Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 224-5):
The fractal types of projection and expansion are also a primary resource by which the semantic system creates new meanings. The ideation base thus itself embodies, auto-genetically, the principles on which it is organised and enabled to develop further, such that the primary systems of ideational meaning then serve as a grid within which more delicate categories are construed. Here we have foregrounded especially the motif of elaborating, with particular reference to its manifestation in the identifying and ascriptive figures of being. We have tried to show how elaboration makes it possible to "import" extralinguistic experience into the meaning base by actively construing it (as in 'that [thing there] is a circle'); and also to "transport" meanings internally from one region of the ideation base in order to construe new meanings in another (as in 'balance means you hold it on your fingers and it does not go'). The extension of meaning in delicacy — not merely generalising across different types but construing such types into dimensional and open-ended taxonomies — is a function of the elaborating potential, exploiting the basic dimensions of the system itself.
Blogger Comments:
Since SFL Theory assumes that there is no meaning outside semiotic systems, 'extralinguistic experience' can be understood as the construal of the meaningless by perceptual semiotic systems.