Since figures of sensing are reined as participants, the path is opened up to the taxonomic interpretation of sensing, in the form of scientific taxonomy: memory —long-term/short-term memory, sensory memory, semantic memory; recall — free recall; learning — associative learning/cognitive learning/classical conditioning;....
The participants, on the other hand, which represent the prototype of entities persisting in time and space, are usually not subject to this kind of modification; but they are organised in fairly elaborate taxonomies. These may be construed as systematic relations among different lexical items: thus eyes, nose, mouth, chin are all different parts of face, and lamb, pork , mutton, beef are all different kinds of meat. Something of the same sort happens with verbs, but to a much lesser extent.The other resource for constructing taxonomies of things is the expansion of the nominal group, and here the picture is very different from that with verbs. Nouns are expanded lexically as well as grammatically, so that, while entities (like processes) are located deictically relative to the 'here-&- now', they are also (unlike processes) extensively classified and described.An example such as those two nice colourful picture postcards of Honolulu that Sandy sent us shows these resources at work: cards are classified as postcards rather than, say, playing cards; postcards as picture postcards not plain postcards; picture postcards are described as colourful, and also (signalling the speaker's attitude to them) as nice; they are quantified, as two, and specified deictically as those. Further than that, both a circumstantial feature (of Honolulu) and even an entire process (that Sandy sent us) can be brought in as characteristics which specify more exactly the particular cards in question.Thus the grammar has the potential for construing a complex arrangement of classes and subclasses for any entity which participates in a process; or, on the other hand, of naming it as an individual, by using a "proper" noun instead of a common one. Proper nouns are already fully specific, and hence seldom expanded experientially (they are often expanded interpersonally!); but common nouns are almost indefinitely expandable, and it is this resource which organises our universe into its elaborate taxonomies of things.
Thus in English the more structure that is to be imposed on experience the more pressure there is to construe it in the form of things. But things are merely the end-point of the metaphoric scale. Processes, though more constrained than things, still have more semantic potential than relators: they accommodate categories of time and phase, among others, and are construed in open lexical sets, whereas relators form closed systems. So there is also a pressure there too, to metaphorise conjunctions into verbs: then, so, because, before, therefore becoming follow, result, cause, anticipate, prove. (Circumstances are something of a special case because most of them already contain participants in minor, subsidiary processes — prepositional phrases in the grammar.) But it remains true that things are the most susceptible of being classified and organised into taxonomies; hence the primary motif of grammatical metaphor is that of construing a world in the form of things.
The minor processes that form circumstances (realised as prepositions in English) are even less taxonomisable; they are intermediate between processes and relators, and only the spatial ones (spatio-temporal) display any real paradigmatic organisation (to/from // towards/away from; inside/outside // into/out of; before/after // in front of/behind &c.).
Processes do resemble other processes, but they share different features with different others; no single line-up is dominant enough to form the basis for permanent hyponymy. For example, if we consider a small subset of the words expressing verbal processes offer, tell, promise, threaten, recommend, warn:(1) offer, promise, threaten have the feature 'offer'; tell, recommend, warn have the feature 'command'(2) offer, tell are neutral in orientation; promise, threaten, recommend, warn have the feature 'oriented to addressee'(3) within the addressee-oriented, promise, recommend have the feature 'desirable', threaten, warn have the feature 'undesirable'.(4) offer, promise, recommend take direct participant ('propose to give ... to Receiver'; 'propose that Receiver should obtain ...').(5) tell, warn take circumstance of Matter 'about...'.
Processes thus have much less potential than participants for being characterised and taxonomised. For example, with a process like decide we can add a circumstance to it, saying he decided quickly or he decided on the spur of the moment; but if we want to identify the occasion as unique we have to say this decision, the previous decision, the only good decision he ever made. We can say his absurd decision but not he decided absurdly — at least not in the same sense, since absurdly could only characterise the figure (how he carried out the act of deciding), not the quality of the process of deciding as such.
Participants are realised by nominal groups, which allow more or less indefinite expansion (through the univariate structure of modification). This expansion is the grammar's way of constructing taxonomies of things: grouping them into classes, assigning properties to them, quantifying them and then uniquely identifying any individual thing, or any number, set or class of things, in relation to the 'here-&-now' of the speech event.
The expansion involves open sets of things and qualities, realised by lexical items; but it can also capture a circumstance, realised by a prepositional phrase, or an entire figure, realised by a clause, and put it to use as a quality in describing or identifying such a thing or set of things, e.g. this unique 20-piece handprinted china dinner service with optional accessories never before offered for sale at such a bargain price.Qualities are attached to things, and so contribute to this overall expansion. They also have possibilities of expansion of their own, by submodification (at least for intensity, but sometimes along other lines as well: very long, longest; dark blue, red hot). …This grammatical potential for taxonomising is complemented by the lexical potential of the nominal group for construing feature networks. So by construing any phenomenon of experience as a thing, we give it the maximum potential for semantic elaboration.
… we can summarise the principle of metaphoric shift as in Figure 6-3 …We can see from this figure that the drift towards 'thinginess' is the culminating and most clearly articulated form of a shift which can be characterised in more general terms as a shift towards the experiential — towards that mode of construing experience that is most readily organised into paradigmatic sets and contrasts. Things are more easily taxonomised than qualities, qualities than processes, and processes more easily than circumstances or relations. Since the 'noun-ness' is being used to construe phenomena that start out as something else than a noun, metaphors will inevitably be abstract. If the surgeon makes an incision, instead of cutting, the cut is being presented as a more abstract version of the experience. This is further reinforced if, as is often the case, the metaphorical term comes from the more highly valued lexical stockpile of Latin and Greek roots.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 217):
From an ideational point of view, the temporality of processes is their salient characteristic. As we saw, there are no semantic or grammatical systems for construing processes into elaborate taxonomies, as there are for construing things. Apart from considerations of time we have also shown that processes can be classified according to their potential for serving in figures of different types.
But we also have to recognise that there is a systematic relationship among a set of terms such as bicycle, tandem, scooter, car, van, truck and bus. Here the form of wording gives no clue to any such relationship; all we have is an inventory of different words. Yet these also form some kind of a taxonomic set: they are all wheeled vehicles. We can have taxonomies of things without using the syntagmatic resources of the nominal group, simply by the device of naming — the organising principle is not syntagmatic but paradigmatic.But there is a difference. The paradigmatic strategy, that of inventing new names, typically construes sets of things which are systemically related but not in a relationship of strict taxonomy. This resource is typically associated with feature networks: that is, networks made up of systems of features, such that each lexical item (as the name of a thing) realises a certain combination of these features selected from different systems within the network — a particular clustering of values of systemic variables.
The expanded form of the nominal group makes explicit the systematic taxonomic relationship which links one thing with another: it is clear that (theoretically at least) a touring bike is a kind of bike, a bicycle wheel is a kind of wheel. It is always possible, of course, to expand in a metaphorical way, as with cart wheel (in turning cart wheels) and Catherine wheel (a kind of firework); these are not, strictly speaking, kinds of wheel, so we have to recognise either that these fall outside the taxonomic organisation or that the taxonomy itself is being extended metaphorically. But this does not affect the general principle at work; indeed, it is the taxonomic principle which makes such divergence possible.
This syntagmatic resource serves prototypically to construe things into strict taxonomies, based on the principle of hyponymy. Thus a touring bike is a kind of bike, a reinforced touring bike is a kind of touring bike, and so on. Since touring is a Classifier, this means that it is one of a defined set: perhaps touring/racing/mountain/exercise/trail. Epithets do not assign classes, but they specify a particular dimension of taxonomic space: e.g. source European/American/Japanese...'.One type of classification is meronymic (part-whole), where the thing is classified by the whole of which it forms a part, e.g. bicycle wheel 'wheel (that forms part) of a bicycle'. These are often indeterminate in meaning: if definite, they tend to be strictly meronymic (somebody stole my bicycle wheel), whereas if indefinite, they are often classifying by type (the kids were playing with a bicycle wheel 'wheel for/ from a bicycle').
These primary categories of things represent an ordering of the phenomena of experience. This ordering has to do with their inherent potential for bringing about change: that is, their ability to initiate processes and to affect other participants.
One way of exploring this is by noting which participant roles each category of participant is typically associated with. The critical roles, in this respect, are those of Senser, Sayer and Actor, operating respectively in figures of sensing, saying and doing & happening. When we investigate these, however, we find that the overall categorisation of phenomena that is revealed in this way displays a further dimension of complexity: at the highest level, all phenomena are distributed into two broad experiential realms, the material and the semiotic. This suggests that we should further modify the schema of primary categorisation by splitting it into these two realms as shown in Figure 5-7. This figure also splits the categories of object and abstraction between the two realms.
Extending figures can thus be used to construe meronymic taxonomies. In other words, they are (among other things) a theory of constituency, semantic composition, and other meronymic relations in language; so they can be used to create further relationships of the same kind. For example, the following paragraph establishes a meronymic taxonomy for sentences in Hawaiian:
Sentences are sequences bordered by periods, question marks, or exclamation points. In Hawaiian they can be thought of as simple, verbless, or complex. The most common simple sentence consists of verb phrase ± noun phrase(s). Verb phrases contain verbs as their heads; verbs are defined on the basis of potential occurrence with the particles marking aspect, especially ua (perfective aspect) . Noun phrases contain nouns or substitutes for nouns; these are names of persons or places, or are defined on the basis of potential occurrence after the article ka/ke (definite), or the preposition ma 'at'.
Elaborating figures can thus be used to construe hyponymic taxonomies. In other words, they are, among other things, a theory of the systemic organisation of the meaning potential itself; and, by virtue of this fact, they can be used to elaborate it further. For example:
The fuels of the body are carbohydrates, fats and proteins. These are taken In the diet. They are found mainly In cereal grains, vegetable oils, meat, fish and dairy products. Carbohydrates are the principal source of energy in most diets. […] Fats make up the second largest source of energy in most diets. […]
The ideation base is thus a resource both for construing experience and for construing its own construal of experience. It has the potential for expanding itself precisely because it includes a theory of how meanings are construed When children begin to make the transition from proto-language into language (that is, when they begin to develop the system of the mother tongue, typically early in the second year of life), these resources for self-construal are not yet in place. The first things that are construed by naming are individuals; there is as yet no potential for taxonomies of general classes. But children soon take the critical step of generalising across individuals (see e.g. Halliday, 1993a, on generalisation). From a lexicogrammatical point of view, this means that naming has been generalised from individual names ("proper nouns") to class names ("common nouns").
Blogger Comments:
Viewed through the lens of SFL Theory, the shift from naming individuals to naming classes is the shift from assigning token-value relations (identity) to assigning token-type relations (ascription: instantiation); see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 145).
Field, tenor and mode variables are the basis for any attempt to develop a taxonomy of situations. At the same time, since text is language functioning in context, the field, tenor and mode variables are also the basis of any attempt to develop a taxonomy of texts operating in situations. It is certainly true that in developing a taxonomy of texts, we can adopt – we need to adopt – a trinocular perspective, matching up contextual, semantic and lexicogrammatical considerations to support the taxonomy. However, to be meaningful, a taxonomy of texts must be grounded in contextual considerations. If the taxonomy is ‘on the right track’, semantic and lexicogrammatical considerations will align themselves with the contextual ones.
