbolic abstraction.

The Three Semohistories Related

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 18):

These are the three major processes of semohistory, by which meanings at continually created, transmitted, recreated, extended and changed Each one provides the environment within which the 'next' takes place, in the order in which we have presented them; and, conversely, each one provides the material out of which the previous one is constructed: see Figure 1-6.

As the upward pointing arrow suggests, the individual's (transfinite) meaning potential is constructed out of (finite) instances of text; the (transfinite) meaning potential of the species is constructed out of (finite) instances of individual 'meaners'. 

Following the downward arrow, the system of the language (the meaning potential of the species) provides the environment in which the individual's meaning emerges; the meaning potential of the individual provides the environment within which the meaning of the text emerges.

The sense in which grammar is said to construe experience will be somewhat different in each of these three time frames.

The Three Time Frames Of Semogenic Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 17-8):

We need, therefore, a further guiding principle in the form of some model of the processes by which meaning, and particular meanings, are created; let us call these semogenic processes. Since these processes take place through time, we need to identify the time frames, of which there are (at least) three.

(i) First, there is the evolution of human language (and of particular languages as manifestations of this). Known histories represent a small fraction of the total time scale of this evolution, perhaps 0.1%; they become relevant only where particular aspects of this evolutionary change have taken place very recently, e.g. the evolution of scientific discourse. This is the phylogenetic time frame.

(ii) Secondly, there is the development of the individual speaker (speaking subject). A speaker's history may — like that of the biological individual — recapitulate some of the evolutionary progression along epigenetic lines. But the individual experience is one of growth, not evolution, and follows the typical cycle of growth, maturation and decay. This is the ontogenetic time frame.

(iii) Thirdly, there is the unfolding of the act of meaning itself: the instantial construction of meaning in the form of a text. This is a stochastic process in which the potential for creating meaning is continually modified in the light of what has gone before; certain options are restricted or disfavoured, while others are emprobabled or opened up. We refer to this as the logogenetic time frame, using logo(s) in its original sense of 'discourse'.

SFL Takes A Constructivist View Of Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 17):

In what we have said so far we could seem to be taking an 'essentialist' or 'correspondence' approach to grammar and meaning, according to which 'meaning' preexists the forms in which it is 'encoded' (cf. Lakoff's, 1988, argument against the 'objectifying' view of meaning). In such a view, the grammar is said to be natural because it evolves to serve an already developed model of experience, a "real world" that has previously been construed. 

In fact we are not taking an 'essentialist' or 'correspondence' approach, and there will be many places throughout our discussion where such an interpretation is clearly ruled out, as being incompatible with our own conception of semantics. 

The view we are adopting is a constructivist one, familiar from European linguistics in the work of Hjelmslev and Firth. According to this view, it is the grammar itself that construes experience, that constructs for us our world of events and objects. As Hjelmslev (1943) said, reality is unknowable; the only things that are known are our construals of it — that is, meanings. Meanings do not 'exist' before the wordings that realise them. They are formed out of the impact between our consciousness and its environment.

The SFL Construal Of Ideational Semantics From The Grammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 16):

We are also constructing meaning out of the grammar. But there are two significant differences.

(i) One is that we are not starting from the word, but from larger units of grammatical organisation: clauses and clause complexes (sentences) — the largest units, in fact, that are constructed on grammatical principles.

(ii) The other is that we are starting not from the overt categories and markers of the grammar, like case and case inflexions, but from the often covert, cryptogrammatical relations that are less immediately accessible to conscious reflection yet constitute the real foundation on which the grammar construes the world of our experience.

The History Of Construing Semantics From The Grammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 15-6):

In approaching the semantic environment from within grammar, as opposed to approaching it from some postulated cognitive or conceptual plane (i.e. in constructing it as meaning rather than as knowing), we are following the principle from which semantics first evolved in western thought. By the time of Aristotle there had emerged the grammatical concept of a word, and of word classes; for example, 'noun'. This concept was born in the work of the Sophists, in their study of rhetoric, out of the dialectic between form and function. A noun was that 'about which something is said', thus embodying the functional concept of a syntactic (Theme-Rheme) structure; and that  'which inflects for number and case but not for gender', embodying the formal concept of a morphological (case and number) paradigm. The category of noun once established, the question arises of why does a noun appear sometimes in singular sometimes in plural number, sometimes in nominative sometimes in accusative, genitive or dative case? These questions are answered with semantic explanations: a noun is the name of a person, other living creature or inanimate object; a noun is in the plural if it refers to more than one of these entities; it is in the nominative case if it refers to the 'doer' in some kind of action, the accusative if it refers to the 'done-to', and so on. The semantics was construed by exegesis out of the grammar: both the general conception of meaning as a linguistic phenomenon and the specific meanings that were constructed by words, their classes and their variants.

Two Corollaries Of Using A Functional Grammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 15):

We have mentioned two corollaries of using a functional grammar. One was that the grammar is 'natural': that is, the forms of the grammar are non-autonomous, non-arbitrary in their relation to meaning. The other was that the grammar is explained in functional terms: specifically, in systemic grammar, in terms of the interaction among various functional constructions of meaning or 'metafunctions': ideational, interpersonal, and textual.

Delicacy And Stratal Realisation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 15):

The more general semantic potential is realised by selections in the grammar; but as we move towards the more delicate part of the ideation base, we come to types of phenomenon that are realised primarily by lexical means.

Delicacy Vs Instantiation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 15):

Note that it is important to keep delicacy and instantiation distinct. … The difference is essentially that between being a type of x (delicacy) and being a token of x (instantiation). Both may be construed by intensive ascription.

The Overall Dimensions Of The Ideation Base: Delicacy x Instantiation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 14, 15):

 

In general, the ideation base can thus be thought of as a large semantic 'space' organised in terms of these two basic dimensions: see Figure 1-5 above.

The Dimension Of Instantiation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 14):

The ideation base has one other primary dimension, that of instantiation. The ideation base is not just a repository of particular facts and other instantial meanings but also a systemic network of meaning potential. For any given domain the ideation base incorporates not only the known particulars of that domain but also the resources necessary for assimilating new information. Instantiation refers to the move from the semantic potential within the general system to instances of this potential within a particular text (cf. Halliday, 1973, 1977, 1992). Intermediate between these two on the instantiation cline are patterns of instantiation that recur in particular situation types — semantic domains located within the overall meaning potential as situated variants of it.

The Global Organisation Of The Ideation Base

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 14):

The distinction between paradigmatic organisation and syntagmatic organisation opens up one dimension of the ideation base. As we have said, syntagmatic specifications occur in paradigmatic environments, as realisations of paradigmatic types. But the global organisation of the ideation base is paradigmatic; the paradigmatic network is ordered in delicacy (subsumption, classification, specialisation), from the least delicate (most general) to the most delicate (most specific types).

The Relation Of Paradigmatic To Syntagmatic Modes Of Construal

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 13):

We have said that the ideation base is a resource for construing our experience of the world. Such construal is both paradigmatic and syntagmatic. (i) In paradigmatic construal, we construe a phenomenon as being of some particular type — some selection from a set of potential types. The ideation base is in fact organised as a network of inter-related types of phenomena, (ii) In syntagmatic construal, we construe a phenomenon as having some particular composition — as consisting of parts in some structural configuration.

For example, if some phenomenon is construed as belonging to the type 'creative doing', it will configure as an Actor, a Process, and a Goal which is brought into existence through the actualisation of the Process, These two modes of construal are related: on the one hand, syntagmatic organisation realises paradigmatic organisation; on the other hand, types in the network of paradigmatic organisation correspond to fragments of syntagmatic specification — this is one way in which such types are differentiated.

The Clause Complex As Defining The Scope Of Ideational Semantics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 13):

Since our approach is via the grammar, we have taken the boundaries of the grammar as criterial, using the clause complex — the highest rank of ideational organisation — to define the scope of the ideational-semantic representation. This is not a necessary constraint; but it is one that is clearly motivated in terms of the overall design, and which may turn out to define the optimal moment of interfacing between the ideational and the other components. This will depend on subsequent work on the text base and the interaction base. The constraint does not imply, however, that the scope of ideational semantics does not extend over sequences longer than a clause complex.

'Pragmatics' Viewed Through SFL Theory

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 12):

There is no separate component of "pragmatics" within our interpretative frame. Since it emerged as a distinct field of scholarly activity, pragmatics has by and large been associated with two aspects of language. 

On the one hand, it has dealt with those aspects of the meaning of a text which depend on specific instances — particulars of the situation and of the interactants, and inferences drawn from these. But just as, in grammatics, we do not distinguish between the grammar of the system and the grammar of the instance — a systemic theory is a theory of both, and necessarily (therefore) of the relationship between them — so in semantics we would not want to separate the system from its instantiation in text. In this aspect, pragmatics appears as another name for the semantics of instances. 

And on the other hand, pragmatics has served as an alternative term for the interpersonal and textual domains of semantics. Here the distinction that is being labelled is one of metafunction, not of instantiation; but it seems undesirable to obscure the relationship between ideational meaning on the one hand and interpersonal and textual meaning on the other hand by locating them within different disciplines.

The Three Meaning Bases In Relation To The Metafunctional Components Of The Grammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 12, 13):

The three bases are shown in relation to the metafunctional components of the grammar (at the rank of clause) in Figure 1-4. Here the three bases are shown as different metafunctional domains within the overall meaning base, with the textual one as internal to the meaning base and oriented towards both the ideation base and the interaction base.

The Text Base

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 12):

The text base provides the resources that enable the speaker to produce contextualised discourse and to guide the listener in interpreting it. These include resources for engendering a wide variety of diverse rhetorical structures, for differentiating among the different values and statuses of the components of the unfolding text, and for ongoingly expanding the text so as to create and maintain the semiotic flow.

The Interaction Base: Dialogic Exchange & Social Personæ

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 11-2):

The interaction base provides the resources for speaker and listener to enact a social and intersubjective relationship, through the assignment of discursive roles, the expression of evaluations and attitudes. The base includes both the semantic strategies speaker and listener deploy in dialogic exchanges and the social personæ of the interactants. This second component is a model of the interpersonal and ideational distance between speaker and listener.

The Ideation Base

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 11):

The ideational semantic resources construe our experience of the world that is around us and inside us. The phenomena of our experience are construed as units of meaning that can be ranked into hierarchies and organised into networks of semantic types. The units of meaning are structured as configurations of functions (rôles) at different ranks in the hierarchy. For instance, figures are configurations consisting of elements — a process, participants and circumstances; these figures are differentiated into a small number of general types — figures of doing & happening, of sensing, of saying, and of being & having.

Metafunctional Meaning Bases

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 11):

… the present book is concerned with just one portion of the higher-level environment of the grammar, that having to do with the ideational metafunction. In other words, we are concerned with that portion of the semantics which "controls" the ideational systems in the grammar, primarily, that of transitivity in the clause and those of projection and expansion in the clause complex. Transitivity is the grammar of processes: actions and events, mental processes and relations. It is that part of grammar which constitutes a theory of "goings-on". Projection and expansion are the fundamental relations between processes: this is the part of the grammar that constitutes a theory of how one happening may be related to another. Thus our aim is towards a general ideational semantics. We may call this the ideational meaning base, or ideation base for short. It is complemented by meaning bases supporting the other two metafunctions — the interaction base (supporting the interpersonal metafunction) and the text base (supporting the textual metafunction).

Blogger Comments:

The term 'controls' is in scare quotes because the theoretical relation between semantics and grammar is not enhancement (cause), but elaboration (intensive identification).

Grammatical Syntagm, Rank Scale & Rankshift

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 9-10):

[A] sequence of classes is called a syntagm to distinguish it from the (function) structure. It specifies constraints on the units serving within the clause — the units on the rank below the clause on the grammatical rank scale. The rank scale determines the overall constituency potential in the grammar: in English, clauses consist of groups (/ phrases), groups consist of words, and words consist of morphemes. The units below the clause on the rank scale are all groups (nominal, verbal adverbial, etc.) or phrases (prepositional phrases), or else clauses that are shifted downwards on the rank scale to serve as if they were groups or phrases. Such down-ranking is known as rankshift. This has the powerful effect of expanding the resources of grammar by allowing the meaning potential of a higher-ranking unit to enrich that of a unit of lower rank.

Semantic Counterparts Of The Clause: Figure, Move & Message

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 8-9):

Ideationally, a clause construes experience by categorising and configuring it as a figure. …Interpersonally, the clause enacts a relationship between speaker and addressee as a move in a potential exchange … Textually, the clause presents the ideational and interpersonal information as a message — a contribution to the text evolving in its context.

The Metafunctional Diversification Of The Content Plane

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 7-8):

The content plane of a natural language is functionally diverse: it extends over a spectrum of three distinct modes of meaning, ideational, interpersonal and textual. These highly generalised functions of the linguistic system are referred to in our theory as metafunctions. The ideational metafunction is concerned with construing experience — it is language as a theory of reality, as a resource for reflecting on the world. The interpersonal metafunction is concerned with enacting interpersonal relations through language, with the adoption and assignment of speech roles, with the negotiation of attitudes, and so on — it is language in the praxis of intersubjectivity, as a resource for interacting with others. The textual metafunction is an enabling one; it is concerned with organising ideational and interpersonal meaning as discourse — as meaning that is contextualised and shared. But this does not mean processing some preexisting body of information; rather it is the ongoing creation of a semiotic realm of reality.

Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 7):

One essential task for our semantics is that of modelling a particular phenomenon of the content plane that is known as grammatical metaphor. This is the phenomenon whereby a set of agnate (related) forms is present in the language having different mappings between the semantic and the grammatical categories, for example:

alcohol's dulling effect on the brain

alcohol has a dulling effect on the brain

alcohol has the effect of dulling the brain

alcohol affects the brain by dulling it

the effect of alcohol is to dull the brain

the effect of alcohol is to make the brain dull

if one takes/drinks alcohol it makes the brain dull

if one takes/drinks alcohol the/one's brain becomes dull &c.

Since this phenomenon of grammatical metaphor is fundamental to adult uses of language, we shall take it as a central thrust of our book. One way in which we shall seek to demonstrate the validity and power of a semantic approach is by using it to handle grammatical metaphor, and to show how this pervasive aspect of the lexicogrammar expands the potential of the meaning base.

A Model Of Semantics Developed From A Functional, Semantically Motivated Grammatics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 6-7):

Thus we can say that a grammatics is a theory of grammar, while a grammar is (among other things) a theory of experience. But to show that a grammar is a theory of experience we use a functional, semantically motivated grammatics, since this allows us to seek explanations of the form of the grammar in terms of the functions to which language is adapted. But this closeness of fit between the semantics (i.e. the meaning) and the grammar does not mean that our grammatics can take over the semantic domain. Adopting a functional approach enables us to extend the domain of grammar in significant ways in the direction of semantics — not thereby reducing the scope of the semantics but rather enabling us to investigate how experience is construed in semantic terms — to develop the "meaning base" model that is the topic of the present book.

Grammar vs Grammatics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 6):

There is a warning to be issued in connection with the term "grammar". It is not uncommon in English for the same word to stand both for a phenomenon itself and for the study of that phenomenon. For example, "psychology" is used to mean both the study of the "psyche" and the psyche itself (so "feminine psychology" means women's psychic make-up, not theories of psychology developed by women scholars). In linguistics, while we do distinguish "language" (the phenomenon) from "linguistics" (the study of the phenomenon), we fail to make such a distinction with the word "grammar", which means both the grammar of a language and the study of grammar. To avoid such pathological ambiguity, we find it helpful to refer to the study of grammar by a special name, grammatics. We will use this term from time to time in order to make it quite clear that we are talking about the model, the theory used to interpret the phenomenon, and not the phenomenon itself.

Thus we can say that a grammatics is a theory of grammar, while a grammar is (among other things) a theory of experience. But to show that a grammar is a theory of experience we use a functional, semantically motivated grammatics, since this allows us to seek explanations of the form of the grammar in terms of the functions to which language is adapted. But this closeness of fit between the semantics (i.e. the meaning) and the grammar does not mean that our grammatics can take over the semantic domain.

Lexicogrammar: The Complementarity Of Grammar And Lexis

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 5-6):

A word needs to be said here about the interpretation of the term "grammar" itself. As used in systemic theory, this term stands for lexicogrammar. The lexical region, or lexis, is not a separate component, but simply the most "delicate" end of the (unified) lexicogrammar. There is a complementarity here. Lexis and grammar are not two different phenomena; they are different ways looking at the same phenomenon. Some aspects of this phenomenon of "wording" in language are foregrounded by viewing it as grammar, others by viewing it as lexis.

Three Strata Differentiated According To Order Of Abstraction

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 4-5):

Language, therefore, is a resource organised into three strata differentiated according to order of abstraction. These strata are related by means of realisation. Semantics, or the system of meaning, is realised by lexicogrammar, or the system of wording (that is, grammatical structures and lexical items); and lexicogrammar is realised by phonology, or the system of sounding. [This is the traditional formulation; more properly: semantics is realised by the realisation of lexicogrammar in phonology.]

For instance, a sequence of figures (a sequence of configurations of processes with participants and attendant circumstances) at the level of semantics is realised by a complex of clauses at the level of grammar; this, in turn, has its own realisation in the phonology — for example, a particular complex of clauses might be realised by a particular sequence of tones (pitch contours).

Between lexicogrammar and phonology runs the line of symbolic arbitrariness: prototypically the relation between these two levels is conventional, whereas that between semantics and lexicogrammar is prototypically natural. What this means is that experience is construed twice in the content plane, once semantically and once lexicogrammatically. The ideational meaning base that we are concerned with in this book is a construct that is 'located' within the semantic system — that is, at the highest level — and realised in the lexicogrammar.

Language As A Tri-Stratal System

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 4, 5):

We might refer to the Hjelmslevian notion of the "content plane" as incorporating both a grammar and a semantics (e.g., Hjelmslev, 1943). Grammar and semantics are the two strata or levels of content in the three-level systemic theory of language, and they are related in a natural, non-arbitrary way. The third level is the level of expression, either phonology or graphology. We can draw this model of language as in Figure 1-1. 

Here the relationship is not one of 'consists of or 'is a subset of: the concentric cotangential circles show the stratal environment of each level — thus lexicogrammar appears in the environment of semantics and provides the environment for phonology. This ordering of levels is known as stratification. We have used circles for all three levels to represent the fact that they are all based on the same fundamental principles of organisation: each level is a network of inter-related options, either in meaning, wording or sounding, which are realised as structures, based on the principle of rank.

A Systemic Grammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 3-4):

A systemic grammar is one of the class of functional grammars, which means (among other things) that it is semantically motivated, or "natural". In contradistinction to formal grammars, which are autonomous, and therefore semantically arbitrary, in a systemic grammar every category (and "category" is used here in the general sense of an organising theoretical concept, not in the narrower sense of 'class' as in formal grammars) is based on meaning: it has a semantic as well as a formal, lexicogrammatical reactance. [The reactance of a category is its distinctive treatment.]

Looked at from the formal angle, of course, this means that it is likely to appear complex; many of the categories are "cryptotypic", manifested only through a long chain of realisations (a "realisational chain"). Hence it takes a long time and a great deal of effort to get such a grammar off the ground in any context (such as natural language processing) requiring total explicitness. Once airborne, however, because it is semantically natural it has considerable potential as the basis on which to represent higher level organisation — provided, that is, such organisation is interpreted in linguistic terms, as meaning rather than as knowledge.

Language As The Foundation Of Human Experience, And Meaning As The Essential Mode Of Higher-Order Human Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 3):

Thus "knowledge" and "meaning" are not two distinct phenomena; they are different metaphors for the same phenomenon, approaching it with a different orientation and different assumptions. But in almost all recent work in this area, the cognitive approach has predominated, with language treated as a kind of code in which pre-existing conceptual structures are more or less distortedly expressed. We hope here to give value to the alternative viewpoint, in which language is seen as the foundation of human experience, and meaning as the essential mode of higher-order human consciousness. This may have more to offer both in theoretical power and in relation to the many practical tasks for which we need to engage with "knowledge". What we are doing is mapping back on to language those patterns that were themselves linguistic in their origin.

Defining Experience In Linguistic Terms

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 3):

This suggests that it should be possible to build outwards from the grammar, making the explicit assumption that the (abstract structure of) categories and relations needed for modelling and interpreting any domain of experience will be derivable from those of language. Our contention is that there is no ordering of experience other than the ordering given to it by language. We could in fact define experience in Linguistic terms: experience is the reality that we construe for ourselves by means of language.

The Knowledge Enshrined In A Particular Discipline

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 3):

Hence when we consider the knowledge enshrined in a particular discipline, we understand this by examining the language of the discipline — the particular ways of meaning that it has evolved. The most obvious example is perhaps that of scientific taxonomies; but aspects of the grammar are no less crucial: this will appear below in our discussion of models of agency and of grammatical metaphor, among other features.

All Knowledge Is Constituted In Semiotic Systems, With Language As The Most Central

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 2-3):

What is the significance of this switch of metaphor from knowing to meaning? A meaning base differs from a knowledge base in the direction from which it is construed. In modelling the meaning base we are building it 'upwards' from the grammar, instead of working 'downwards' from some interpretation of experience couched in conceptual terms, and seen as independent of language. We contend that the conception of 'knowledge' as something that exists independently of language, and may then be coded or made manifest in language, is illusory. All knowledge is constituted in semiotic systems, with language as the most central; and all such representations of knowledge are constructed from language in the first place.

Meaning Is A Social, Intersubjective Process

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 2):

But at the same time our own approach, both in theory and in method, is in contradistinction to that of cognitive science: we treat "information" as meaning rather than as knowledge and interpret language as a semiotic system, and more specifically as a social semiotic, rather than as a system of the human mind. This perspective leads us to place less emphasis on the individual than would be typical of a cognitivist approach; unlike thinking and knowing, at least as these are traditionally conceived, meaning is a social, intersubjective process. If experience is interpreted as meaning, its construal becomes an act of collaboration, sometimes of conflict, and always of negotiation.

The Construal Of Human Experience As A Semantic System

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 that is 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 role not only in storing and exchanging experience but also in construing it, we are taking language as our interpretative base.

Construing Experience As A Resource

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 1):

In this book we are concerned with how human beings construe experience. This means, first and foremost not experience as an instantial product — the particulars of the world that is around us and inside our heads, the particular individuals, the events of last Friday, and so on — but experience as a resource, as a potential for understanding, representing and acting on reality. It is in terms of this potential that the particulars of daily life are interpreted: they make sense because they are instantiations of this potential.

Construing Experience: The First Design

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: xiii):

Construing Experience Through Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: xi):

Condensed into one short paragraph, our own point of departure is the following. Language evolved, in the human species, in two complementary functions: construing experience, and enacting social processes. In this book we are concerned with the first of these, which we refer to as constructing the "ideation base"; and we stress that the categories and relations of experience are not "given" to us by nature, to be passively reflected in our language, but are actively constructed by language, with the lexicogrammar as the driving force. By virtue of its unique properties as a stratified semiotic system, language is able to transform experience into meaning. In our attempt to describe this process, we have deliberately used the grammar as the source of modelling, because we wanted to show how such a process could take place. We have confined ourselves, in principle, to how it takes place in English; the theoretical concepts we have used are general to all languages, but the descriptive categories should be interpreted in the context of a description of English.

Four Aspects Of Human Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: x):

The semantic perspective enables us to emphasise four aspects of human consciousness which have been rather less foregrounded in cognitive approaches. One is that of meaning as a potential, a systemic resource which is deployed in — and ongoingly modified by — individual acts of meaning in language. (Whereas most theoretical work in linguistics since the mid century has focussed strongly on syntagmatic relations — what goes with what, systemic theory has foregrounded the paradigmatic — what is meant in relation to what might be). The second is that of meaning as growth, a semogenic resource which is constantly expanding in power by opening up new domains and refining those that are already within its compass. The third is that of meaning as a joint construction, a shared resource which is the public enterprise of a collective (whereas "thinking" is essentially a private phenomenon "located" within the individual). The fourth is that of meaning as a form of activity, a resource of energy which is powered by the grammar at the heart of every language.

SFL Models Knowledge As Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: ix-x):

… we have tried to represent language as the resource whereby the human species, and each individual member of that species, constructs the functioning mental map of their phenomenal world: of their experience of process, both what goes on out there and what goes on in the realms of their own consciousness.

It seems to us that our dialogue is relevant to current debates in cognitive science. In one sense, we are offering it as an alternative to mainstream currents in this area, since we are saying that cognition "is" (that is, can most profitably be modelled as) not thinking but meaning: the "mental" map is in fact a semiotic map, and "cognition" is just a way of talking about language. In modelling knowledge as meaning, we are treating it as a linguistic construct: hence, as something that is construed in the lexicogrammar. Instead of explaining language by reference to cognitive processes, we explain cognition by reference to linguistic processes. But at the same time this is an "alternative" only if it is assumed that the "cognitive" approach is in some sense natural, or unmarked. It seems to us that current approaches to neural networks, "connectionist" models and the like, are in fact more compatible with a semantic approach, where "understanding" something is transforming it into meaning, and to "know" is to have performed that transformation.

Why The Study Of Discourse Cannot Properly Be Separated From The Study Of The Grammar That Lies Behind It

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 731):

In the most general terms, the purpose of analysing a text is to explain the impact that it makes: why it means what it does, and why it gives the particular impression that it does. … What the metaphorical interpretation does is to suggest how an instance in the text may be referred to the system of the language as a whole. It is therefore an important link in the total chain of explanations whereby we relate the text to the system. A text is meaningful because it is an actualisation of the potential that constitutes the linguistic system; it is for this reason that the study of discourse (‘text linguistics’) cannot properly be separated from the study of the grammar that lies behind it.

Textual Metaphor?

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 731n):

While some scholars have explored the possibility of grammatical metaphor within the textual metafunction, we do not see any evidence that the textual metafunction engenders metaphor. It is certainly a factor in the metaphorical mode of realisation – particularly, in ideational metaphor, as we have illustrated above; but the origins of metaphor lie in the need to re-construe experience (ideational) and to re-enact roles and relations (interpersonal). The role of the textual metafunction is of a different nature (cf. Matthiessen, 1992).

Metaphorical Wording Means Both Metaphorically And Congruently

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 730):

The important point to make is that a piece of wording that is metaphorical has, as it were, an additional dimension of meaning: it ‘means’ both metaphorically and congruently. Thus, to go back to alcohol impairment: here impairment is a noun functioning as Thing, and hence takes on the status of an entity participating in some other process, as in:

Because alcohol impairment effects are well established and documented, alcohol impairment can be used as a benchmark for other forms of driving impairment, such as fatigue, or in comparison to the effects of other drugs.

It does not thereby lose its own semantic character as a process, which it has by virtue of the fact that congruently it is realised as a verb; but it acquires an additional semantic feature by becoming a noun. Compare failure in Engines of the 36 class only appeared on this train in times of reduced loading, or engine failure. – where a more congruent version would be whenever an engine failed. Thus, however far one may choose to go in unpacking ideational metaphor, it is important also to analyse each instance as it is. A significant feature of our present-day world is that it consists so largely of metaphorically constructed entities, like access, advances, allocation, impairment and appeal.

How Far Should Metaphor Be Unpacked?

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 730):

How far should one pursue the analysis of ideational metaphors? There can be no universally valid answer to this question; it depends on what one is trying to achieve. In an example such as The second day of the convention saw the advantage pushed further, there is an obvious tension between day as Senser and saw as mental Process which needs explaining (cf. Figure 10-13). But in most instances of contemporary discourse it is only when we start to analyse that we become aware of the grammatical metaphors involved.

The Emergence Of Nominalising Metaphors

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 730):

This kind of nominalising metaphor probably evolved first in scientific and technical registers (cf. Halliday, 1967b, 1988), where it played a dual role: it made it possible on the one hand to construct hierarchies of technical terms, and on the other hand to develop an argument step by step, using complex passages ‘packaged’ in nominal form as Themes. It has gradually worked its way through into most other varieties of adult discourse, in much of which, however, it loses its original raison d’être and tends to become merely a mark of prestige and power. Notice that when clausal patterns are replaced by nominal ones, some of the information is lost: for example, the Classifier + Thing construction alcohol impairment gives no indication of the semantic relation between the two and could be agnate to alcohol impairs (alcohol as Actor), alcohol is impaired (alcohol as Goal), and maybe other transitivity configurations besides. The writer presumably knows exactly what it means; but the reader may not, and so this kind of highly metaphorical discourse tends to mark off the expert from those who are uninitiated.

Nominalisation

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 729):

Nominalising is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor. By this device, processes (congruently worded as verbs) and properties (congruently worded as adjectives) are reworded metaphorically as nouns; instead of functioning in the clause, as Process or Attribute, they function as Thing in the nominal group. Thus, for example:

is impaired by alcohol                                alcohol impairment

they allocate an extra packer                     the allocation of an extra packer

some shorter, some longer                         of varying length

they were able to reach the computer        their access to the computer

technology is getting better                        advances in technology

What then happens to the original ‘things’? They get displaced by the metaphoric ones, and so are reduced to modifying these: alcohol becomes a Classifier of impairment; the computer, one extra packer and technology go into prepositional phrases functioning as Qualifier to, respectively, access, allocation and advances.

Choreographic Complexity Of Spoken Mode vs Crystalline Complexity Of Written Mode

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 728-9):

In spoken language, the ideational content is loosely strung out, but in clausal patterns that can become highly intricate in movement: the complexity is dynamic – we might think of it in choreographic terms. In written language, the clausal patterns are typically rather simple; but the ideational content is densely packed in nominal constructions: here the complexity is more static – perhaps crystalline. These are, it should be made clear, general tendencies; not every particular instance will conform. But they do bring out the essential character of the relationship between the two. And it is the written kind of complexity that involves grammatical metaphor.

The Primary Grammatical Resource For Increasing Lexical Density

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 728):

The nominal group is the primary resource used by the grammar for packing in lexical items at high density. An example is that in Figure 10-18. Here the relationships which are expressed clausally in the spoken version (the viaducts were constructed of masonry and had numerous arches in them) are instead expressed nominally (masonry viaducts of numerous arches). The clause complex is replaced by the nominal group.

Lexical Density & Grammatical Intricacy: Metaphorical vs Congruent Grammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 726-8):

Consider the following sentence, from The Horizon Book of Railways, pp. 74–75:

In bridging river valleys, the early engineers built many notable masonry viaducts of numerous arches.

The clause complex and transitivity analysis is given in Figure 10-17.

To measure lexical density, simply divide the number of lexical items by the number of ranking clauses. This example has eleven lexical items (bridging, river, valleys, early, engineers, built, notable, masonry, viaducts, numerous, arches), and two clauses; hence lexical density [is] 5.5. Note that the grammatical structure both of the clause complex as a whole and of each constituent clause is rather simple.

Let us now reword this in a form more typical of the spoken language. If we retain the same lexical items, but reword in a more naturally spoken form, we might arrive at something like the following:

In the early days when engineers had to make a bridge across a valley and the valley had a river flowing through it, they often built viaducts, which were constructed of masonry and had numerous arches in them; and many of these viaducts became notable.

Here the structure of the clause complex is

1×b1 ^ 1×β+2 ^ 1aa ^ 1α =β1 ^ 1α=β+2 ^ +2

There are now six grammatically related clauses, rather than just two. The total number of lexical items has gone up to seventeen, mainly because there is some repetition; but since there are six ranking clauses, the lexical density is slightly under 3. In other words, the written version is more complex in terms of lexical density, while the spoken version is more complex in terms of grammatical intricacy. The lexical items in the written version thus have fewer clauses to accommodate them; but obviously they are still part of the overall grammatical structure – what typically happens is that they are incorporated into nominal groups.