Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 428):
Returning to Barwise's contrast between the mind-oriented view of meaning and the world-oriented view, we can note Barwise's general argument against the mind-oriented view:... representational mental states have meaning in exactly the same way that sentences and texts have meaning, and saying what one means is a complicated matter. This makes attempts to explicate linguistic meaning in terms of mental representations an evasion of the main issue: How do meaningful representations of all kinds, sentences and states, mean what they do? (Barwise, 1988: 38)We acknowledge this problem, but we believe the solution lies in a socio-semiotic view of meaning such as the one we are presenting here. Jackendoff views information about the projected world in conceptual terms; hence reality construction is seen as a process taking place within the consciousness of the individual.
Our own view, that the projected world is a semantic construction, foregrounds the interpersonal perspective: meaning is construed in collaboration. Meanings are exchanged; and the "projected world" is constantly calibrated against the interpersonal negotiation of meaning. This means that consensus and conflict take over much of the domain that is usually conceptualised in terms of truth and falsehood (cf. Eggins, 1990). The semantic system (as part of the linguistic system) is shared; it is part of our social being.