The Developmental Dynamic Of Generalisation — Abstractness — Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 618):

The developmental dynamic of "generalisation — abstractness — metaphor" provides the semiotic energy for the grammar, enabling it to serve as the powerhouse for construing experience in the form of scientific knowledge. Presented in this very sketchy fashion the movement may seem catastrophic and discontinuous; but this is misleading. Rather, it is a steady progression, marked by three periods of more rapid development at the transitions: 

from protolanguage to language (generalisation, associated with bipedal motion), 

from commonsense (spoken) language to written language (abstractness: the move into primary school), and 

from non-specialised written language to technical language (metaphor the move into secondary school). 

There is a clear grammatical and semantic continuity between the various versions of experience, which we can bring out by analysing the grammar of particular instances (such as those cited above). At the same time, the ontogenetic perspective shows that in fact our experience is being ongoingly reconstrued and recategorised as we grow from infancy to maturity.  

This is the outcome of processes taking place in human history — evolutionary events that are at once both material and semiotic, and that cannot be reduced to either purely physical processes driven by technology or purely discursive processes driven by ideology. 

There is no point in asking whether the ideation base of our technologised natural languages necessarily had to evolve the way it did. But it is extremely pertinent to ask, given the enormous demands now being made on both the material and the semiotic resources of the human species, what the options are for the way it may evolve in future.

Grammatical Metaphor As A Prerequisite For The Semiotic Construal Of Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 617-8):

But there is a further transformation still to come, when experience is once again reconstrued, this time as technical knowledge. This reconstrual too is institutionalised, in the transition from primary to secondary education: when children move into secondary school, as adolescents, they learn to organise their experience according to the disciplines — mathematics, science (chemistry, physics, biology), geography, history, and so on. 

Semiotically, the critical factor is that of metaphor; the semiotic bonds that had enabled the child to learn the mother tongue in the first place, bonds between figures and their elements on the one hand and clauses and their transitivity functions on the other, are systematically (and more or less ceremonially!) untied. The categories of experience are deconstrued, to be recategorised over the remaining years of schooling in the "objectifying" framework of grammatical metaphor. … 

By the time children reach the 11th and 12th year of education their experience is being construed in terms such as these:

Every similarity transformation, if not a translation, reflection, rotation, or enlargement, is the product of two or more such transformations.

What would be the order of magnitude of the moment of inertia of the Earth about its axis of rotation?

The elements are processes and qualities that have been metaphorically reconstrued to become participants: rotation, magnitude, enlargement, and so on; together with the relation of identity construed as a process by the verb be. When our adolescents' ideation base comes to accommodate a meaning potential of this technicalised kind, we consider that they have reached semiotic maturity.

Abstractness As A Prerequisite For The Semiotic Construal Of Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 615-6):

But there are two further developments to come before the ideation base can take the form it has to take if it is to produce discourse of the kind we have been assuming throughout the book; and there is some elapse of time before children take these further steps. The first of these developments is abstractness; the second is (grammatical) metaphor. 

General terms are not necessarily abstract; a bird is no more abstract than a pigeon. But some words have referents that are purely abstract — words like cost and clue and habit and tend and strange; they are construing some aspect of our experience, but there is no concrete thing or process with which they can be identified. 

Small children simply ignore them, but by the age of about four or five they begin to cope with abstract meanings; in literate societies, this is the time we consider that children are "ready to start school", no doubt because you have to cope with abstractness in meaning in order to be able to learn to read and write (cf. wordings like spell, stand for, beginning of a sentence). 

But it is not only the written medium; rather it is the whole world of educational knowledge that demands such abstractness in meaning. Consider examples taken from primary text books such as Some animals rely on their great speed to escape from danger, or The time taken by the earth to rotate once on its own axis is a day. 

What happens here is that experience is being reconstrued in order to build up a form of knowledge that is systematically organised and explicit. Children already know that animals run away because they're frightened, and that the sun goes round the earth once in a day; but they have to learn these things over again in a new, more abstract semiotic frame.  

Generalisation As A Prerequisite For The Semiotic Construal Of Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 615):

A prerequisite for the semiotic construal of experience is generalisation: the move from "proper" to "common" as the basic principle of referring. The protolanguage, as already remarked, is non-referring; children move into reference by gradually deconstruing the proto-linguistic sign in a sequence of steps such as 'I want Mummy to ...', 'I want Mummy!', 'Where is Mummy?', 'Mummy' (see Halliday, 1992). The sign has now become a word, functioning as a proper name.  

Typically one or two other signs have been deconstrued at the same time in similar fashion, e.g. 'I want my (toy) bird!', 'Where is my bird?', 'My bird'; and by a further step these then become common names 'bird(s)'. The child has now learnt to name a class of things; this then opens the way 

(i) to constructing hierarchies of classes — a 'pigeon' is a kind of 'bird', and so on, and 

(ii) to naming other kinds of element, processes and qualities, which can be construed only as "common" terms. 

Since these other elements have distinct and complementary functions it becomes possible to combine them into organic structures, as complex elements or as figures, such as 'blue bird', 'birds flying', 'tiny bird flew away'. The resources are now in place for construing experience in lexicogrammatical terms.

 This principle of generalisation — that is, naming general classes rather than specific individuals — is what makes it possible to construct an ideation base. When they have reached this stage, children can make the transition from protolanguage to mother tongue, building up figures and sequences of figures, and simultaneously structuring these as moves in dialogic exchanges (question, statement, etc. — the interaction base), and as messages or quanta of information (the text base). In other words, they learn "how to mean" according to the metafunctional principle of adult human semiosis.  

The Semiotic Manifestation Of The Social Conditions Of Human Existence

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 614):

Since our concern in this book is with the ideation base, we have not been considering interpersonal aspects of meaning, and we have not put major emphasis on dialogic patterns in discourse. So in this final glance at ontogenesis we should foreground very clearly the fact that meaning is an interactive process and that children learning to mean construe their semiotic resources through dialogue. This is not simply an optional extra, something that makes the learning processes easier; it is an inherent property of semiosis itself. 

Semiotic systems are social systems, and meaning arises in shared social consciousness; this is evident already in the protolanguage, when infants depend on being treated as communicating beings, and those within their "meaning group" are tracking them — unconsciously creating the language along with them (see Halliday, 1979b). We find this manifested also in the forms of discourse, in the way children participate in constructing narratives of shared experience (see Halliday, 1975: 112; Painter, 1989: 55). 

When we talk of "construing experience" as the metafunctional realm of the ideation base, we are referring to the shared experience of the group, the culture and the species; it is by means of dialogue that children gain access to this shared experience and are enabled to construe their own experience with reference to it. And the dialogic nature of discourse serves the child also as a metaphor, as the semiotic manifestation of the social conditions of human existence.

The Transition From Protolanguage To Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 614):

Children make the transition from protolanguage to language typically in the second half of the second year of life. The transition has been described in detail elsewhere, based on intensive observations of individual children (see especially Painter, 1984, 1989; Oldenburg, 1987); we may assume that in general terms they are recapitulating the phylogenetic evolution of language, although of course we can only speculate about the way that evolution took place (it is important to say explicitly that all human languages known today are equally far removed from that phase in our semiotic history). During that stage they learn to construe elements and figures, and in this way "semanticise" both the construction of experience and the enactment of interpersonal relations. In terms of the grammar, they learn to form groups and clauses, and to select systemic options simultaneously in transitivity and in mood.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, ontogenesis does not recapitulate phylogenesis, in either life or language. For example, the phylogenesis of Modern English includes stages of both Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, but the ontogenesis of Modern English does not.

A more plausible claim would be that present-day ontogenesis of language from protolanguage still broadly resembles this ontogenesis at the time that language first emerged.

[2] To be clear, 'all human languages known today are equally far removed from that phase in our semiotic history' in the same sense that all extant ape species are equally far removed from the evolutionary split from what became the monkey lineage. However, like the different ape species, different languages do not change at the same rate in phylogenetic time.

The Move Into Language: Why And How

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 613-4):

How, and why, do children discard their functioning protolanguage and move on to "language" in its adult form? To take up the "why?" first: because the protolanguage sets limits on both dimensions of meaning. 

You can converse in it, but you cannot build up a dialogue: that is, it allows exchange of meaning, but it precludes any form of an interpersonal dynamic, in which meanings expand on the basis of what went before. 

You can point with it, but you cannot refer: that is, it allows focus on an object, but it precludes any form of ideational systematic, in which phenomena are construed as configurations and in taxonomies. 

For these to be possible you need a semiotic of a different kind, one that allows for a purely abstract level of representation "in between" the two faces of the sign, To put this another way (as we did at the beginning of the book), the sign has to be deconstructed so that, instead of content interfacing directly with expression, the relationship is mediated by a systematic organisation of form (a lexicogrammar). In other words, the semiotic has to become stratified.

Non-Human Protolanguage

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 613n):

It is clear that animals such as chimpanzees and gorillas, whales and dolphins, communicate with signs in this defined sense, and it appears that these are in some way organised into sign systems. It is possible that some of these species have already moved towards a human-like, stratified form of language; but this has not yet been demonstrated, as far as we know, by any of the available evidence.

An interesting case is that of domesticated cats and dogs. They communicate with signs to their human companions, but apparently not, or only very rarely, to each other. The affinity often felt between such pets and small children is not merely one of a shared material plane (they are more like each other in size) but also one of a shared semiotic plane: they share a common form of language.

Blogger Comments:

For a glimpse of a small portion of the protolanguage of one bird species, see Rainbow Lorikeet Semiosis.

Human vs Non-Human Protolanguage

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 613):

The protolanguage is typically associated with the stage of crawling, when children are mobile, but not yet walking and running: typically about 0;8 - 1;4, but with wide variation around these times. The elements of the protolanguage are "signs" (that is, content/ expression pairs); they are thus formally identical with the semiotic resources of higher mammals (primates and cetaceans) — but with one important difference: the signs of other species become codified as the form of communication among adults, whereas those of human children are transitional to a system of a different kind, and hence do not stabilise into a settled pattern but are constantly shifting on both semiotic planes. 

The Microfunctions Of Protolanguage

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 612-3, 613n):

Children gradually build up an inventory of such proto-signs, and towards the end of the first year the signs begin to form systems, sets of contrasting terms in particular proto-semantic domains or micro-functions: typically, 

the instrumental (e.g. 'I want/I don't want'), 

regulatory (e.g. Do that!/ Do that!!'), 

interactional (e.g. I'm here/ where are you?'), and 

personal domains (e.g. 'I like that/ I'm curious about that'). 

These already foreshadow the semantic motifs of the adult language, the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions, although they are not in any direct correspondence with them; thus the "personal" signs expressing curiosity, or pleasure/ displeasure, constitute the beginning of the semiotic exploration of experience and open the way to naming and classifying phenomena, while the interactional signs are the ones whereby a child enacts social relationships with caregivers and others who are close (Halliday, 1975; 1984b). 

Here we see the earliest context for the later emergence of types of process within the grammar (Halliday, 1991). But the immediate significance of the protolanguage is that by acting semiotically in these particular contexts children construe the fundamental distinction between "self" and "other", and the further distinction of "other" into persons and objects (cf. the discussion and figure in Halliday, 1978b). The consciousness of the self arises at the intersection of the various semiotic roles defined by each of these systems² — as well as, of course, from awareness of being one interactant in the general dialogic process (Halliday, 1991).

 

² There is a sense in which these roles anticipate the functions in the transitivity structure of the clause: proto-Beneficiary (instrumental), proto-Agent (regulatory), proto-Carrier (interactional), and proto-Senser (personal).

Meaning Arises Out Of The Impact Between The Material And The Conscious

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 611-2):

A human infant is a social being from birth (cf. Trevarthen, 1987). Newborn children can exchange attention with their mothers, addressing them and recognising that they are being addressed by them; the infant's whole body is actively involved in the exchange. This is "pre-language" ("pre-meaning", even "pre-text"); but it is not language — no distinction is yet being made between symbolic and non-symbolic acts. 

Then, as they become aware of themselves and their environment, children feel a tension building up between two facets of their experience: between what they perceive as happening "out there" and what is happening "in here", within their own borders so to speak. We can watch babies of around 3 - 4 months struggling to reconcile these complex sensations: they can see a coloured object, reach out, and grasp it and pull it towards them. The inner and the outer forms of this experience have to be brought into line; in order to achieve this, children begin to act in a new, distinctively symbolic mode. 

A typical example of such an "act of meaning" is the high-pitched squeak a child of around 5 months may produce when some commotion takes place that has to be assimilated. Adults interpret these proto-signs as a demand for explanation: "Yes, that's a bus starting up. Isn't it noisy!" Thus meaning arises out of the impact between the material and the conscious as the two facets of a child's ongoing experience.

Three Levels Of Human Individuality: Biological Organism, Social Person, Socio-Semiotic Meaner

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 610-1):

The human individual is at once a biological "individual", a social "individual" and a socio-semiotic "individual": 

as a biological "individual", s/he is an organism, born into a biological population as a member of the human species. 

as a social "individual", s/he is a person, bom into a social group as a member of society. "Person" is a complex construct; it can be characterised as a constellation of social roles or personae entering into social networks … . 

as a socio-semiotic "individual", s/he is a meaner, born into a meaning group as a member of a speech community. "Meaner" is also a complex construct. For the socio-semiotic construction of the individual subject, see Thibault (1993) … .

These different levels of individuality map onto one another: a meaner is a person, and a person is a biological organism. But the mappings are complex; and at each level an individual lives in different environments — in different networks of relations.

Enacting Interpersonal Relationships

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 610):

It has been found that, among the higher primates, those species that live in social groups have more complex brain structures, other things being equal, than those that live apart as individuals (Dunbar, 1992, quoted in New Scientist ). This, too, is something which resonates with our interpretation with language. In our account of the ideation base, we have stressed the interactive, dialogic nature of the construal of experience. But we have also stressed that the ideation base is only one component of the total semantic resource: as well as construing our experience in language, we also use it to enact our interpersonal relationships. Because we are social animals, there is an added dimension of meaning for language to cope with.

Blogger Comments:

Dunbar's claim is actually that primate group size is constrained by neocortex size. However, among the monkeys, geladas live in groups of 1200, despite having a similar sized neocortex to comparable monkeys living in much smaller groups, and contrariwise, among the apes, orangutans live largely solitary lives, despite having a larger neocortex than the more social gibbons, and a similar sized neocortex to the far more social chimpanzees and gorillas. Moreover, the group size of the same species can vary considerably depending on habitat, as demonstrated by the much larger group size of langurs living in urban environments compared to those living in forests.

Collective Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 609):

Edelman's interpretation of higher-order consciousness referred to above suggests that this form of consciousness (unlike primary consciousness) is constituted in language. Language is a socio-semiotic system, so it follows that higher-order consciousness is constituted socio-semiotically; and since socio-semiotic systems are collective, it follows that higher-order consciousness must also be collective. 

Collective consciousness is an attribute of human social groups — the members of a given culture. But we need to distinguish between the consciousness of a social group and the consciousness of a species, whose collective construal of experience is codified in the structure of the brain. All human populations have the same brain, and to that extent all construe experience in the same way. But humans live in social groups, and their local environments vary one from the other; to that extent, different groups construe experience in different ways.

The significance of this for us is that language is the resource for both: both what is common to the species as a whole, and what is specific to the given culture. In the way these two components are construed in the grammar, we cannot tell them apart. But it is the role of language in the construction of experience as meaning — as shared activity and collaboratively constructed resource — that gives substance to the concept of collective consciousness as an attribute of the human condition.

Construing Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 608-9):

We prefer to conceptualise "reality construction" in terms of construing experience. This is not so much because it avoids metaphysical issues about the ultimate nature of reality — we are prepared to acknowledge a broadly materialist position; rather, we have three more specific considerations in mind. 

(i) One is that what is being construed by the brain is not the environment as such, but the impact of that environment on the organism and the ongoing material and semiotic exchange between the two. 

(ii) The second is that we want to emphasise the evolutionary perspective, since this allows us to start from what human beings have in common with other species rather than always insisting on our own uniqueness: when we talk of "construction of reality" it is almost impossible to avoid taking our own construction as the norm, whereas parakeets, pythons, and porpoises have very different experiences to construe — different both from each other's and from those of people. 

(iii) The third point is that the concept of experience is, or can be, a collective one: experience is something that is shared by the members of the species — construed as a "collective consciousness", in Durkheim's classic formulation.

The Evolutionary Emergence Of Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 608):

Edelman (1992) relates this evolutionary perspective to the emergence of consciousness, which he explains in terms of a neurological account of brain structures. He interprets consciousness in what we can think of as semiotic terms, making a distinction between primary consciousness, which depends on the construal of scenes or images, and higher-order consciousness, which depends on the construal of meaning in language … 

Edelman's account indicates the evolutionary value of the human potential for construing processes of consciousness. In contrast with mainstream cognitive science, Edelman makes language the central resource and relates it to the social construction of the self. 

Our conception of the "meaning base" is fully compatible with this line of interpretation (cf. Halliday, 1995a): the human brain has evolved in the construction of a functioning model of "reality".

The Evolution Of Reality Construction

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 607):

Neurobiologists interpret the evolution of the brain in vertebrate species as the evolution of the species' potential for constructing reality (Jerison, 1973 (1992); Edelman, 1992). Evolution brings about a constant change in the organism's relation to its environment; this relationship becomes increasingly complex, so that the organism's model of the environment has to become increasingly complex in its turn. This, it is suggested, is what "drives" the evolution of more and more complex brain structures.

The Brain As Bio-Semiotic System

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 607):

The neural events that constitute the various interface systems are themselves in the broadest sense semiotic: terms such as "communication", "exchange of information", that are used to characterise the activities of the brain are less abstract variants of the concept of "semiotic systems & processes". 

At the same time, the neural networks can be thought of as "realising" the system of language, in the sense that it is in the brain that language materialises as a process of the bio-physical world. In this perspective the relationship between language and the brain is itself a semiotic one, analogous to that between the content plane and the expression plane within language itself; and by the same analogy, there is no necessary or "natural" relationship such that certain parts of the neural network (certain locations within the brain) are dedicated to language or to any particular subsystem within it. 

The analogy is relevant here because it is the fact that language and the perceptual systems share a common "realisation" in neural networks and neural processes that enables language to function as a dynamic open system, one that persists in time by constantly being modified through ongoing exchanges with its environment.

Bio-Semiotic Systems That Interface With The Expression Plane Of Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 607):

These are the physiological systems and processes of the production and reception of speech: motor systems of articulation (air stream mechanisms, constrictions and oscillations of the larynx and other organs, movements of tongue and lips, shaping of the buccal cavity) and receptor systems of auditory perception in the various regions of the ear. When language comes to be written, analogous systems come into play for the production and reception of visual expressions.

Bio-Semiotic Systems That Interface With The Content Plane Of Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 606-7):

These are the systems and processes of human perception, tactile, auditory, visual, and so on. They are themselves semiotic, in that what the organism "sees" is what is construed by the brain into meaning; this then becomes the "input" to the semantic system and is transformed into higher-order meaning of the linguistic kind.

Two Ways Socio-Semiotic Systems That Are Parasitic On Language Are Related To Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 606):

These systems enter into relation with language in two ways. 

On the one hand, they are metonymic to language: they are complementary, non-linguistic resources whereby higher-level systems may be realised (e.g. ideological formations realised through forms of art; theoretical constructs realised through figures and diagrams). 

On the other hand, they relate metaphorically to language: they are constructed, stratally and metafunctionally, in the image of language itself, and hence can be modelled on language as prototype, being described "as if" they had their own grammar and semantics …

Blogger Comments:

Importantly, in SFL terms, only language has a grammar; only linguistic texts can be read out loud (rather than merely described).

Socio-Semiotic Systems Both Realised Through Language And Parasitic On Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 606):

Many socio-semiotic systems are combinations of types (a) [i.e. realised through language] and (b) [i.e. parasitic on language]; for example, religious ceremonials and most types of dramatic performance.

Socio-Semiotic Systems That Are Parasitic On Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 606):

Socio-semiotic systems that are parasitic on language, in the sense that they depend on the fact that those who use them are articulate ('linguate') beings. These include the visual arts, music and dance; modes of dressing, cooking, organising living space and other forms of meaning-making behaviour; and also charts, maps, diagrams, figures and the like.

Blogger Comments:

 Halliday later used the term 'epiphytic' rather than 'parasitic', and I labelled such systems 'epilinguistic' in my model of body language.

Socio-Semiotic Systems That Are Realised Through Language (2)

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 605-6):

From a semantic point of view, such systems constitute contexts for language; they can thus be modelled as part of a general linguistic theory, being interpreted as a higher stratum of language itself. That is to say, we can extend the series:

the system of phonology realises that of lexicogrammar;

the system of [lexicogrammar realised in phonology] realises that of semantics;

the system of [semantics realised in [lexicogrammar realised in phonology]] — which is what we call "language" — realises the system of context (i.e. the "culture", considered as a semiotic potential).

Such higher-level systems (theories, institutions, genres), since they are realised in language, are realised as subsystems within the semantics and the grammar. These subsystems are what we have referred to as registers;

Blogger Comments:

Halliday also uses the term 'institution' as the general term for variant subsystems of context:

To be clear, this is 'genre' in Hasan's sense of rhetorical mode, not in Martin's sense of a stratum above a register stratum, which confuses text type, rhetorical mode and the different semantic structures that realise different rhetorical modes.

Socio-Semiotic Systems That Are Realised Through Language (1)

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 605):

This category corresponds to Hjelmslev's (1943) concept of a "connotative semiotic": a higher-level system that has language as its plane of expression. These include theories: every theoretical construction, scientific, philosophical, aesthetic, and so on, is a higher-level semiotic realised in language. They also include the codified aspects of social institutions such as the law, the financial system, constitutions and codes of practice. 

Martin interprets both genre and ideology in this light, as social activity structures and ideological formations that are realised in language (e.g. 1985, 1992; for a critique of Martin's view, see Hasan, 1995).

From a semantic point of view, such systems constitute contexts for language;

 

Blogger Comments:

Importantly, Hjelmslev's (1943) concept of a "connotative semiotic" includes both a content plane and an expression plane, not just a content plane. That is, in SFL terms, the connotative semiotic is both context and language, not just context.

The Level Of Abstraction In Modelling Semantics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 604):

Since we are interested in how experience is construed, we have focussed attention on the semantics: concepts like "figure", "element", "process", "thing" are categories of semantic theory. But in modelling the semantic system we face a choice: namely, how far "above" the grammar we should try to push it. Since the decision has to be made with reference to the grammar, this is equivalent to asking how abstract the theoretical constructs are going to be. 

We have chosen to locate ourselves at a low point on the scale of abstraction, keeping the semantics and the grammar always within hailing distance. There were various reasons for this. 

First, we wanted to show the grammar at work in construing experience; since we are proposing this as an alternative to cognitive theories, with an "ideation base" rather than a "knowledge base", we need to posit categories such that their construal in the lexicogrammar is explicit. 

Secondly, we wanted to present the grammar as "natural", not arbitrary; this is an essential aspect of the evolution of language from a primary semiotic such as that of human infants. 

Thirdly, we wanted to explain the vast expansion of the meaning potential that takes place through grammatical metaphor; this depends on the initial congruence between grammatical and semantic categories. 

But in any case, it is not really possible to produce a more abstract model of semantics until the less abstract model has been developed first. One has to be able to renew connection with the grammar.

The Continuity Of Lexical And Grammatical Semantics

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 604n):

Thus semantics, as a field of study, is located within linguistics. We should therefore make it clear that it is not being used in the traditional sense that it has had within linguistics, of the study of the meanings of words. It is used in the sense it has always had in systemic theory, namely the total meaning-making system of a natural language. Semantics thus relates to the lexicogrammar as a whole. We can talk of "lexical semantics" if we want to foreground the meanings of words (lexical items functioning in open sets), and of "grammatical semantics" if we want to foreground the meanings of closed grammatical systems; but just as the lexicogrammar itself is a continuum, so — even more so, in fact — is there continuity between these two aspects of semantics, so we have not found it necessary, except in one or two instances, to make this terminological distinction.

The Central Meaning-Making Resource In Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 603-4):

We have located ourselves, throughout the book, in a certain region of metasemiotic space: that is, we adopted a particular perspective on what we are trying to explain. Our central concern has obviously been with 'meaning': our interpretation of meaning is immanent, so that meaning is inside language, not some separate, higher domain of human experience. … 

The central meaning-making resource in language — its "content plane" (within which the ideation base, which has been our focus of attention, is one part) — is stratified into two systems: that of lexicogrammar, and that of semantics. 

The semantic system is the 'outer' layer, the interface where experience is transformed into meaning. The 'inner' layer is the grammar, which masterminds the way this transformation takes place. 

This deconstrual of the content plane into two strata … is a unique feature of the post-infancy human semiotic, corresponding to Edelman's (1992) "higher-order consciousness" as the distinguishing characteristic of Homo sapiens.

'Mind' As An Unnecessary Construct

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 603):

Others have also been critical of the established academic view of mind; and some recent book titles suggest the kinds of alternatives that have been offered: "embodied mind", "social mind", "discursive mind". These suggest that the concept of 'mind' should be brought into close relation with other phenomena — biological, social, or semiotic. … But once this has been done, the mind itself tends to disappear, it is no longer necessary as a construct sui generis. 

Instead of experience being construed by the mind, in the form of knowledge, we can say that experience is construed by the grammar; to 'know' something is to have transformed some portion of experience into meaning. To adopt this perspective is to theorise "cognitive processes" in terms of semiotic, social and biological systems; and thus to see them as a natural concomitant of the processes of evolution.

Why The "Scientific" Model Of The Mind Is Problematic

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602-3):

In the last chapter we reviewed the "scientific" model of the mind that informs cognitive science, looking at it from our point of view of construing experience through meaning. We showed that 'mind' is a construct of the ideation base, owing much to the commonsense picture of the world that is embodied in everyday grammar; but problematic because it draws on this account one-sidedly. 

The scientific model takes off from the grammar of mental processes (seeing, feeling, thinking), but ignores verbal processes (saying) — although the two are both processes of consciousness, are closely related grammatically, and share the critical feature of being able to create meaning by projection. 

It takes off from the ideational metafunction, but ignores the interpersonal — although our folk perception of consciousness derives from both. 

Our sense of ourselves as conscious beings comes as much from the fact that we talk as from the fact that we think and feel; and owes as much to the nature of meaning as social action as it does to the nature of meaning as individual reflection.

Language As Part Of A More Complex Semiotic Construct

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):

In other words, language has evolved as part of our own evolution. It is not arbitrary; on the contrary, it is the semiotic refraction of our own existence in the physical, biological, social and semiotic modes. It is not autonomous; it is itself part of a more complex semiotic construct — which, as we have tried to show, can be modelled in stratal terms such that language as a whole is related by realisation to a higher level of context (context of situation and of culture). This contextualisation of language, we suggested, was the critical factor which made it possible to relate language to other systems-&-processes, both other semiotic systems and systems of other kinds.

Why Language Is Able To Create Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):

Language is able to create meaning because it is related to our material being (ourselves, and our environment) in three distinct and complementary ways. 

In the first place, it is a part of the material world: the processes of language take place in physiological (including neural) and physical space and time. 

In the second place, it is a theory about the material world: language models the space-time environment, including itself, in a "rich" theoretical mode: that is, both construing it (our ideation base) and enacting it (our interaction base). 

In the third place, it is a metaphor for the material world: the way that language itself is organised, as a stratified, metafunctional system, recapitulates — acts out, so to speak both the make-up of this environment in natural (physical-biological), social and semiotic systems-&-processes (our metafunctions) and the internal contradictions, complementarities and fractal patterning by which all such systems-&-processes are characterised (our stratification). 

In other words, language has evolved as part of our own evolution.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this characterises the material world as a construal of experience as meaning, such that language itself is part of that semiotic construal, language is a theory about that semiotic construal, and language is a metaphor for that semiotic construal. That is, language creates meaning out of prior meaning: that created by perceptual systems.

It Is Language That Creates Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):

Language is not a second-order code through which meanings created in some higher-order realm of existence are mysteriously made manifest and brought to light. To borrow the conceit that Firth was fond of caricaturing, there are no "naked ideas" lurking in the background waiting to be clothed. It is language that creates meaning, in the sense that meaning has for us as human beings (which is the only sense of it that we can know).

Blogger Comments:

It was Samuel Johnson who quipped Language is the dress of thought, though he also said Words are but the signs of ideas.

The Value Of The Folk Model For Cognitive Science

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 601):

Both of these paths leading beyond the figures of sensing embodied in the folk model, beyond the ideational domain of sensing, are of fundamental importance to our conception of the individual mind and hence of the domain of cognitive science. By implication, cognitive science should not only be 'cognitive', it should also be semiotic, because it is the notion of meaning that enables us to see the connection between sensing and saying, and between theory and enactment of consciousness. 

The folk model — developed unconsciously and collectively out of shared experience over hundreds of generations — construes and enacts the complexity of being a person by bringing to it a multiplicity of perspectives. It extends the 'mind' by refracting it through language, the resource that makes the "cognitive operations" possible and by the same token ensures that they are not subjective but intersubjective.

Extensions Of Sensing In Scientific vs Folk Models

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600-1):

The two extensions of scientific and folk models are contrasted in Figure 14-11.

Insights From The Folk Model: Projection

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600):

What is common to these two further sources of insight [saying as well as sensing, and enacting as well as construing] is that both depend on projection. 

(i) The potential for projecting is shared by sensing and saying; and when they are considered together, they reveal a very powerful principle that is embodied in the folk model: that through projection, we construe the experience of 'meaning' — as a layered, or stratified, phenomenon, with 'meanings' projected by sensing and 'wordings' projected by saying. 

(ii) Projection also brings the ideational and the interpersonal aspects of consciousness together. Ideationally, projection is an mode of construal — in figures of sensing and saying, sensers and sayers construe meanings and wordings. Interpersonally, projection is an mode of enactment — in moves in dialogue, interactants enact propositions and proposals. Interpersonal metaphors of mood and modality bring out the relationship between the two: here interactants simultaneously both enact propositions and proposals interpersonally and construe this enacting in such a way that the ideational construal comes to stand as a metaphor for aspects of the interpersonal enactment.

Absent From The Cognitive Science Modelling Of Mind

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600):

Both these perspectives — that of the construal of processes other than the mental (saying and symbolising), and that of meaning as enacting as well as meaning as construing — are absent from the cognitive science modelling of mind; and in our view they could with advantage be brought into the picture when we try to understand these complex and central areas of human experience. To do so would both enrich the cognitive model and steer it away from obsessions with information, with knowledge as a separate 'thing' divorced from meaning, and with mind as the exclusive property of an individual organism bounded by its skin.

Complementary Perspectives On Consciousness In the Grammar Of English

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 599-600):

At the same time the 'scientific' models of the mind fail to extend consciousness in the way it is extended by the grammar of English. There are, in fact, two complementary perspectives embodied in the semantic and grammatical systems of English; and together they point towards an alternative interpretation both of 'information' as constructed in cognitive science and of the individualised 'mind' that is its object of study. 

(i) Ideational: Sensers and Sayers. The ideational resources of language are primarily a theory of experience, so they are reflected fairly directly in consciously designed theories such as those of cognitive science. If we stay within the ideational metafunction, where mental processes are construed, we also find other processes that are complementary to these: those of saying (verbal processes) and those of symbolising (a type of relational process). 

(ii) Interpersonal: interactants. If we move outside the ideational metafunction to the interpersonal, the resource through which we interact with other people, we find that here we are acting out our conscious selves — "modelling" consciousness not by construing it but by enacting it. Since this kind of meaning is non-referential it is not taken account of in scientific theories at all.

Two 'Scientific' Developments Of The Folk Model: Academic Psychology And Psychoanalysis

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 599):

These two models move away from the folk model in two directions. 

(i) They reinterpret figures of sensing as figures of doing or being-&-having; that is, they interpret mental phenomena in material terms. With the growth of cognitive psychology, this situation has changed, of course; it is no longer disallowed to talk about mental processes.

(ii) They emphasise motivation as an important unconscious psychological factor; thus they introduce unconsciousness in the account of the workings of the human mind. In the systems of process types in the grammar, there is no 'unconscious' type of sensing distinct from the conscious ones that can project ideas.

In a way, the two directions away from sensing … in the unconscious folk model — material reinterpretation and 'unconsciousness' — are opposites: the first reconstrues sensing in terms that are more readily observable by scientific method (i.e., method other than introspection), while the other introduces a factor that is even less readily observable than conscious sensing: unconscious motivation. But they share the characteristic that they construct the 'mind' as remote from our everyday experience with sensing.

Folk Model Of Sensing vs The "Scientific" Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 598):

Here a contrast is construed in the grammar between the congruent we think, we believe, we know and the metaphorical the mind's operations. This contrast represents the conflict between our everyday experience of ourselves seeing, feeling, thinking, remembering, and so on, and the "scientific" model of cognitive science. Indeed, Dennett (1988) makes the generalisation that "every cognitivist theory currently defended or envisaged ... is a theory of the sub-personal level". Given this orientation, it would thus seem that the unified senser existing as a person who "senses" is an illusion construed by the grammar as part of a folk theory of our own sense of conscious processing.

The Effacement Of Sensers In The Mainstream Cognitive Science Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 598):

The mainstream cognitive science model is thus basically derived from a variety of the commonsense model. It creates a metaphorical distance from experience as construed in our congruent grammar, so that the conscious processing that we experience can be reconstrued as a 'subconscious' domain that we do not have access to — an abstract space where figures of doing & happening and of being & having are the ones that operate, rather than figures of sensing. This would seem to be at one remove (at least) from the folk model, which might reasonably be seen as one of experientialist cognition in Lakoffs (1988) sense — one that is in direct contact with the everyday, embodied experience of Sensers. 

Thus, the metaphorical reconstrual of mental processes effaces the Sensers involved in these processes — the conscious beings, prototypically human, who are thinking, knowing, believing, remembering and so on. 

This effacement of the Sensers is of course not accidental: in fact, one central feature of the way in which cognitivists reconstrue mental processing in metaphorical terms is that the grammatical metaphor makes it possible to distance the account from our everyday experience.

The 'Scientific Model' Of Sensing In Cognitive Science And Formal Semantics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596, 596n):

The 'scientific model' in mainstream cognitive science is centrally concerned with information located in the individual's mind.⁶ This information is organised in some way as a conceptual system.

⁶ Alongside this cognitivist approach, there is a material one embodied in formal approaches to semantics, where the 'aboutness' of linguistic expressions is taken as central and these expressions are interpreted in terms of models of possible worlds. However, in this respect there is a formal-cognitivist alliance: meaning is interpreted not as something in its own right but as something outside language, either a mental construct (concepts, ideas etc.) or a material one (referents in the real world or a formal model of a possible world).

The Central Motif In The Metaphorical Reconstrual Of Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596, 597):

Figure 14-10 represents the central motif in the metaphorical reconstrual of sensing: sensing is 'extracted' from figures of sensing as a domain, and reified to become one of a variety of participants that take on roles in figures of being & having and doing & happening, taking place in the mind construed as a container.

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: The Loss Of The Interpersonal

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596):

Since Sensers are effaced, and projection is lost as a feature of the Senser/sensing complementarity, the gateway to the interpersonal realm — where Sensers are enacted as interactants in dialogic exchange — is closed, and the interpersonal element in the ideational/interpersonal complementarity is lost.

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: A Scientific Taxonomy Of Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 596):

Since figures of sensing are reined as participants, the path is opened up to the taxonomic interpretation of sensing, in the form of scientific taxonomy: memory —long-term/short-term memory, sensory memory, semantic memory; recall — free recall; learning — associative learning/cognitive learning/classical conditioning;....

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: Mind As Location Of Non-Mental Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595-6, 596n):

Since figures of sensing are reified as participants, they can themselves be construed in participant roles. Here another feature of the folk model is taken oven its spatial metaphor is retained and further elaborated. Thus the mind is construed as a space where the metaphorical participants of sensing are involved in processes of doing & happening and of being & having: thoughts, concepts, memories, images are stored, located, retrieved, activated and so on.⁵ 

⁵ The widespread lexical metaphor of memory as a kind of space predates cognitive psychology by many hundreds of years; see e.g. Yates, 1966, on medieval notions such as the "memory theatre" used as aids to remembering.

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: The Loss Of Senser/Sensing Complementarity And Projection

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595):

Since figures of sensing are reified as participants, the processes of sensing are likewise turned into things, and the participants in sensing, the Sensers, are typically effaced. The Senser/sensing complementarity of the folk model is thus lost, as is the feature of Sensers projecting ideas into existence.

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: The Domain Of Sensing Reified As The "Mind"

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595):

Since it is not taken over as a theory, the fundamental insights of the folk theory are ignored: figures of "Sensers sensing (that ...)" are re-construed through grammatical metaphor as participants. In particular, the domain of sensing is reified as the "mind", so that instead of somebody perceiving things happening, or somebody thinking that the moon was a balloon, the model of cognitive science has perception, vision, cognition, learning, memory, ... .

Cognitive Science As An Elaboration Of The Folk Model: Sensing As The Object Of Study

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 595):

The congruent ideational system separates out consciousness from the rest of our experience and construes it as a domain of sensing, embodying a Medium + Process complementarity where conscious beings (Medium) perceive, think, want, feel (Process). Sensing is thus 'mediated' through the Senser; and this process may project ideas into semiotic existence. This domain of Sensers sensing (that...), which is construed in the congruent system, is taken over in cognitive science. However, it is not taken over as being itself a theory of conscious processing; instead, it is treated as a phenomenon — that is, sensing is turned into the object of study.

The Model Of Sensing In Mainstream Cognitive Science

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 594, 595):

… the object of study of cognitive study is constructed by ideational metaphor, as reified sensing (perceiving, thinking) or as names of sensing (the mind, mental phenomena). 

… while the domain of scientific theorising about cognition is determined by the grammar of processes of sensing, the model is depersonalised, and sensing is construed metaphorically in terms of abstract "things" such as knowledge, memory, concepts. This suggests that mainstream cognitive science is basically an elaborated variety of a folk model, rather than a different scientific alternative …

Folk vs Scientific Construals Of Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 593):

What Is Lost In The Scientific Model Of Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 588-9):

The scientific model is metaphorical; and it stands as a metaphor for the congruent folk model. As [Figure 14-9] makes explicit, there is a considerable loss of ideational information as one moves from the congruent mode to the metaphorical mode: grammatically, a clause complex is compressed into a clause, and the clauses that are combined in the clause complex are compressed into nominal groups. As a result, the subtle distinction between the cognitive projection of ideas (sb believing that....) and the perceptive sensing of acts (sb seeing sth happen) is lost, and participants can be left implicit. … 

The possibility of leaving participants implicit means in practice that Sensers are effaced in the scientific model and, as a result, the consciousness we experience in the living of life is also construed out of the picture, being replaced with unconscious processes not accessible to our experience.

The Nature Of The Move From Folk To Scientific Model

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 586-7, 588):

What is the nature of the move from our everyday construal of the experience of consciousness — our folk theory of Sensers sensing phenomena or projecting ideas — to the way cognitive scientists construe that experience? We can see the essential nature of this move when the folk theory is reconstrued as if it was a scientific one. …

The two modes of construing our experience of consciousness ate compared in grammatical terms in Figure 14-9.

Projecting Combined With Material Lexical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 586):

This mind-space may enter into material processes of storing, searching, crossing, escaping etc., either as participant or as circumstance, and also into relational processes of "being + Location". It is interesting to note that in these various lexical metaphors the Sensers are still very much present; they are not effaced. In fact, a number of these lexical metaphors constructed on the model of material clauses retain the option of projecting; see Figure 14-8.

Types Of Lexical Metaphors In The Domain Of Sensing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 585-6):

(i) mind:

— mind as space: cross one's mind, broaden the mind, be out of one's mind, to be driven out of one's mind, get something out of one's mind, search one's mind, at the back of one's mind, to put at the back of one's mind, at the front of one's mind

— mind as container: occupy the mind, escape/slip one's mind, an open mind, a closed mind, keep in mind, to have in mind,

— mind as physical organ: blow one's mind, to boggle the mind, to have something on one's mind, the mind recoils

(ii) other mental constructs:

— emotion as location in vertical space: be up/ down, be high/ low, depress sb, lift sb's spirits, spirits soar; fall in love, love deeply, abhor/ detest/ dislike deeply

— emotion as liquid/ gas (contained in body): explode, vent one's anger, blow one's top, to boil over, to smoulder, to cool down, to keep the lid on,

Sensing As A Bounded Semantic Domain

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 585):

The grammar thus construes sensing as a bounded semantic domain within our total experience of change. This picture is further enriched through lexis, prominently through lexical metaphors. Metaphors relating to space, with the mind as a container (Reddy, 1979; cf, Lakoff & Kôvecses, 1987, on Anger), a finite space or a physical entity reinforce the grammar's construal of a bounded domain of sensing.

The Differentiation Of Inner And Outer Experience

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 584-5):

This 'world view' can be depicted using the conventions of comic strips: see Figure 14-7.

The conventions of comic strips clearly differentiate between figures of sensing and saying on the one hand and figures of being & having and doing & happening on the other: the latter are represented graphically, whereas the former are represented linguistically, in terms of their projected content Comic strips thus codify the higher-order nature of projections and their constitution in language.

The Verbal Externalisation Of Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 584):

The everyday grammar's contribution to the construal of sensing is thus both rich and varied. Some features of it are particularly significant to the uncommonsense model of mainstream cognitive science. The grammar separates out consciousness from the rest of our experience in the form of mental processes, capable of projecting ideas; but in addition, consciousness may also be 'externalised' in the form of verbal processes, capable of projecting locutions.

The Ideational And Interpersonal Modes Of Constructing The Self

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 583-4):

A projection mental clause such as I (don't) think, since ideationally it realises a figure of sensing, construes the speaker as 'Senser at the time of speaking' (it occurs metaphorically only in simple present tense); at the same time, it enacts the speaker's own 'intrusion' into the dialogue — his or her judgment about how much validity can be attached to the proposition contained in the projected clause. 

Interpersonal metaphor is thus the hinge between the ideational and the interpersonal modes of constructing the self. In the ideational mode we construe ourselves as conscious Sensers, while in the interpersonal mode we enact ourselves as speakers interacting with addressees; the metaphor brings the two together in such a way that the ideational construal stands for the interpersonal enactment (see Figure 14-6).

The grammar of everyday discourse thus clearly points to the significance of interpersonal meaning in the way that we construct ourselves — the self is not only construed but it is also enacted. Cognitive scientists, however, have derived their object of study, and their model of this object from the ideational perspective alone, failing to take the interpersonal perspective — that of enacting — into account.

The Ontogenesis Of Construing Mental Projection

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 580):

Painter (1993) documents how one child first learned to construe mental projection: he began with figures in which he himself was the Senser. The system made it possible for him then to generalise his own experience of consciousness by construing other persons in the Senser role, as he built up a model in which this role could be occupied by any conscious (prototypically human) being.

The Grammar's Construal Of Consciousness As Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 579, 580):

Figure 14-5 shows how the proposition construed by the idea clause is projected, as the "content of consciousness", by the Senser involved in the process of sensing. This content is brought into existence by the sensing process, as actualised through the Senser; and it is construed as being of a higher order of semiotic abstraction than the process of sensing itself (i.e. it is always at one further remove from the instantial context).

Why Projected Clauses Are Not Constituents Of Projecting Clauses

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 578-9):

In the grammar, the 'idea' is a separate clause that combines with the 'sensing' clause in a clause complex, through the relation of projection; see Figure 14-4 for a structural interpretation.

In our analysis (unlike that of the mainstream grammatical tradition), the projected clause is not a constituent part of the mental or verbal clause by which it is projected. There are numerous reasons for this; some of them are grammatical — for example, 

• it cannot be the focus of theme-predication [we do not say: it is that they're absolutely horrible that I think]; 
• it cannot be the Subject of a passive mental clause [we do not say: they're absolutely horrible is thought by me]; 
• it is presumed by the substitute so, which is also used to presume conditional clauses in clause complexes: I think they're absolutely horrible and my husband thinks so too]. 

But these, in turn, reflect the semantic nature of projection: this is a relationship between two figures, not a device whereby one becomes a participant inside another. We can thus show the difference between these and 'fact' clauses, those where the idea clause is a projection but it is not the accompanying mental clause that is doing the projecting; such readymade projections do function as constituents. An example here is I don't care whether they are devoted or not; compare it's not whether they are devoted or not that I care about.

Consciousness As A Complementarity Of Change And Persistence Through Time

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 578):

The figure of sensing is a configuration of a Process (think) and the participant engaged in sensing, the Senser (I); that is, consciousness is construed as a complementarity of change through time and persistence through time — as a conscious participant involved in an unfolding process.

The Folk Model Of Consciousness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 577):

We have shown how the system of the ideation base construes consciousness: as conscious processing by a conscious being. Conscious processing can create a higher-order world of ideas (or, as we would say, meanings), comparable in certain respects to Popper's World 3; this defines the essential distinction between projection and expansion as ways of relating one figure to another. Conscious processes themselves appear as the central figures in the construal of experience, and they are pivotal in differentiating among the various types of participant. This folk model is constituted in innumerable encounters in the course of casual conversation; and it is instantiated again and again in contexts of everyday life. 

Conscious processes are of two kinds: sensing, and saying. Since what we are exploring here is the modelling of "mind", our concern in the first instance will be with sensing.

The Reification Of Experience In Scientific Models

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 575-6):

The most central aspect of the various changes that took place [in the move from folk to scientific models] was the reification of experience — the grammatical metaphor whereby processes were reconstrued as things. In the language of everyday commonsense, A attracts B, so B moves — a complex of two clauses; in the language of science, attraction causes (or is the cause of) movement — where the everyday clause complex, the sequence of two processes of action, has been 'compressed' into one clause with two nominalised elements, and a single process of being (cause 'be causally', or be). 

When they are reconstrued as things, processes lose their location in time and often also their participants; for instance, A attracts B is likely to be reconstrued simply as attraction. Attraction, repulsion, motion, gravity, acceleration, etc. can then be taxonomised in the same way as ordinary things such as plants and animals; they become part of an explicit taxonomy of metaphorical things. These basic resources were already in place in ordinary language — the nominal group for representing things and for organising them into taxonomies, nominalising suffixes for reconstruing non-things as things, and so on; but their potential was being exploited to a greater extent and in significantly different ways. 

This change in the grammar entailed a change in world view, towards a static, reified world — so much so that Bohm (1979) complains that language makes it hard to represent the kind of flux that modem physics likes to deal with. Bohm's dissatisfaction is directed at language in general; but bis real target is — or should be — the language of science. The everyday language of casual speech is, by and large, a language of flux, construing experience in much the way that Bohm seems to demand (see Halliday, 1987).

Folk And Scientific Models As Co-existing Varieties

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 573-4):

As we also noted above, we can interpret folk models and scientific ones as co-existing varieties of the same basic system within the ideation base. In the first instance, we will, of course, be aware of them as differing in particular domains — e.g. as operating with different lexical semantic organisations; but they also tend to construe experience differently in general terms — scientific models tend to rely on grammatical metaphor and thus embody a metaphorical construal of experience: see Figure 14-3.

Fig. 14-3: Folk and scientific models within the ideation base

Folk Models As Evolved And Everyday, Scientific Models As Designed And Restricted

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 573):

As we noted above, folk models are part of the unconscious background of thinking in everyday situation types; they have evolved without any conscious design and are not associated with academic contexts. Folk models can also be more conscious, of course — these are the models that people talk about, that they believe they believe. Scientific models are consciously designed in more restricted situation types, usually within academic institutions, to serve as resources in reasoning about the world.

The Shift From Folk To Scientific Models

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 572-3):

The shift from folk models to scientific ones thus takes place over a long period of time; it typically involves several factors: see Figure 14-2.

Folk Models Co-existing Alongside Scientific Models

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 572):

As designed semiotic systems emerge, both the registers of everyday language and the original specialist registers continue to exist and to develop; folk models of the world will co-exist alongside the scientific ones. A certain degree of intertranslatablity is likely to be maintained — linguistic renderings of logical or mathematical formulas, for instance; and this constitutes one of the contexts in which ordinary language is brought into explicit contact with more scientific varieties. 

There will always be some complementarity of function between the more designed varieties and those that are naturally evolving. They may be allocated to different spheres of activity: for example, the language of bird-watchers vs. the language of ornithologists. 

But in other cases the two are closely integrated as submotifs within a single sphere: for example, the use of both natural language and mathematical expressions side by side in the learning and practice of mathematics. This kind of interpenetration still entails a semiotic complementarity, but of a very sensitive kind, requiring a delicate interpretation of the context in order to bring it out.

The Emergence Of Scientific Registers In The West

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 569-70):

In the early scientific period in the West, new registers evolved as part of the ongoing reconstruction of experience in the form of systematic knowledge and experimental science. Perhaps the earliest to evolve in these new contexts were those registers associated with the exploration, storage and dissemination of new knowledge about plants and herbs in the 16th and 17th centuries. These new contexts put pressure on the linguistic resources, and the meaning-creating power of these resources correspondingly increased. We can hypothesise a gradual evolution from the registers of ordinary language, with their folk models of the world, including folk taxonomies of plants and herbs, to more specialised scientific ones. It was at this point, as people became aware of the rapid development of new knowledge and the need for processing and storing it, that conscious design of language began, with nomenclatures and taxonomies being explicitly discussed and fixed. At the same time — but in this case without conscious design — new ways of meaning evolved in the construction of figures and sequences.

Unequal Awareness Of The Metafunctions

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 569):

In addition to the different degrees of their awareness of different grammatical units, such as words and clauses, people are also not equally aware of the different kinds of functions in which the resources of language are organised. In particular, in constructing and reasoning about more conscious models, people are readily aware of those linguistic resources whose function it is to interpret and represent experience, those of the ideational metafunction; but they are much less aware of those of the other two metafunctions, the interpersonal and the textual — no doubt because these do not embody representations of experience but reflect our engagement with the world in different ways. However, although they tend to be overlooked when one comes to build a 'scientific' model of language and the mind, these other metafunctions are no less important than the ideational.

Whorf's Cryptotypes

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 569):

It is only in more recent times that the more covert areas of grammar have been systematically studied — those that, following Whorf, we have referred to as "cryptogrammar". Whorf (1956) distinguished between overt and covert categories and pointed out that covert categories were often also "cryptotypes" — categories whose meanings were complex and difficult to access. Many aspects of clause grammar, and of the grammar of clause complexes, are essentially cryptotypic. It is the analysis of some of these more covert features embodied in the everyday grammar, in particular the theory of mental processes, that throws light on the domain of cognitive science.

Word: Lexical Item vs Grammatical Rank

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 568-9):

Certain aspects of language are closer to conscious awareness than others (see Halliday, 1987): these are the more exposed parts of language, which are also the parts that tend to get studied first. In Western thinking about language, the most exposed aspect of language has been the "word": to talk is to "put things into words". 

The folk notion of the "word" is really a conflation of two different abstractions, one lexical and one grammatical. 

(i) Vocabulary (lexis): the word as lexical item, or "lexeme". This is construed as an isolate, a 'thing' that can be counted and sorted in (alphabetical) order. People "look for" words, they "put thoughts into" them, "put them into" or "take them out of another's mouth", and nowadays they keep collections of words on their shelves or in their computers in the form of dictionaries. Specialist knowledge is thought of as a matter of terminology. The taxonomic organisation of vocabulary is less exposed: it is made explicit in Roget's Thesaurus, but is only implicit in a standard dictionary. Lexical taxonomy was the first area of language to be systematically studied by anthropologists, when they began to explore cultural knowledge as it is embodied in folk taxonomies of plants, animals, diseases and the like. 

(ii) Grammar: the word as one of the ranks in the grammatical system. This is, not surprisingly, where Western linguistic theory as we know it today began in classical times, with the study of words varying in form according to their case, number, aspect, person etc.. Word-based systems such as these do provide a way in to studying grammatical semantics: but the meanings they construe are always more complex than the categories that appear as formal variants, and grammarians have had to become aware of covert patterns.

Models At Different Levels Of Awareness

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 568):

There is thus a range of variation from our everyday folk models to scientific models, with expert models somewhere coming in between (Linde, 1987). Such models vary considerably in the degree to which we are consciously aware of them as models (cf. Whorf s, 1956, notion of critical consciousness). We are more aware of models that 'stand out' as belonging a particular subculture than of those that are pan of our everyday repertoire; and we are more aware of scientific models than of folk models. 

Whatever the scope and sophistication of a model, however, we are likely to be more aware of a model as a cultural construct than as a linguistic construct, since language is typically further from our conscious attention.

Scientific Models Of Experience: Context

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 567):

We can characterise them in terms of field, tenor and mode as follows (from Halliday & Martin, 1993: 54):

field: (i) extending, transmitting or exploring knowledge (ii) in the physical, biological or social sciences;

tenor: addressed to specialists, to learners or to laymen, from within the same group (e.g. specialist to specialist) or across groups (e.g. lecturer to students);

and

mode: phonic or graphic channel, most congruent (e.g., formal 'written language' with graphic channel) or less so (e.g., formal with phonic channel), and with variation in rhetorical function — expository, hortatory, polemic, imaginative and so on.

These ranges of field, tenor and mode values define a great variety of situation types within institutions of higher education, of research and of technological development. However, these situation types are quite constrained relative to the context of culture as a whole: only certain members of the culture participate in these situation types and engage with the scientific models that are developed, maintained, changed and transmitted within them. In this respect, scientific models are clearly subcultural models: contextually they are located somewhere between the potential and the instance. If we focus on particular scientific models, such as those of the mind in cognitive science, we will find that they are even more contextually constrained.