Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 428):
Thus while our view that the ideational semantic system construes human experience is similar to what Lakoff (1987; 1988) calls the position of "experientialist cognition" (the position he has himself espoused, in contrast with what he calls "objectivist cognition"), it differs in that for us construing experience is an intersubjective process. It is at once both semiotic (the construction of meaning) and social (as in Peter Berger's "social construction of reality": cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1966, Wuthnow et al, 1984). It is the intersection of these two perspectives that characterises the social semiotic we are attempting to present in this book (cf. Lemke, 1995; Thibault, 1993).