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.