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.
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.
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,
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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 models to scientific ones thus takes place over a long period of time; it typically involves several factors: see Figure 14-2.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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);andmode: 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.
The everyday folk models are likely to be embraced unconsciously by everybody in the culture, because they are everyday models, instantiated in casual conversation, and because they are construed as congruent in the cryptogrammar. The general model of the phenomena of our experience, including those of our own consciousness — seeing, thinking, wanting, and feeling — is of this highly generalised kind.
In contrast, scientific models are much more contextually constrained: they are developed, maintained, changed and transmitted within those situation types that we associate with scientific language.
At both these strata, models are also located along the cline of instantiation, running between the potential — the overall resources for making meaning, within the context of culture, and the instance — instantial 'texts' constituted of meanings that have been selected from this potential, within particular contexts of situation. The potential end of the cline of instantiation embodies all the contextual-semantic models that the culture embraces. …
Figure 14-1 shows the dispersal of contextual-semantic models along the cline of instantiation. As the figure indicates, an inherent property of instantiation is variation; and scientific models (like other subcultural models) vary one in relation to another. Sometimes they are complementary, sometimes they conflict.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 565-6):
Any given model of experience exists at different orders of abstraction. It is a configuration of higher-level meanings within the context of culture; at the same time, it is also construed semantical!y in the ideation base. The relationship between these two orders of abstraction, contextual and semantic, is a stratal one; hence a model is a cultural construct that is construed in language (together with other, language-dependent semiotic systems such as expository drawings and diagrams).
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 565):
We shall examine this variation [on the cline from folk to scientific theories] with particular reference to those phenomena to which we are offering the ideation base as a conceptual alternative: the mind, knowledge, cognition — as the concerns of cognitive science. We shall suggest that the domain of cognitive science is construed ideationally within the folk model; but that this model is extended metaphorically in cognitive science itself, and this extension in fact invites the interpretation of knowledge as meaning. … Cognitive science operates with a scientific model of the individual mind; but, we shall suggest, it is one that is based fairly uncritically on certain aspects of a folk model, in particular in its selection of, and perspective on, its own domain of enquiry.
As a resource for making sense of our experience, the ideation base enables us to construe a range of different theories, commonsense as well as scientific. There is a cline between folk, or commonsense, theories and scientific, or uncommonsense, ones; and at any point along the cline alternative theories may be in competition. The ideation base, by dint of being polysystemic, accommodates variation along this cline, not only from folk to scientific but also across alternatives: it embodies both congruent and metaphorical construals of experience, and it provides elasticity within the overall construction space.
From an educational point of view, the most fundamental complementarity is the move from the registers of everyday life to the registers of education: this is a move from folk or commonsense models to the "uncommonsense" models of systematic and technical knowledge. To say that the ideational system is polysystemic means that it can support these different theoretical angles on experience: semantic variation of all kinds is the manifestation of the different theoretical interpretations that language places on experience.
The overall ideation base thus comprises many different registerial variants — register-specific systems that we called domain models. Now, just as the overall ideation base is a theory of our total experience of the world around us and inside us — the theory that is shared by the culture as a whole, so also the different registerial variants constitute different 'subtheories' of our experience.
These 'subtheories' may complement one another by simply being concerned with different domains of experience. This complementarity is purely additive, although for society as a whole it constitutes the semiotic aspect of the division of labour, whereby different people construe different facets of the overall cultural experience.
But such subtheories may also be concerned with more or less the same domain, bringing alternative theoretical perspectives to the construal of experience that is shared. Halliday (1971) shows how this is achieved in William Golding's novel The Inheritors, by means of alternative deployments of the resources of transitivity as Golding presents the world view of two groups of early humans; these different perspectives on the shared experience are constituted as variants of the same overall transitivity system.
In addition, the ideation base is polysystemic in another sense: registerial variation. We have seen that such variation can be construed in terms of the probabilistic nature of the linguistic system, as variation in the probabilities associated with terms in systems. Seen in this light, a register is a particular probabilistic setting of the system; and the move from one register to another is a re-setting of these probabilities. What is globally the 'same' ideational semantic system can thus appear as a collection of different systems, as one moves along the cline of instantiation from potential to instance. As we noted above, the effect is quantitative; but it is also qualitative, in the sense that it provides different perspectives on experience within the same system.