Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 213-4):
It is not easy to construe experience of time, and different languages vary considerably in the way they do it: there are differences from one language to another, and differences within the same language over the course of time. Like everything else we are exploring here, the grammar's model of time has been evolving unconsciously in the context of human survival; it is part of the selective and collective wisdom that the species has accumulated in the understanding of its relationship to its environment and in the interaction of its members one with another. And again like everything else in the construal of experience it is the product of continual compromise, whereby divergent and often conflicting aspects of experience are adjusted and accommodated in such a way that all of them have some place in the total picture.
Blogger Comments:
This wording construes time as transcendent of semiotic systems, which is inconsistent with the epistemological assumption of SFL Theory that all meaning is immanent of semiotic systems. On this assumption, time is meaning construed of experience, not "pre-existing" meaning that is modelled by languages.