Fact As Projection, Act As Expansion

Halliday (1994: 269):

The Congruent As A Common Coding Of Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 537):

"Congruent" is of course a contingent term. What it is saying is that, at the present moment in human history we can recognise forms of language which seem to represent a common coding of experience: this is the configuration that we referred to as "process + participant + circumstance" which is construed in grammars through some version of the trichotomy of verb, noun and the rest. If we relate this to English, it is the form of English that is learnt as a mother tongue, in which phenomena are interpreted clausally, in a kind of dynamic equilibrium of happenings and things. 

The prototypical thing is a concrete object which can be related by similarity to certain other objects, such that taken together they form a class, like engines. The prototypical happening is a change in the environment that is perceptible to the senses, or a change in the senser's own consciousness. A process is a happening involving one or two such objects, or one object and a conscious being. 

When children move from their own constructed protolanguage into the mother tongue, this provides a theory which they can use to give a plausible construction to their own individual experience.

The Greater Potential Of Gestural Resources For Iconicity

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 534):

Gestural systems, by contrast, have a far greater potential for construing experience iconically. Thus in Johnston (1989: 16) "signs are roughly graded into four classes of transparent, translucent, obscure and opaque signs, depending on how iconic a sign is"; and while most signs fall in between the two extremes — Johnston grades them as obscure or translucent, rather than opaque or transparent — many of those he labels "obscure" have a popular explanation in iconic terms (e.g. 2388: n. CAMERA, v. TAKE A PICTURE, PHOTOGRAPH. Obscure action. Popular explanation: 'holding a camera and depressing the shutter button' [p. 301]). This suggests that even if particular explanations are "nothing more than deaf folklore" (p. 16), the system as a whole is perceived as prototypically iconic; and this feature is borne out in two important respects. 

One is that many of the signs construing basic categories of experience that would be learnt very early in childhood, in the transition from protolanguage to mother tongue — examples are 1291 GET; 1479 HOLD; 1824 RUN; 2473 BIRD; 2759 DRINK, CUP; 36 BED; 163 UP — are clearly iconic, and so would tend to establish iconicity as the norm. 

The other is that individual signs may be modified in a distinctively iconic fashion; e.g. 1471 "v LARGE, BIG, (with amplification) great, (with amplification and stress) enormous, huge, immense"; see in particular the section on "sign modification" in Johnston (1989: 494-9). As Johnston comments (p. 513), "A language which is itself visual and spatial has far more opportunities than an auditory one to map onto itself those very visual and spatial qualities of the world it wishes to represent".

The Limited Potential Of Vocal Resources For Iconicity

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 533-4):

We have referred all along to the primarily visual nature of human experience: how much of it is constituted as location, and especially movement, in space. Now, both gestural and vocal resources involve positioning and moving the organs of articulation in space; but the position and movement of the vocal organs, besides being largely out of sight of the listener, is very much mote constrained; and while this permits a limited degree of iconicity (association of close vowels with 'small', open with 'large', for example) this can never be more than a marginal feature of the system as a whole. Thus even allowing for the additional iconic potential of loudness and length, the expression systems of spoken languages must remain prototypically conventional. This is the familiar principle of the "arbitrariness" (i.e. conventionality) of the linguistic sign.

Given And New

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 529-30):

But the "Theme + Rheme" configuration becomes a message only when paired with another one, that of "Given + New". This construes a piece of information from the complementary point of view, as something having news value — something the listener is being invited to attend to. It may not contain anything the listener has not heard before; a great deal of "news" is totally familiar, being simply contrasted or even reiterated. On the other hand, the entire message may consist of unknown information, for example the first clause of a piece of fiction. 

But the message is construed along prototypical lines as an equilibrium of the given and the new, with a climax in the form of a focal point of information: 'this is to be the focus of your attention'. This focal point usually comes at the end; but (unlike the Theme + Rheme) the Given + New structure is not signalled, in English, by word order — it is signalled by intonation, and specifically by pitch prominence, the point of maximum perturbation (falling, rising or complex) in the intonation contour. The principle behind this is clear: if the Theme always came first, and the New always came last, there would be no possibility of combining them; whereas one powerful form of a message — powerful because highly marked — is that in which the two are mapped on to one another, as in no wonder they were annoyed (where the focus is on the interpersonal theme no wonder).

Degree Of Involvement: Subject

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 173):

The difference in the degree of involvement is also reflected in the extent to which an element is available for a critical role in the interpersonal metafunction. Prototypically, as we have noted, participants can be assigned the status of Subject, being made to carry the burden of the argument, whereas circumstances cannot. This distinction is however being obscured in Modern English, where although the prepositional phrase as a whole cannot function as Subject, the nominal group inside a prepositional phrase often can; e.g. the grass shouldn't be walked on.

Blogger Comments:

The obvious exceptions are circumstantial relational clauses, which are metaphorical.

Behavioural Processes [with caveat]

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 135-7, 136n):

As with all systems in language, any given instance will be more or less prototypical; and there may be subtypes lying intermediately at the borderline of the primary types. The grammar construes the non-discreteness of our experience by creating borderline cases and blends. One such area is that of behavioural processes (Halliday, 1985: 128-9): "processes of physiological and psychological behaviour, like breathing, dreaming, smiling, coughing". These can be interpreted as a subtype of material processes or as a borderline category between material and mental. They include conscious processing construed as active behaviour (watching, listening, pondering, meditating) rather than as passive sensing (seeing, hearing, believing). Like the Senser in a mental clause, the 'Behaver' in a behavioural one is endowed with consciousness; whereas in other respects behavioural clauses are more like material ones. Like material clauses (but unlike mental ones), behavioural clauses can be probed with do: What are you doing ? — I'm meditating but not I'm believing. Furthermore, behavioural clauses normally do not project, or project only in highly restricted ways (contrast mental: cognitive David believed —> the moon was a balloon with behavioural: David was meditating —> the moon was a balloon);² nor can they accept a 'fact' serving as Phenomenon (mental: David saw that the others had already left but not behavioural: David watched that the others had already left). In these respects, behavioural processes are essentially part of the material world rather than the mental one. Many of them are in fact further removed from mental processes, being physiological rather than psychological in orientation.

Such borderline cases, in which the pattern of reactances does not conform exactly to that of a major type, are typical of grammatical systems in general.

 

² For the special case of quoting by a behavioural process, as in "You're late again", she frowned, cf. the discussion of saying in Section 4.3.

Blogger Comments:

Caveat: Importantly, this is Matthiessen, not Halliday. For Halliday, behavioural processes do not project. Instead, instances like David was meditating (that) the moon was a balloon are mental clauses, where a behavioural feature has been added to a mental Process. Likewise, instances like "You're late again", she frowned are verbal nexuses, where a behavioural feature has been added to a verbal Process. Importantly, process type depends on the clause in which a verbal group functions, not on the most probable function of a verb (meditating, frowned).

The Cognitive Linguistic Position On Categorisation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 72):

Categorisation has received much attention in recent work in linguistics, especially within the framework of cognitive science. The received tradition was the classical or Aristotelian conception of a category as a type definable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions — its essential characteristics rather than its accidental ones. One central aim of cognitively oriented linguists has been to show that the Aristotelian conception does not apply to semantic categories, which have to be re-theorised in terms of prototype theory. The initial impetus came from a series of well-known experiments in categorisation by E. Rosch and by Labov (1973) and from Berlin & Kay's (1969) study of colour terms across languages; Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances had provided an earlier insight within a philosophical frame of reference (cf. Ellis, 1993). Since there are now a number of summaries of these positions, and of the critique of the Aristotelian conception (e.g. Lakoff, 1987; Taylor, 1989), we will not review the discussion here.

Rank–Shifted Vs Ranking [Definition]

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 382):

With only rare exceptions, all Qualifiers are rank–shifted. What this means is that position following the Thing is reserved for those items which, in their own structure, are of a rank higher than or at least equivalent to that of the nominal group; on these grounds, therefore, they would not be expected to be constituents of a nominal group. Such items are said to be ‘rank–shifted’, by contrast with ranking ones which function prototypically as constituents of the higher unit.

Relational Clauses: Prototypical Configuration

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 262):

This tells us something significant about a prototypical configuration of ‘being’: the experiential ‘weight’ is construed in the two participants, and the process is merely a highly generalised link between these two participants … Thus the verbs that occur most frequently as the Process of a ‘relational’ clause are be and have; and they are typically both unaccented and phonologically reduced … This weak phonological presence of the Process represents iconically its highly generalised grammatical nature. The limiting case of weak presence is absence; and the Process is in fact structurally absent in certain ‘non-finite’ ‘relational’ clauses in English … and in many languages there is no structurally present Process in the ‘unmarked’ type of ‘relational’ clause … Here the ‘relational’ clause is simply a configuration of ‘Be-er1’ + ‘Be-er2’.

Relational Clauses: Nature Of Unfolding

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 260):

Unlike ‘material’ clauses, but like ‘mental’ ones, ‘relational’ clauses prototypically construe change as unfolding ‘inertly’, without any input of energy — typically as a uniform flow without distinct phases of unfolding (unlike the contrast in material processes between the initial phase and the final phase of the unfolding of a process, the outcome).

Grammatical Labels

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 247):

It might be argued … that since grammatical and semantic categories are not in one-to-one correspondence, then if we use grammatical terms that are semantic in import (as nearly all grammatical terms are) we cannot expect them to be appropriate for all instances. The reasoning is quite valid; grammatical labels are very rarely appropriate for all instances of a category — they are chosen to reflect its central or ‘core’ signification ( … ‘prototype’ …). These core areas are the central region for each process type … and the non-core areas lie on the borders between the different process types, shading into one another as the colours of a colour spectrum.

Process Type As Continuous Semiotic Space: Core & Peripheral Areas

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 216):

The regions have core areas and these represent prototypical members of the process types; but the regions are continuous, shading into one another, and these border areas represent the fact that the process types are fuzzy categories.

Main Process Types Construed By The Transitivity Of English: Material & Mental

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 214):

There is a basic difference, that we become aware of at a very early age (three to four months), between inner and outer experience: between what we experience as going on ‘out there’, in the world around us, and what we experience as going on inside ourselves, in the world of consciousness (including perception, emotion and imagination). The prototypical form of the ‘outer’ experience is that of actions and events: things happen, and people or other actors do things, or make them happen. The ‘inner’ experience is harder to sort out; but it is partly a kind of replay of the outer, recording it, reacting to it, reflecting on it, and partly a separate awareness of our states of being. The grammar sets up a discontinuity between these two: it distinguishes rather clearly between the outer experience, the processes of the external world, and inner experience, the processes of consciousness. The grammatical categories are those of material process clauses and mental process clauses …

Metafunctions And Constituent Structure: Discreteness

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 84):

The general principle of discreteness means that each structural unit has clearly defined boundaries. But while this kind of segmental organisation is characteristic of the clause as representation, the clause in its other guises – as message, and as exchange – departs from this prototype. In its status as an exchange, the clause depends on prosodic features — continuous forms of expression, often with indeterminate boundaries; while in its status as message it tends to favour culminative patterns — peaks of prominence located at beginnings and endings.

How Other Socio–Semiotic Systems Relate To Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 606):

These systems enter into relation with language in two ways. On the one hand, they are metonymic to language: they are complementary, non-linguistic resources whereby higher–level systems may be realised … On the other hand, they relate metaphorically to language: they are constructed, stratally and metafunctionally, in the image of language itself, and hence can be modelled on language as prototype, being described “as if” they had their own grammar and semantics …

Cognitive Science’s Effacement Of Sensers

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 598):

… 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 processes in metaphorical terms is that the grammatical metaphor makes it possible to distance the account from our everyday experience. …

Given this orientation, it would thus seem that the unified senser existing as a person who “senses” is an illusion construed by the grammar as part of a folk theory of our own sense of conscious processing.

The Evolutionary Emergence Of Common Words Denoting Classes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 513):

[A] significant step that took place in human grammars … was … the evolution of common nouns — or rather, of common words, since verbs are “common” in this sense: that is, words denoting classes rather than individuals. It is usually assumed that these evolved out of “proper” words, prototypically the names of individual persons; the ontogenetic evidence suggests that this is one source but not the only one, another source being rather in the interpersonal function.

Why Language Is The Prototypical Human Semiotic System

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 509-10):

Language is set apart, however, as the prototypical semiotic system, on a variety of different grounds:

it is the only one that evolved specifically as a semiotic system;

it is the one semiotic into which all others can be “translated”; and

it is the one whereby the human species as a whole, and each individual member of that species, construes experience and constructs a social order.

In this last respect, all other semiotic systems are derivative: they have meaning potential only by reference to models of experience, and forms of social relationship, that have already been established in language. It is this that justifies us in taking language as the prototype of systems of meaning.

Blogger Comment:

Beyond the narrow world of one species, Homo sapiens, language is least typical of all semiotic systems, being mostly confined to humans and being, on the SFL model, the only semiotic system with a stratified content plane.

The Interaction Base: Moves

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 376-7):

The interaction base provides the resources for enacting social rôles and relations as meaning, (prototypically) in dialogue. The interaction base includes the strategies for adopting and assigning speech rôles, for giving and demanding assessments, and the like. The locus of these strategies is a unit of interaction or move. A move is typically mapped onto a figure from the ideation base: a speaker construes a quantum of experience as a figure and enacts this figure as a move in dialogue, either as a proposition or as a proposal. This mapping between figure and move is a central feature of the way we jointly construct and negotiate experience.