The Realisation Of Circumstances

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 518):

The third type of constituent of the clause, referred to above as "others" (that is, elements that are neither verbal nor nominal groups), evolved as the representation of a kind of "third party" to the process. This may be some qualification of the process in terms of its manner of occurrence (an adverbial group, in the case of English); or it may be an entity that is involved in the process but only indirectly (in English, a prepositional phrase, consisting of preposition plus nominal group).

Participants

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 518):

The participants, on the other hand, which represent the prototype of entities persisting in time and space, are usually not subject to this kind of modification; but they are organised in fairly elaborate taxonomies. These may be construed as systematic relations among different lexical items: thus eyes, nose, mouth, chin are all different parts of face, and lamb, pork , mutton, beef are all different kinds of meat. Something of the same sort happens with verbs, but to a much lesser extent. 

The other resource for constructing taxonomies of things is the expansion of the nominal group, and here the picture is very different from that with verbs. Nouns are expanded lexically as well as grammatically, so that, while entities (like processes) are located deictically relative to the 'here-&- now', they are also (unlike processes) extensively classified and described. 

An example such as those two nice colourful picture postcards of Honolulu that Sandy sent us shows these resources at work: cards are classified as postcards rather than, say, playing cards; postcards as picture postcards not plain postcards; picture postcards are described as colourful, and also (signalling the speaker's attitude to them) as nice; they are quantified, as two, and specified deictically as those. Further than that, both a circumstantial feature (of Honolulu) and even an entire process (that Sandy sent us) can be brought in as characteristics which specify more exactly the particular cards in question.

Thus the grammar has the potential for construing a complex arrangement of classes and subclasses for any entity which participates in a process; or, on the other hand, of naming it as an individual, by using a "proper" noun instead of a common one. Proper nouns are already fully specific, and hence seldom expanded experientially (they are often expanded interpersonally!); but common nouns are almost indefinitely expandable, and it is this resource which organises our universe into its elaborate taxonomies of things.

Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 517-8):

Processes take place in space-time, which the grammar may model in a variety of different ways: the happening is upstream or downstream, past or future, real or imaginary. Typically the point of reference is the speech situation: there is some deictic feature relating what is being said to the current "moment" in time and space. In English the deixis is achieved by locating the process on a linear time-scale with 'present' as a fulcrum between 'past' and 'future', or else by locating it on one or other of a cluster of scales whereby the speaker intrudes his or her own judgment on it. There may be a wide variety of other attachments to the verb — modalities, aspects, phases and the like, which the grammar construes as features of the process; consider English examples like wasn't going to start trying to help. On the other hand, the processes themselves are not, in general, construed into systematic taxonomies, and the verb is expanded by grammatical rather than lexical means.

Clause Constituents

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 517):

As for the elements that make up the process configuration, we have seen that the foundation of the grammar's theory of experience was laid down in the simplest terms in the evolution of word classes: verbs, nouns, and others. But the constituents of a clause are not, in fact, verbs and nouns; they are more complex expressions that have expanded from verbs and nouns, which we call "verbal groups" and "nominal groups". At this point, we find a considerable difference between the two, in the kind of expansion that they engender. The formal patterns vary, as always, among different languages; but the underlying principles seem to be fairly constant.

Participant Ambivalence In Mental Processes

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 517):

When it comes to mental processes (and here is one of the contradictions referred to above), the grammar is uncertain whether the participant other than the Senser is doing duty as agent or not; if I'm doubtful about something, for example, I may say your story doesn't convince me, which makes your story look like an agent, or I may say I don't believe your story, which makes the role of your story very different — not exactly a goal, but like an expression of scope. Many languages display some such ambivalence about mental processes, which do not match up neatly with material processes in our experience in any obvious way.

Inherent Participants

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 517):

At the same time, all processes are interpreted as having something in common, in that typically there is one participant that is inherently associated with the process — without which the process could not take place at all, like birds in birds are flying. That may be the only one, in which case that participant is held accountable (even if involuntarily!) and the process is said to stop there. Alternatively, another participant may be involved; either as an external agent, like children in children are flying kites, or as a goal, like a letter in I'm writing a letter.

Favourite Configurations Of Participants

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 516-7):

With each type of process, the grammar associates one or two favourite configurations of participants. These usually vary considerably from one process type to another, in English, there is a strong link between the role of "Senser" (the one who knows, thinks &c.) in a mental process and the personal pronouns he and she, such that putting it in this role (it didn't believe me, for example) creates an anomaly — we wonder what this "it" could be?

The Grammar As A Resource For Thinking With

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 516):

In construing experience in this way, the grammar is providing a resource for thinking with. A strict taxonomy of separate process types would impose too much discontinuity, while a bipolar continuum would precisely be too much polarised. What the grammar offers is, rather, a flexible semantic space, continuous and elastic, which can be contorted and expanded without losing its topological order. Since it evolved with the human species, it is full of anomalies, contradictions and compromises; precisely the properties which make it possible for a child to learn, because only a system of this kind could accommodate the disorder that is inherent in experience itself.

Blogger Comments:

Strictly speaking, on the 'immanence' view of SFL, the distinction between order and disorder is made by semiotic systems; it is not prior to semiosis. 

Process Topology

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 514-6):

This part of the grammar, then — the grammar of clauses —, constitutes a theory about the types of process that make up human experience. In English (which is probably fairly typical), the three principal categories that we are calling the material, mental and relational are rather clearly distinct on a number of formal grounds; the other three appear as mixed or intermediate types lying on the borderlines. 

(In fact the category of verbal process is more clearly distinct than the other two; and in view of its central place in the semantic system, we have treated it throughout the present study as a primary category.) 

The total picture is of a continuum; but not between two poles — rather something that we would represent in the form of a circle. Figure 13-2 shows this in diagrammatic form.

Existential Processes: Between The Relational And The Material

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 514):

Finally, there is the phenomenon of existing — still construed, grammatically, as a type of process. What is said to exist may be an entity, something that persists through time, like there's a letter for you; but it may also, in many languages, be a happening, as in there was a fight. Here we have something that could alternatively be construed as a material process (people were fighting ), which suggests that "existential" processes are another intermediate type, something between the relational and the material.

Relational Processes: The Two Basic Relationships That Characterise Semiotic Systems

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 514):

And these [verbal processes] in turn shade into something else, which the grammar again construes as phenomenally distinct relations of identity (including symbolic identity, like red means stop) and attribution. Expressions of this kind, which in English often have the verb be, hardly seem to fit the label "process" at all; but the grammar firmly represents them as such, so we call them "relational processes". They are modelled, in fact, on the two basic relationships that characterise semiotic systems: realisation (identifying processes such as this is ('realises') my sister), and instantiation (attributive processes such as she is ('instantiates') a student of law).

Behavioural Vs Verbal Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 514):

Language itself, of course, is a form of human behaviour, but "languaging" constitutes, for the grammar, another distinct type of process, that of "verbal" (or, better, "symbolic") processes. An act of saying is not simply externalising inner events; it is actively transforming them, into an event of a different kind. It then resembles other semiotic events, many of which do not require a conscious information source (your diary says you have a denial appointment, the light says stop).

Construing Outer And Inner Experience As Material And Mental Processes (And 'Externalised Inner' As Behavioural)

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 513-4):

At the same time, while recognising a general category of "process" to construe our experience of change, the grammar also recognises that not all processes are alike. As human beings we become aware (and again we can see this in the actions of tiny infants) that phenomena fall into two distinct types: those happening outside ourselves, which we can see and hear, and those happening within our own consciousness — thoughts and feelings, and also the sensations of seeing and hearing, as distinct from whatever is seen and heard. The grammar construes this as a distinction between "material processes" and "mental processes". Mental processes are specifically attributed to conscious beings: humans, and some of our more intimate animal consorts. 

Languages construe this pattern in many different ways, and draw the line at different points; as always we are relating our account to the particulars of English. Here the grammar postulates a third type of process intermediate between these two: "behavioural" processes, in which inner events are externalised as bodily behaviour, like staring, thinking (in the sense of pondering) or crying.

The Ideational Function Of English Prepositional Phrases

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 513):

The classes of word may be distinguished by their internal form, or by the way they are able to enter into larger constructions (or both). Typically the most complex is the class of circumstantial elements, because these are themselves often formed as complex constructions; there may be simple words (a class of adverbs), but there may also be constructs like English prepositional phrases, the function of which is to bring in other potential participants but to bring them in indirectly, like the sea in across the sea. The theory behind this is that there are two ways in which an entity can be involved: either directly as a participant in the process, or indirectly in a circumstantial role, such as the place where the process happens. This indirect participant is often construed as participating in a kind of secondary process tangential to the main one (grammatically, a prepositional phrase is a reduced variant of a clause).

Construing Classes Of Phenomena Through Classes Of Word

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 513, 515):

The significant step that took place in human grammars in this context was, obviously, the evolution of common nouns — or rather, of common words, since verbs are also "common" in this sense: that is, words denoting classes rather than individuals. It is usually assumed that these evolved out of "proper" words, prototypically the names of individual persons; the ontogenetic evidence suggests that this is one source but not the only one, another source being rather in the interpersonal function. Be that as it may, construing processes in this way clearly depends on generalising whole classes of phenomena; the grammar sets up classes of process, of participant and of circumstance. There are various ways of doing this; one that is familiar in many languages is by means of a taxonomy of different kinds of word, as in Figure 13-1. The classes of word may be distinguished by their internal form, or by the way they are able to enter into larger constructions (or both). 

Construing Perceptual Meaning As Linguistic Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 512-3):

Suppose we are standing on the shore, and there is a rapid movement across our line of vision. We construe this grammatically as

birds + are flying + across the sea

This is obviously not the only way such an experience could be "semanticised": it might be construed as a single unanalysed phenomenon, e.g. it's winging. Some processes are in fact construed in this way: in English, for example, meteorological processes such as it's raining. But in most instances the theory propounded by the grammar is that this is a composite phenomenon, an organic construction of functionally distinct parts: here, a process are flying, something participating in this process, namely birds, and a relevant circumstance across the sea. This allows for other things to fly across the sea, such as insects and aeroplanes; for birds to fly in other locations, such as over the trees, and to do other things than flying, such as singing or quarrelling. The meaning potential here is clearly far greater than if a different lexical item was used to construe every possible configuration.

Ideational Metafunction: Experiential

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 512):

The basic component of all experience is change: when something changes from one state to another, it projects itself on to our consciousness. This may be something in the external environment; we can see this happening with small babies, who are first jerked into semiosis by dramatic perturbations such as a loud noise or a flashing light. The grammar construes this experience of change in the form of a process configuration: the fundamental element of grammar is a clause, and the clause presents the parameters within which processes may unfold.

The grammar does this by deconstructing the process into component parts. Typically, as in English and many, perhaps all, other languages, these are of three kinds: first the process itself, secondly certain phenomena construed as participants in the process, and thirdly, other phenomena that are associated with the process circumstantially.

Grammar Construes Semantics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 512):

In all these metafunctions, the language does not take over and reproduce some readymade semantic space. There is no such space until the grammar comes along to construe it.

The Textual Metafunction

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 512):

Textually, the grammar is the creating of information; it engenders discourse, the patterned forms of wording that constitute meaningful semiotic contexts. From one point of view, therefore, this "textual" metafunction has an enabling force, since it is this that allows the other two to operate at all. But at the same time it brings into being a world of its own, a world that is constituted semiotically. With the textual metafunction language not only construes and enacts our reality but also becomes part of the reality that it is construing and enacting.

The Interpersonal Metafunction

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 511):

Interpersonally, the grammar is not a theory but a way of doing; it is our construction of social relationships, both those that define society and our own place in it, and those that pertain to the immediate dialogic situation. This constitutes the "interpersonal" metafunction, whereby language constructs our social collective and, thereby, our personal being. The word "construct" is used to suggest a form of enactment — though something on which we inevitably build a theory, of ourself and the various "others" to whom we relate.

The Ideational Metafunction

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 511):

Ideationally, the grammar is a theory of human experience; it is our interpretation of all that goes on around us, and also inside ourselves. There are two parts to this: one the representation of the processes themselves, which we refer to as the "experiential"; the other the representation of the relations between one process and another, and it is this that we refer to as the "logical". The two together constitute the "ideational" metafunction, whereby language construes our experiential world. The word "construe" is used to suggest an intellectual construction — though one that, of course, we then use as a guide to action.

The Metafunctions

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 511):

We have stressed all along that a language is a system for creating meaning; and that its meaning potential has evolved around three motifs — what we refer to as the "metafunctions" of ideational, interpersonal and textual, with the ideational in turn comprising an experiential component and a logical component. These are the multiple aspects of the content plane — the grammar (in its usual sense of lexicogrammar) and the semantics. Since the powerhouse of language lies in the grammar, we shall refer to them here as aspects of the grammar; but it is important to insist that they could not be "in" the one without also being "in" the other. It makes no sense to ask whether the metafunctions are grammatical or semantic; the only possible answer would be "yes".

Physical, Biological, Social And Semiotic Systems As Different Stances Taken By The Observer

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 510):

Meanwhile what has become clear is that there is the (by now) familiar interplay between phenomenon and observer. We have talked of physical, biological, social and semiotic systems as being categories of phenomena — which in an important sense they are. But they may also be thought of as different stances taken by the observer; thus we find physical and biological systems being interpreted as semiotic systems, in a kind of intellectual game which turns out to reveal new aspects of physical and biological processes. It is obviously beyond our scope — and indeed beyond our capabilities — to pursue these matters here. But they add a whole new dimension to our grammatics, to the concept of a theory of grammar as a metatheory of human experience.

Blogger Comments:

See, for example, Towards A Linguistic Science Of Sciences.

The Problem With Thinking Of Language As Physical, Biological, Social And Semiotic

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 510):

But there is one problem with this intellectual strategy: that the code for systems of this fourth type has not yet been cracked. There are two aspects to this problem. One is that we do not yet fully understand the nature of a linguistic fact: this is the problem of instantiation. The other is that we do not yet fully understand the nature of the relationship that is the semiotic analogue of the "cause : effect" of classical physics: this is the problem of realisation. 

It is true that Saussure, and even more Hjelmslev, took important strides towards an understanding; but we are still arguing about what Saussure really meant (to us it seems that he had not clearly separated the two concepts of instantiation and realisation), and Hjelmslev has largely been ignored — Sydney Lamb (e.g., 1966a,b) is almost the only person who has tried to follow through his achievements. Probably it will be well into the next century before the picture comes to be clear.

Why Language Is The Prototypical Social Semiotic System

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 509-10):

Language is set apart, however, as the prototypical semiotic system, on a variety of different grounds: it is the only one that evolved specifically as a semiotic system; it is the one semiotic into which all others can be "translated"; and (the least questionable, in our view) it is the one whereby the human species as a whole, and each individual member of that species, construes experience and constructs a social order. In this last respect, all other semiotic systems are derivative: they have meaning potential only by reference to models of experience, and forms of social relationship, that have already been established in language. It is this that justifies us in taking language as the prototype of systems of meaning.

Language As Physical, Biological, Social And Semiotic Systems

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 509):

It can be studied as a physical system, in acoustics and in the physical aspect of articulation (air pressure measurements and so on). It can be studied as a biological system, in the physiological aspect of articulation and in the neurophysiology of the brain. It can be studied as a social system, as the primary mode of human interaction. And of course it can be studied as a semiotic system, in the core areas of lexicogrammar, phonology and semantics. If linguistics is conceived of as a discipline — that is, as defined by its object of study (in this case, language) — then it must encompass within itself theories and methods of all four different kinds.

Meaning: Value That Is Construed Symbolically

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 509):

Meaning can be thought of (and was thought of by Saussure) as just a kind of social value; but it is value in a significantly different sense — value that is construed symbolically. Meaning can only be construed symbolically, because it is intrinsically paradigmatic, as Saussure understood and built in to his own definition of valeur. Semiotic systems are social systems where value has been further transformed into meaning.

Semiotic Systems In The Linear Taxonomy Of Systems

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 509):

A biological system is a physical system with the added component of "life"; it is a living physical system. In comparable terms, a social system is a biological system with the added component of "value" (which explains the need for a synoptic approach, since value is something that is manifested in forms of structure). A semiotic system, then, is a social system with the added component of "meaning".

Blogger Comments:

Note that 'semiotic' here means 'social semiotic'. On this model, the somatic semiotic system of perception is a biological system 'with the added component of meaning'.

Shifting Perspectives For Understanding Different Systems

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 508):

For understanding physical systems, the critical approach was that of measurement; the dominant theme was mathematics, and the perspective essentially a synoptic one. But this did not serve well for interpreting biological systems; these are better understood in terms of change, so the perspective had to be altered, to become dynamic, with evolution as the dominant theme. For social systems, however, the dynamic perspective by itself lacked explanatory power, and in the present century it was overtaken by another synoptic approach, the theme of structuralism. Our conception of the nature of social systems has been largely moulded in structuralist terms.

The Problematic Relationship Between System And Instance

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 508):

What is problematic is the relationship between the system and the instance; or, to put it another way, what is the nature of a "fact" in these different realms of experience? A biological fact is different from a physical fact, and a social fact is different again; the relationship between that which can be observed, and the system-&-process lying behind what is observed, is significantly harder to establish when the system is a social system, because the phenomena involved are simultaneously of all three kinds.