Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 73-5):
Construing experience as meaning means locating classes such as squares and circles somewhere in the semantic system, both locally as terms in systems and also more globally in the ordering of these systems in delicacy.
Painter comments: "... through the naming utterances where Stephen was practising signification, he was also necessarily construing the things of his experience into taxonomies". So Stephen also construes the attributes of semantic classes, attributes that will help him sort out the organisation of the semantic system. …
When Stephen's meaning potential has gained critical semantic mass, he begins to construe its own internal organisation explicitly in an effort to sort out taxonomic relations within the system. … Again, the resource for construing 'categories' is the intensive ascriptive figure of being; but now both the Carrier and the Attribute are meanings internal to the semantic system. That is, Stephen construes a taxonomic relationship between e.g. 'seal' and 'animal' by construing them as Carrier + Attribute:
Painter comments: "The importance of this development is that it constitutes a move on Stephen's part from using language to make sense of non-linguistic phenomena to using language to make sense of the valeur relations of the meaning system itself." We can diagram the contrast between these two steps in construing experience as categories of meaning as in Figure 2-10.
Blogger Comments:
Relating this to Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, 'visually shared experience' can be understood as the meaning that perceptual (semiotic) systems construe of experience. On the SFL assumption of immanence, domains outside semiotic systems are not meaningful of themselves.
Importantly, the 'external' ascriptive relation here is the subtype 'instantiation' which is a token to type relation (op. cit.:145), so construing categories 'externally' is relating perceptual tokens to semantic types.