The Purpose And Means Of Analysing Discourse

Halliday (1994: 366):

The Need To Account For Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday (1994: 366):

Coherence And Reality Construction

Halliday (1994: 339):

The Textual Component Of Grammar Gives Texture To Discourse

Halliday (1994: 334):

Textual Cohesion As An Aspect Of Text As Process

Halliday (1994: 311):

Cohesion: Non-Structural Lexicogrammatical Resources Of The Textual Metafunction

Halliday (1994: 309):

The Inbuilt Limitations Of Structural Relationships Between Clauses

Halliday (1994: 309):

Method Of Development (Fries)

Halliday (1994: 61):

The Information Unit

 Halliday (1994: 59):

The Stratification Of Language

Halliday (1994: 15):

From Graphological To Grammatical Constituency

Halliday (1994: 5-6):

The Problem Of Examples

Halliday (1994: xxxiii):

Understanding The Code

Halliday (1994: xxxi-xxxii):

Syntagmatic vs Paradigmatic Grammars

Halliday (1994: xxviii):

Discourse Analysis

Halliday (1994: xxii):

The Central Place Of Grammar In Discourse Analysis

Halliday (1994: xvi-xvii):

Lower And Higher Levels Of Achievement In Discourse Analysis

Halliday (1994: xv-xvi):

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.

Mode And Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 536):

Many "spoken" languages may be realised in two different media: in speech, and in writing. At first this presents itself just as two modes of expression; but when we look more closely at discourse in spoken and written language we find regularly associated differences in grammatical construction. We find written language constructed in nominal groups, whereas spoken language is typically constructed in clauses. And since it is in the grammar that our experience is construed into meaning, what we are seeing are different forms of the construction of experience, one couched primarily in terms of figures, the other in terms of elements that make up such figures, mainly those that function as participating entities.

Our basic approach to this is embodied in the term "metaphor", as used in the context of metaphor in the grammar. We used the expression "grammatical metaphor" to refer to a complex set of interrelated effects whereby, in English and many other languages, there have evolved what seem to be alternative representations of processes and properties, in terms of word classes, meanings prototypically construed as verbs or adjectives come to be construed as nouns instead. But, as we saw, this is simply the superficial manifestation of a wider and deeper phenomenon affecting the entire construal of experiential meanings in the grammar.

The Resources For Creating Cohesion

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 530):

Over and above its contribution to the grammar of the clause, what we are calling the "textual" metafunctional component comprises a further set of resources, which construe clauses and clause complexes into longer stretches of discourse without the formality of further grammatical structure. These are the resources for creating "cohesion". These are of four kinds: reference (sometimes called "phora", to distinguish it from reference as defined in the philosophy of language), ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.