Construing Experience As Meaning

Halliday (1994: 108):

The Stratification Of Language

Halliday (1994: 15):

What A Natural Symbolic System Of Lexicogrammar Enables

Halliday (1994: xviii):

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.

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".

'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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.