Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 509):
Meaning can be thought of (and was thought of by Saussure) as just a kind of social value; but it is value in a significantly different sense — value that is construed symbolically. Meaning can only be construed symbolically, because it is intrinsically paradigmatic, as Saussure understood and built in to his own definition of valeur. Semiotic systems are social systems where value has been further transformed into meaning.
A phenomenon of experience is construed as a category in the ideation base by being given a location in the three semantic networks described in the preceding section. This taxonomic, meronymic and eco-functional location is the category's value (valeur) in relation to the other categories within the ideation base. By being assigned a value internal to the ideational system, a semantic category is also being related to categories that lie beyond semantics itself. On the one hand it is being related to categories within systems that lie outside language but which the semantic system interfaces with; on the other hand it is being related to the grammatical categories in terms of which it is realised. Figure 2-18 shows these three strata! angles on the process of construal.
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Importantly, these are categories of perceptual semiotic systems. SFL Theory makes the assumption of immanence: all meaning is within semiotic systems.
Meaning can be thought of (and was thought of by Saussure) as just a kind of social value; but it is value in a significantly different sense — value that is construed symbolically. Meaning can only be construed symbolically, because it is intrinsically paradigmatic, as Saussure understood and built into his own definition of valeur.
A phenomenon of experience is construed as a category in the ideation base by being given a location in the three semantic networks […]. This taxonomic, meronymic and eco-functional location is the category’s value (valeur) in relation to the other categories in the ideation base. By being assigned a value internal to the ideational system, a semantic category is also being related to categories that lie beyond semantics itself. On the one hand it is being related to categories within systems that lie outside language but which the semantic system interfaces with; on the other hand it is being related to the grammatical categories in terms of which it is realised.
The vertical axis of the network is unordered; systems are arranged so as to make the two-dimensional representation of the wiring as simple as possible. But the horizontal axis is ordered from left to right on a scale of delicacy, or refinement in detail (referred to in computational grammars as “granularity”). Here the ordering is determined by the interrelations among the various systems, irrespective of how their terms are realised in structure. This is a fundamental consideration: one of the reasons for making the underlying representation paradigmatic was in order to free it from constraints of structure, so that every feature could be located according to its relationship with other features. In other words, describing something, and relating it to everything else (to its agnates), which in a description based on structure are two distinct operations, in a systemic grammar are one and the same operation. Each feature is described by being located in its paradigmatic context.
