Three Levels Of Human Individuality: Biological Organism, Social Person, Socio-Semiotic Meaner

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 610-1):

The human individual is at once a biological "individual", a social "individual" and a socio-semiotic "individual": 

as a biological "individual", s/he is an organism, born into a biological population as a member of the human species. 

as a social "individual", s/he is a person, bom into a social group as a member of society. "Person" is a complex construct; it can be characterised as a constellation of social roles or personae entering into social networks … . 

as a socio-semiotic "individual", s/he is a meaner, born into a meaning group as a member of a speech community. "Meaner" is also a complex construct. For the socio-semiotic construction of the individual subject, see Thibault (1993) … .

These different levels of individuality map onto one another: a meaner is a person, and a person is a biological organism. But the mappings are complex; and at each level an individual lives in different environments — in different networks of relations.

Lakoff's Cognitive Semantics vs A Social Semiotic Perspective

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 428):

Thus while our view that the ideational semantic system construes human experience is similar to what Lakoff (1987; 1988) calls the position of "experientialist cognition" (the position he has himself espoused, in contrast with what he calls "objectivist cognition"), it differs in that for us construing experience is an intersubjective process. It is at once both semiotic (the construction of meaning) and social (as in Peter Berger's "social construction of reality": cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1966, Wuthnow et al, 1984). It is the intersection of these two perspectives that characterises the social semiotic we are attempting to present in this book (cf. Lemke, 1995; Thibault, 1993).

Language And Gesture

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 46-7):

Most accounts of ‘multimodal text’ so far have probably focused on combinations of written texts and instances of ‘visual semiotic’ systems. From a developmental and evolutionary point of view, it would make more sense to start with spoken texts unfolding together with instances of other somatic semiotic systems (i.e. other semiotic systems using some aspect of the body as their expression plane; see Matthiessen, 2009a, and cf. Thibault’s, 2004, notion of the ‘signifying body’) before moving on to interpret and describe exo-somatic semiotic systems. Indeed, the protolanguages of early childhood tend to be both vocal and gestural in their expression (see Halliday, 1975, 1992d, 2004); and we can hypothesise that the same was true of protolanguages in human evolution (see Matthiessen, 2004a). … An early systemic functional contribution to the study of language and gesture is Muntigl (2004), and the systemic functional work on language and gesture has been followed up by Hood (2011).

Blogger Comment:

Not insignificantly, the theoretical basis of "Hood's contribution to the study of language and gesture" is the unpublished work of this blogger (Cléirigh 2009), which distinguishes — on the basis of ontogenesis and phylogenesis — between protolinguistic, linguistic and epilinguistic gesture–&–posture systems.