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.