Folk And Scientific Models As Co-existing Varieties

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 573-4):

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.

Fig. 14-3: Folk and scientific models within the ideation base

Models Of Experience: Instantiation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 566, 567):

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.

Registerial Variation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 563):

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.

Register Variation Defined

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 554):

This illustrates one very powerful feature of a probabilistic system of this kind: that it accommodates systematic functional variation. We have discussed the two text types, weather forecasting and recipes, as examples of variation in register: of the way in which the meaning selections in texts tend to vary systematically with their contextual function — their value in the social process. We pointed out that this variation is seldom categorical: except in very closed registers, or "restricted languages", no major options are likely to be totally excluded. What happens is that the probabilities are reset. This may be a relatively minor skewing affecting a large number of semantic features; but one or other system may stand out by being particularly clearly realigned, as happens with tense and with mood, respectively, in our two examples. We can in fact define register variation as the resetting of probabilities in the lexicogrammatical and semantic systems, including those in the ideation base. We observe these probabilities in the form of frequencies in the text;

Systemic vs Registerial Probabilities

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 553-4):

What we are saying is that there is a global pattern of probabilities in English, including a probability profile of the tense system whereby the probability of future is (say) 0.1. The register of weather forecasting, however, sets up a local pattern in which the probability of future is (say) 0.5. This changes the meaning of the system of primary tense, because it reverses the marking and hence sets up a new relationship among the different terms. It construes a realm of experience in which the future becomes the familiar dimension of time, the point of reference by which both present and past are defined.

Text Frequencies Manifest System Probabilities

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 552-3):

We have sometimes referred to the relative frequency of a particular feature of the grammar. For instance, in our two examples of the meaning base as a resource in language processing, certain patterns characteristically recurred: future tense in the weather forecasts, imperative mood in the recipes. In each case this was a special feature pertaining to the register in question: in weather forecasts, the future tense is especially frequent relative to the other primary tenses.

To say this means that there is a general expectancy in English discourse that, again relative to the other primary tenses, future will occur less frequently than it does here. In other words, there is some global expectation, in the grammar of English, about the relative frequency of the different terms in the primary tense system, past, present and future. Similarly there is some global expectation about the relative frequency of imperative and indicative mood. Frequency in the text is to be interpreted, therefore, as the manifestation of underlying probability in the system.

Instantial System

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 384-5):

If we look at logogenesis from the point of view of the system (rather than from the point of view of each instance), we can see that logogenesis builds up a version of the system that is particular to the text being generated: the speaker/writer uses this changing system as a resource in creating the text; and the listener/reader has to reconstruct something like that system in the process of interpreting the text — with the changing system as a resource for the process of interpretation. We can call this an instantial system (see Matthiessen, 1993c). 

For example, in the course of logogenesis, a recipe is built up as a series of ordered loops through the system of sequences, whereas an encyclopaedic entry may be built up as a systemic taxonomy, developed step by step in delicacy. 

An instantial system may fall entirely within the registerial system it instantiates; in other words, the meanings created within it may all have been created before. However, it may also create new meanings — new to the speaker and/or listener. In either case, the instantial system is built up successively by the generation process; but as it is developed, it in turn becomes a resource for further instantiation.

Logogenesis

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 384, 385):

A text is generated within the logogenetic time-frame. In fact, generation is a logogenetic process: it creates meaning in the course of instantiation as the text unfolds — see Figure 9-5.

Stratification x Instantiation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 381, 384):

Table 9(2) represents the intersection of instantiation and stratification, providing a schematic map of the overall semiotic space (the table has been adapted from a fuller version presented in Halliday, 1995). We have shown the ideational 'slice' of the overall picture in bold italics. (We have left the phonological cells unspecified … but the cline of instantiation is equally important at this lowest stratum of language.)

Stratification, Metafunction And The Cline Of Instantiation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 381, 383):

Figure 9-4 represents the stratal organisation of the resources, diversified into field, tenor and mode (within context) and into ideational, interpersonal and textual (within the content strata of language). As we have noted, these resources are extended along the cline of instantiation from potential (language in context of culture) via subpotentials (registers in situation types) to instances (texts in contexts of situation). Figure 9-4 shows the stratified resources as being extendable along the cline of instantiation.

Interpersonal Semantics: Exchange Relationship

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 377-8):

Midway between potential and instance, sets of such strategies cluster within ranges of tenor values. Such a cluster is the interpersonal analogue of a domain in the ideation base: it is a region within the overall interpersonal space of meaning, selected according to tenor, just as a domain is a region within the overall ideational space of meaning, selected according to field. 

The options in interpersonal meaning that make up the cluster together enact a tenor relationship, 

such as that between a client and a server (unequal in power, low in familiarity, neutral in affect) where the client initiates demands for goods-&-services and information about them and the server responds, 

such as that between two friends (equal in power, high in familiarity, positive in affect) where the interpersonal options are wide-ranging, or 

such as that between the writer of a weather report and the readers (unequal in expertise, no familiarity, neutral in affect) where the writer gives information and the readers accept. 

We might call such a cluster an exchange relationship to foreground that it is semantic (i.e. constituted in meaning through exchanges of meaning) and that it is interpersonal (rather than one-sidedly personal). 

To indicate that it is analogous to a domain model, we might have called it an exchange or interaction "model"; but we have avoided that term because it suggests a construal of something and construal is the ideational mode of meaning — it is more like a protocol than like a model.

Interpersonal Semantics: System

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 377):

The interaction base extends along the cline of instantiation. At the potential end of the cline of instantiation, the interpersonal strategies that have the move as their domain are defined by all the options persons have in exchanging meanings with one another, adopting speech roles of giving/demanding information or goods-&-services and assigning complementary roles of accepting or giving on demand to the addressee. These constitute all the patterns of interaction within a culture.

The Semantic System Or "Meaning Base"

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 376, 377):

The semantic system, or "meaning base", thus consists of the three familiar metafunctional contributions: the ideation base, the part of the meaning base that we have focussed on, but also the other two bases, the interaction base and the text base. All three bases are extended along the cline of instantiation from potential to instance. … Table 9(1) summarises those aspects of the three bases to be discussed.

Climate And Weather As System And Instance

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 328):

The terms climate and weather are related to each other as langue to parole: as the system of language is to its instantiation in text. Weather is the instantiation of climate; climate is the system 'behind' the weather. As with language, there is, of course, only one set of phenomena here not two; when we refer to climate we are construing general principles and tendencies that 'explain' the multidimensional microvariation that is what we actually have to live with …

Realisation vs Instantiation vs Delicacy

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 327):

It is important perhaps to make quite explicit the distinction among the three concepts of realisation, instantiation, and delicacy, since each of these is a distinct scale of abstraction. It is easiest to describe them in terms of metalanguage dynamics: what we are doing when we move along these different scales. 

(1) Realisation is the relation of one stratum to other strata (in any stratified system, with language as prototypical); when we shift attention from semantics 'upwards' into context or 'downwards' to lexicogrammar and phonology/ graphology, we are moving in realisation. We can do this at any degree of delicacy, from most general to most specific; and we can do it at any point along the instantiation scale, from system to text.  

(2) Instantiation is the relation between the system and the instance. When we shift attention along this scale, we are moving between the potential that is embodied in any stratum and the deployment of that potential in instances on the same stratum. Again, this move can be made at any degree of delicacy.  

(3) Delicacy is the relation between the most general features and the most specific. When we shift attention from, say, 'recreation' to 'hockey' at the level (stratum) of context, or from 'syllable' to long open nasal syllable' to /pã:/ in phonology, we are moving in delicacy. Again, we can do this at any point along the instantiation scale.

The Cline Of Instantiation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 323, 324):

Instantiation relates the system to the instance, at any given stratum; thus, at the semantic stratum, instantiation is as shown in Figure 8-2.

Four Representational Challenges For SFL Metalanguage

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 45):

We shall mention four such challenges briefly here.

(i) The first representational challenge is the need to handle the dimension of instantiation.  

As a process, instantiation can be represented as involving traversal of the system network and activation of realisation statements. The instance is thus a set of features (semantic types) selected, with associated realisational specifications — an instantial pattern over the semantic potential. 

However, instantiation also defines a scale between the potential and the instance, with intermediate patterns of instantiation. We will introduce these later as register-specific domain models. Such patterns of instantiation will need to be represented: perhaps as systemic probabilities, or as domain-partitions within the overall ideation base.

(ii) The second representational challenge is the need to model how the overall ideation base is expanded by grammatical metaphor. It must be shown how metaphor adds junctional types to the ordinary types …

(iii) The third representational challenge comes from outside the account of the ideation base itself: the ideation base has to be related to the other metafunctional modes of meaning, the interaction base and the text base. The interaction base will include alternative 'projections' of the ideation base to account for the relationship between speaker and addressee. …

(iv) The fourth representational challenge concerns the non-discreteness of the various systems that construe semantic space. The semantic types represented by the features of systems in the system network do not constitute discrete Aristotelian categories; they are values on semantic clines — core regions, to use the metaphor of semantic space. We can bring this out by adopting a topological view on meaning; we can also explore the possibility of interpreting features as names of fuzzy sets.

Metalanguage: Representation Stratum

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 33-4):

The theoretical model makes considerable demands on the representational system or systems in which it is realised. Such a system must be able to handle the axial differentiation of the meaning base so that it represents not only structural configurations but also variation in delicacy, the indeterminacy between options in meaning, the move in instantiation from potential to instance, and other theoretical specifications. …

As we have already noted, the representational semiotic may also be language itself — the theory may be represented discursively in the register(s) of linguistics. In this case, the relationship between theory and language is similar to … a relationship where theory might be construed as a connotative semiotic (in Hjelmslev's, 1943, conception: a semiotic system whose expression plane is a semiotic system) …

Finally, the representational semiotic may also be a diagrammatic one — e.g. network graphs, tree diagrams, our circle diagrams. With such graphic representation, it is important to ask (i) if the information represented graphically can be restated in some other form of representation and (ii) if its realisational relationship with respect to theory is clear. There is a certain danger that the graphic representation is simply assumed to be natural and transparent even though it depends as much on semiotic conventions as any other system. Our own experience with circle diagrams is that, unless the representational convention has been made explicit, readers favour certain types of meaning: the circles are interpreted in terms of 'extension' rather than in terms of 'elaboration' — which is to say, they are read in constituency terms rather than in realisational terms. In any case, diagrams will only serve us as 'visualisations' as long as they construe a metaphor of abstract space at the theoretical stratum.

Metalanguage: Theoretical Construal Stratum

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 32-3):

Thus any account of the ideation base has to be metalinguistically stratified It has to be constructed as a theoretical model out of the resources the theory provides and according to the constraints imposed by these resources. From a systemic-functional point of view, this means that the ideation base is construed as a multidimensional, elastic semantic space. This space is organised as a meaning potential, with an extensive system of semantic alternatives; these alternatives are ordered in delicacy. Each set of alternatives is a cline in semantic space rather than a set of discrete categories, and any alternative may be constituted structurally as a configuration of semantic roles. The meaning potential is thus differentiated axially into (i) systems of options in meaning and (ii) structural configurations of roles by which these options are constituted.

The meaning potential itself is one pole on the dimension of instantiation: it is instantiated in the unfolding of text, with patterns of typical instantiation (specific domains of meaning) lying somewhere in between the potential and the instance. At the same time, this overall ideation base can be expanded by various semogenic strategies, among which we are foregrounding that of grammatical metaphor.

The Overall Dimensions Of The Ideation Base: Delicacy x Instantiation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 14, 15):

 

In general, the ideation base can thus be thought of as a large semantic 'space' organised in terms of these two basic dimensions: see Figure 1-5 above.