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.