The Registerial Origins And Functions Of Nominalising Metaphor

Halliday (1994: 353):

Demetaphorising

Halliday (1994: 348):

From Conation To Tense And Modalty

Halliday (1994: 281):

The Time–Phase System That Has Become Tense

Halliday (1994: 279):

The Phylogenesis Of The Transitivity System

Halliday (1994: 163):

Structural Properties Are Not Arbitrary

Halliday (1994: 16):

Phonological Constituency

Halliday (1994: 6, 7):

From Graphological To Grammatical Constituency

Halliday (1994: 5-6):

The Natural (Non-Arbitrary) Relation Between Semantics And Lexicogrammar

Halliday (1994: xvii-xviii):

The Three Distinct Senses In Which SFG Is A Functional Grammar

Halliday (1994: xiii-xiv):

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.

The Transition From Protolanguage To Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 614):

Children make the transition from protolanguage to language typically in the second half of the second year of life. The transition has been described in detail elsewhere, based on intensive observations of individual children (see especially Painter, 1984, 1989; Oldenburg, 1987); we may assume that in general terms they are recapitulating the phylogenetic evolution of language, although of course we can only speculate about the way that evolution took place (it is important to say explicitly that all human languages known today are equally far removed from that phase in our semiotic history). During that stage they learn to construe elements and figures, and in this way "semanticise" both the construction of experience and the enactment of interpersonal relations. In terms of the grammar, they learn to form groups and clauses, and to select systemic options simultaneously in transitivity and in mood.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, ontogenesis does not recapitulate phylogenesis, in either life or language. For example, the phylogenesis of Modern English includes stages of both Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, but the ontogenesis of Modern English does not.

A more plausible claim would be that present-day ontogenesis of language from protolanguage still broadly resembles this ontogenesis at the time that language first emerged.

[2] To be clear, 'all human languages known today are equally far removed from that phase in our semiotic history' in the same sense that all extant ape species are equally far removed from the evolutionary split from what became the monkey lineage. However, like the different ape species, different languages do not change at the same rate in phylogenetic time.

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".

The Evolution Of Reality Construction

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 607):

Neurobiologists interpret the evolution of the brain in vertebrate species as the evolution of the species' potential for constructing reality (Jerison, 1973 (1992); Edelman, 1992). Evolution brings about a constant change in the organism's relation to its environment; this relationship becomes increasingly complex, so that the organism's model of the environment has to become increasingly complex in its turn. This, it is suggested, is what "drives" the evolution of more and more complex brain structures.

'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.

Language As Part Of A More Complex Semiotic Construct

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):

In other words, language has evolved as part of our own evolution. It is not arbitrary; on the contrary, it is the semiotic refraction of our own existence in the physical, biological, social and semiotic modes. It is not autonomous; it is itself part of a more complex semiotic construct — which, as we have tried to show, can be modelled in stratal terms such that language as a whole is related by realisation to a higher level of context (context of situation and of culture). This contextualisation of language, we suggested, was the critical factor which made it possible to relate language to other systems-&-processes, both other semiotic systems and systems of other kinds.

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.

Blogger Comments:

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.

Folk Models As Evolved And Everyday, Scientific Models As Designed And Restricted

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 573):

As we noted above, folk models are part of the unconscious background of thinking in everyday situation types; they have evolved without any conscious design and are not associated with academic contexts. Folk models can also be more conscious, of course — these are the models that people talk about, that they believe they believe. Scientific models are consciously designed in more restricted situation types, usually within academic institutions, to serve as resources in reasoning about the world.

The Shift From Folk To Scientific Models

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 572-3):

The shift from folk models to scientific ones thus takes place over a long period of time; it typically involves several factors: see Figure 14-2.

The Emergence Of Scientific Registers In The West

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 569-70):

In the early scientific period in the West, new registers evolved as part of the ongoing reconstruction of experience in the form of systematic knowledge and experimental science. Perhaps the earliest to evolve in these new contexts were those registers associated with the exploration, storage and dissemination of new knowledge about plants and herbs in the 16th and 17th centuries. These new contexts put pressure on the linguistic resources, and the meaning-creating power of these resources correspondingly increased. We can hypothesise a gradual evolution from the registers of ordinary language, with their folk models of the world, including folk taxonomies of plants and herbs, to more specialised scientific ones. It was at this point, as people became aware of the rapid development of new knowledge and the need for processing and storing it, that conscious design of language began, with nomenclatures and taxonomies being explicitly discussed and fixed. At the same time — but in this case without conscious design — new ways of meaning evolved in the construction of figures and sequences.