Appraisal: Attitude

Halliday (2008: 179):

This is a grammatical system that is realised by a selection of lexical items. Each such item is uniquely identified as a set of intersecting grammatical features; eg complicated is

appraisal: attitude: appreciation: composition: ( complexity : complex /  polarity: negative …)

as well as other general grammatical features (e.g. as distinct from confusing, which is “effective”, as in it confuses me, complicated is “descriptive”).  Note that I am interpreting the feature "undesirable" (the "snarl" member of the "purr/snarl" opposition) as negative in the environment of the interpersonal.

Lexical Items

Halliday (2008: 174, 180):

Lexical items, by contrast, form open sets; they are particular to certain domains, but open-ended and not so mutually defining: you can add a new lexical item to a set without perturbing the other members, whereas with a closed system if any term is added or taken away all the others move around. In other words, grammar and lexis are different manifestations of the principle of choice in a semiotic system. … 

each [lexical item] is the intersection of a number of component features, and such features can be networked — they are systemic.

Grammar: The Properties Of A Closed System

Halliday (2008: 174):

The notion of grammaticalisation depends on the notion of a closed system. This has the properties:

1. a small fixed set of possibilities, x/y/z…, which are
2. mutually exclusive, x = “not y or z”, and
3. strictly proportional, x : y : z, is constant, with
4. a defined condition of entry, eg nominal group, and
5. generalised to a large domain of application, eg every major clause

The Three Types Of Complementarity

Halliday (2008: 169):

The complementarity of grammar and lexis brings all of reality into focus, from the most general and all-pervasive kinds of phenomena to the most local, transitory and particular. The complementarity of system and text builds up a massive and open-ended meaning potential from countless small occasions of language use. The complementarity of speaking and writing allows for alternating between different semiotic states in resonance with the different contexts in which language functions. All of these complementarities are what lie behind the awesome power of human language.

Writing Creates Semiotic Stability

Halliday (2008: 168):

Thus the complementarity of speaking and writing is not a case of reciprocity. They do different things; not the same thing in different ways. Writing is secondary, derived; because of this it reaches a higher level of abstraction, creating through semantic junction a kind of semiotic stability, both ideational and interpersonal. Ideationally, it raises the commonsense theory of experience on to a more abstract and explanatory plane; so proverbs are replaced by axioms and equations as repositories of human knowledge. Interpersonally, it creates distance, and interaction among strangers: virtual interaction, as well as virtual dialogue brought about by projection. So writing is at one and the same time both more constraining and more enabling than speaking; and the fullest semiotic potential of the human brain, as we have inherited it, requires both.

Spoken Vs Written Language: Interpersonal Differences

Halliday (2008: 168):

Interpersonally, speaking is a two-way semiotic process, an ongoing exchange of meanings among different speakers; and analogously, spoken language is constantly shifting its deictic base, and alternating among the range of different speech functions. Writing is a one-way process (or was, until the coming of e-mail and then texting); and analogously, written language is largely invariant in mood and has a stable deictic base. While itself it is monologic, it can be turned into “virtual dialogue” by projection — which is another instance of semantic junction.

Written Sentence As Semantic Junction

Halliday (2008: 167-8):

So the written language tends to be configurational in its grammar: it displays the classic “constituent structure” on which formal linguistic categories are modelled — again, like writing itself; while the spoken language is organised like speech, with experience modelled as a flow of events where entities — persons and objects — are given value by their rôles as participants in these events. And since writing is, both as it evolved in the species and as it is developed by each individual, subsequent to and derived from speaking, the written sentence is itself a semantic junction — between its original state of being as a “flow of meaning”, in the spoken mode, and its adopted state of being as inscription, or documentation, in the written.

The Semantic Junction Of Ideational Metaphor: Semiotic Analogues

Halliday (2008: 167):

Those nominalised processes and qualities, which are semantic junctions of the core meaning of their original categories, as verb or adjective, with the core meaning of their adopted category as a noun, are the semiotic analogue of a written clause or sentence, which is a flow of meaning that has been frozen into a text; and the verbalised relators, likewise a semantic junction of their original category as conjunction with the core meaning of their adopted category as a verb, are analogous to the punctuation devices that link one written chunk with another.

The Evolution Of The Written Language

Halliday (2008: 167):

So the written language has always tended to make the world look like itself: stable, solid, dense, with recognisable chunks that may get built into substantial and complex structures. This was highly functional at the birth of experimental science, where the world needed to be held still so that it could be observed, measured and reasoned about.

The Evolution Of Written Languages

Halliday (2008: 166):

Written languages evolved to their present state in the “modern” period beginning with the European “renaissance”; but they were already launched along that journey in the ancient written cultures of Greece and Rome, India and China. The science and technology of the ancient world already needed virtual entities to think with, elements like motion and heat and distance and sum and addition which are the supports of the primary phase of our modern education. The more highly theorised learning of the renaissance took this metaphoric strategy one step further, constructing complex syndromes of virtual entities, virtual qualities and classes and virtual processes to achieve the “favourite clause type” of scientific writing — and now of many other kinds of writing besides the scientific.

The Semiotic Complementarity Of Speech And Writing: Ideation

Halliday (2008: 166):

We see this most clearly in the ideational metafunction, where […] the grammar of the written language tends to organise meaning around entities, or things; whereas the grammar of the spoken language organises meaning around processes — doing and happening; or rather, as a balanced array of processes, participants and circumstances, the “verbs, nouns and the rest” of the everyday spoken grammar.

The Semiotic Complementarity Of Speech And Writing

Halliday (2008: 165-6):

As written language evolved, itself as a metaphor for language in its original, spoken form, it opened the way to the metaphoric reconstrual of experience: to new ways of meaning, the forms of educational and technical knowledge that constitute the semiotic aspect of a set of massive changes in the human condition. This is where we find the complementarity, not of speech and writing as material modes (states of matter), but of spoken and written language as modes of meaning. The metaphorical and the congruent are complementary states of meaning — because speaking and writing both shape reality in their own image. Each one makes the world look like itself.

The Material Complementarity Of Speech And Writing

Halliday (2008: 165):

But if we talk of speech as liquid, writing as solid (or whatever metaphorical variant we find suggestive), what particular feature are we referring to? Most obviously, or most immediately, it is the nature of the medium itself; we are looking at speech and writing “from below”. Speech unfolds in time; its material existence takes the form of disturbances in the air; it can be “reduced to writing”, but then it has become writing, like dancers captured in metal or stone. Writing extends in space; it can be “read aloud”, but then it has become speech, like the river flowing out of a frozen glacier. These are just the two modes of material being. But they have different states of meaning, different semiotic modes, associated with them.

Speech And Writing As A Complementarity Of State

Halliday (2008: 165):

One and the same semiotic system–&–process, that we call “language”, is being manifested (to use the material states by way of analogy) either as liquid or as solid. Spoken language is liquid (some might say it often reaches a gaseous state) and transitory; written language is solid and permanent. There are many such pairs we could use as analogy: mercurial versus crystalline, river vs glacier, dance vs sculpture. What any such pair of terms must suggest is that both states of being are equally rich and equally complex.

The Notion Of Complementarity

Halliday (2008: 164-5):

I have used the term for three distinct dualities: first grammar and lexis, then system and text, and now speaking and writing. These three dyads are all distinct from each other. Grammar and lexis form a complementarity of focus, based on delicacy: meaning as generalities or as particulars. System and text form a complementarity of angle, based on instantiation: meaning as collections of instances or as potential. Speaking and writing are different from either of these. They form a complementarity of state, in the sense of different states of matter as solid, liquid and gas — except that here we are concerned with different states of meaning.

The Speech / Writing Complementarity

Halliday (2008: 164):

There is no denying that writing is parasitic on speech; or perhaps we should say epiphytic, since presumably it does not cause injury to its host. But once writing has evolved to the point where anything in the language can be written down, it adds a new dimension to the meaning potential. There is no point in arguing about which can develop more power; each has its own mechanisms and its own strategies, related to their complementary ways of achieving and managing complexity. But they generate power of rather different kinds.

Interpersonal Aspects Of The Spoken / Written Complementarity

Halliday (2008: 164):

Interpersonally, probably the most significant variable in this context is that of personality, the different personæ being taken on by the writer and the speaker. Writing departs much further from the dialogic foundations of language. There have always been monologic forms of speech; but writing alters the balance, shifting from the intersubjective to the subjective, with the interesting consequence that the writer is, relatively, more first-person oriented than the speaker. If you are writing, your addressees are, typically, virtual; whereas if you are speaking your addressee is typically actual, and this imposes constraints on the meaning-making process: it has to be more a matter of negotiation. So while the writer’s personal intrusion into the discourse may be less apparent, because the mood tends to be constantly declarative, it is clearly present in the lexicalised systems of appraisal that we have become familiar with in recent systemic work.

Grammatical Intricacy And The Logical Metafunction

Halliday (2008: 163):

The intricacy that is characteristic of spoken language is a different manner of deploying grammatical energy, exploiting the “logical” way of looking at phenomena (note that “logical” here always refers to grammatical logic, not to formal logic — which is a designed extension of it). The principle of setting up a logical-semantic relationship between two figures is extended recursively, so that it can be extended to construe complex sequences of figures that are related systemically: in grammatical terms, a “nexus” can initiate a “complex” of any length. […] It is a powerful resource; it suits the “choreographic” spoken language, which unfold in time and builds up its own discursive momentum.

Ideational Metaphor And Lexical Density

Halliday (2008: 163):

This [ideational metaphor] is a designed, or at least semi-designed, extension of the “experiential” way of looking at phenomena. It suits the “crystalline”, written mode of being; and in particular, as already said, it suits the elaborated discourses of organised knowledge, because it is good to think with — it enables you to build well-ordered conceptual structures and to spin tangled skeins of reasoning. High lexical density is the price to be paid.

Grammatical Intricacy And Lexical Density: Evolved Ways Of Managing Complexity

Halliday (2008: 161):

Grammatical intricacy [logical metafunction] and lexical density [experiential metafunction] are two ways of managing complexity: different strategies for transforming complex phenomena into edifices of meaning [ideational metafunction]. They are not intrinsically tied to the speech / writing complementarity; they derive from two variants both of which evolved in spoken language as a typological variable in the construal of complex processes.

Measuring Grammatical Intricacy

Halliday (2008: 161):

Grammatical intricacy can be measured as the number of ranking clauses in the clause complex. But this is more problematic: partly because it requires criteria for identifying the limits of a clause complex in spoken discourse, and partly because it makes no sense to calculate it as a mean. The reasons for this have nothing to do with the way spoken language construes experience; they are not ideational but interpersonal. Spoken language is inherently dialogic in nature, with very many short turns guiding the interaction; whereas intricate clause complex structures can only occur in the more monologic interludes in the dialogue. Thus the mean figure for intricacy would be essentially meaningless.

Measuring Lexical Density

Halliday (2008: 158):

Lexical density can be measured as the number of lexical items (“content words”) per ranking clause. (A “ranking clause” is one that is functioning as a clause, independent or dependent; not “rank-shifted” to become part of something else.) Since it is a comparative measure, it does not matter exactly where the line between content words and function words is drawn, provided it is drawn consistently for all the texts under study.

The Complexity Of Spoken Vs Written Language Viewed ‘From Round About’: Grammatical Intricacy And Lexical Density

Halliday (2008: 158):

The complexity of spoken language is, as I put it, choreographic; it can build up quite elaborately structured clauses, and string these out in equally elaborate clause complexes, giving a commonsense picture of the world that is intricate but not dense: intricate in movement, like a dance, but not on the other hand very densely packed. It is rather explicit in showing the semantic relationships among its various components. By contrast, the complexity of written language could be described as crystalline: its clauses tend to be rather simple in structure, but they can be extremely dense, with the elements compressed into lengthy expansions of words, most typically nominal groups, and the semantic relations among the constituent elements very largely left implicit — for the informed reader to supply. I have referred to these two types of complexity as “grammatical intricacy” and “lexical density” respectively.

The Complementarity Of Congruent And Metaphorical Ideational Grammars

Halliday (2008: 157):

Once both grammars are in place, however, by the time the child enters secondary school, the two form complementary constructions of reality. Technical knowledge is construed almost entirely in these metaphoric terms. But since every adolescent started life as a child, the primary commonsense grammar is still in place, and the picture of the world that is being built up by language is not just the reconstructed version but a composite. The result is a multi-faceted perspective on reality which, if you come to terms with it, gives a plausible representation of the contemporary human environment.

Ideational Metaphor, Mode And Ontogenesis

Halliday (2008: 157):

… there are various reasons why this metaphoric [nominal-based] kind of grammar is associated with writing while the congruent, clause-based grammar is associated with speech. The metaphoric grammar could not function as the primary construction of reality — “primary” in the sense of the child’s mother tongue, the grammar through which experience is first construed. This is because this grammar is interpretable only as a transformation of something else: only as metaphor, in fact. … This kind of grammar can only function as a secondary construal of experience — just as writing can only function as a secondary construal of meaning, because writing is also metaphoric to speech.

Technical Term Vs Ideational Metaphor

Halliday (2008: 155):

A technical term […] is a dead metaphor, one that can no longer be “unpacked” — replaced by a non-metaphorical expression.

Lexical Metaphor Vs Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday (2008: 155):

In metaphor in its traditional sense, one word (lexical item) is replaced by another; here it is one grammatical category that is replaced by another.

Not All Trancategorisation Creates Semantic Junction (Grammatical Metaphor)

Halliday (2008: 154-5):

If we use the noun mover, “one who moves”, as when are the movers coming to shift the furniture, mover is indeed an entity; but it is an entity that is defined by a process — it does not embody the semantic feature of “process”. There is no semantic junction going on here.

The Power Of Writing

Halliday (2008: 153):

Writing creates conditions in which in which knowledge can be recorded and transmitted, and hence systematically extended as new experience accrues; it provided the soil in which new ways of meaning could germinate and flourish. But there is another feature of writing which gives it its special power.  Whereas speech is transitory and in flux, writing is permanent and stable; and this serves both as metaphor and as model for the grammar of written language: its own mode of being is the model for the meanings it construes.  In the commonsense world of doing and happening, which is created, and ongoingly maintained, by the spoken language, the unit of organisation is the clause, which construes experience in terms of movement and change.  But in the written language the organising unit becomes the noun, or rather the nominal group, which construes experience in terms of taxonomies of things.  And things are better to think with; they stay where they are.  So the written language makes the world look like writing itself: something that is stable, observable, and made up of clearly defined parts.

Language And Technology: Theory, Metaphor And Transcategorisation

Halliday (2008: 152-3):

Technology is based on things: complex things, whose parts are measured and consolidated into wholes. Grammatically, these things are construed as nouns and organised into taxonomies, on the principle of meronymy. Measuring and taxonomising are steps toward scientific theory; a theory is a designed construction of meanings (a piece of semiotic technology!) in which the grammar is being used to construe more elaborate and more abstract models of experience: cosmologies, geometries, theories of the socio-political and moral order. For the first two, at least, you need to theorise about generalised processes and qualities: [how] big things are, how fast and in what directions they move, how they change from one state to another; so the grammar turns these processes and qualities into pseudo-things, virtual objects like length, motion, speed, distance, proportion. To do this the grammar uses the resources of transcategorising, which is part of its architecture: it makes verbs and adjectives into nouns, the category which construes phenomena that can be measured, and that are stable and persist through time. Transcategorising is a syntactic operation; it may use formal marking, morphological and phonological, but there may be no formal variation at all.

The Universe Of Meaning Created By Written Language

Halliday (2008: 149):

Language creates a metaphor for life, a semiotic universe, or “universe of meanings”, that is the analogue of the material universe in which we exists as physical beings. But the universe of meaning created by written language is one that can be frozen or suspended in time, and so can be reflected on and examined in relative tranquility.

The Evolved Ideational Function Of Grammar

Halliday (2008: 147):

The grammar, in its ideational function, is a theory of human experience. And a very effective theory it is, because it has evolved along with ourselves, in what is now recognised to have been the co-evolution of language and the human brain. Constructing our model of reality along these particular lines has proved highly beneficial to our survival as a species on the planet. […] But this is how the grammar — the “content plane”, the lexicogrammar with the semantics — has evolved: it is the theory in terms of which we interpret and interact with our environment.

The Construal Of Experience: The Nucleus Of The Figure

Halliday (2008: 146-7):

Within the configuration we can recognise one part which is the nucleus of the figure; this consists of the process itself plus the one participant that is essential to it as the medium through which the process is actualised […] . This complex of process plus medium is what the grammar theorises as being the cornerstone of the phenomenal world.

The Construal Of Experience: Kinds Of Process And Participant Rôles

Halliday (2008: 146):

The kinds of process distinguished by the grammar, in the most general terms, are doing and happening, sensing and saying, being and having; and the rôles played by the participants will vary according to the process type: the doer, the “done-to”, the senser, the “be-er” and so on.

The Construal Of Experience: Figures

Halliday (2008: 146):

In it’s ideational guise, the grammar is making sense out of the diversity of human experience by construing it into discrete quanta, which we call “figures”. Each figure is in turn construed as a configuration of elements, which are of a small number of different types. If we take English as our exemplar (but English is very typical in this respect), the figure is made up of a process of some kind, a small number of entities playing particular parts in that process, and perhaps one or two circumstantial elements surrounding it.

The Textual Semogenic Resource

Halliday (2008: 142):

This blending [of the ideational and the interpersonal into a lexicogrammar] entailed a third component, that we call the textual, whereby the meanings are organised into discourse in such a way that each element in this experiential-interpersonal complex (each clause, since that is the key grammatical unit where most of the blending takes place) makes sense with its surroundings, both its material environment of what is going on around and its semiotic environment of other clauses that have gone before.

The Blending Of Semogenic Resources Into A Lexicogrammar

Halliday (2008: 142):

But the real genius of the semogenic spirit was to blend the ideational and the interpersonal into a single semiotic mode, and integrated form of order that we call a grammar — or more accurately a lexicogrammar, since it includes the lexical items, the words. Meaning evolved as a complex act having both these components intertwined.

The Ideational Semogenic Resource

Halliday (2008: 142):

Language evolved, simultaneously with this, as the construal of human experience; this is its ideational metafunction, including the strictly experiential part, construing the world of doings and happenings and the creatures and things that take part in them, and the more abstract logical part where these happenings are brought into relation one with another, relations of time and cause and so on.

The Interpersonal Semogenic Resource

Halliday (2008: 142):

Language evolved as the enactment of human relationships: that is what we call the interpersonal metafunction, ranging from the expression of personal feelings, wants and concerns to the complex interactions with other people that create and maintain the social bond.

Trinocular Vision On Semiotic Systems

Halliday (2008: 141):

When we are observing and investigating language, or any other semiotic system, our vision is essentially trinocular. We observe the phenomenon we want to explore — say, the lexicogrammar of language — from three points of vantage. We observe it from above, in terms of its function in various contexts. We observe it from below, in terms of its various modes of expression. And thirdly, we observe it from its own level: from within, or from round about, according to whether we are focussing on the whole or some of its parts.

The Complementarity Of Speaking And Writing Viewed “From Below”

Halliday (2008: 140-1):

When we look at it “from below”, in terms of its mode of expression, the complementarity is very obvious: speech happens, as ongoing transitory disturbances in the air, that we recognise as sound waves; writing exists, as simultaneous and relatively permanent visible marks, on stone or metal or vegetable matter processed into paper. It is only in the last few decades that these properties have come to be mixed together, so that we can now “capture” spoken language on tape, and “scroll” written language up (but also down) the computer screen. We don’t yet know what are going to be the longer-term consequences of this interpenetration of these two modes of expression, which were previously much more distinct. But changing pressures from below — and also those from above — are bound to have some significant effects.

The Complementarity Of Speaking And Writing Viewed “From Above”

Halliday (2008: 140):

Writing is, as I said, parasitic on spoken language; it could not have come into existence except as a surrogate of speech. But it is not, and never has been, just the same thing in a new guise. Writing is not just spoken language written down, unlike the visual system of deaf sign (“sign language”), which is truly a variant of spoken language and shares the functions and fluidities of speech. […] This is to look at writing “from above”, in terms of its meaning and its function in human cultures.

The Principles At Work In The Construal Of Time In The Lexicogrammar Of English

Halliday (2008: 137):

There is serial time reference to past / present / future, beginning with deictic time [i.e. time relative to now] and moving on recursively from there; this is fully grammaticalised as the tense system in the verbal group, which operates in partial concord with lexical realisations of the same temporal categories. That is the underlying potential, in terms of which actual instances are construed by speaker and listener.

The Tense System Of English

Halliday (2008: 135):

But the tense system of English is organised on this serial principle: each choice of past, present or future may serve as a point of reference for a further move into past, present or future, and this can happen four or five times over. There is no requirement that each step should be made explicit; the speaker can move in at any point, and verbs with up to three tense choices are commonly used as dialogic openings, for example

• I’ve been going to ask you: … future in past in present

“the present situation is that in the past I was contemplating the future”.

Our Angles Of Vision On Language

Halliday (2008: 126):

To revisit my earlier analogy of climate and weather: the power of weather to influence our daily lives, through storms and floods and droughts and all the rest, derives from the fact that it is the instantiation of something we call “climate” — because it is climate that has shaped our evolution and so determines the effect on us, and indeed on all of nature, of all the fluctuating processes and forces that we call “weather”. In the same way the power of the text resides in the system, because it is the system that determines the meaning and the significance of the ongoing choices made by writers and speakers. It is a mistake to restrict our angle of vision to just one perspective or the other, or to treat the discourse analyst and grammarian as if they inhabited two different realms of intellectual being.

The Power Of Language

Halliday (2008: 125-6):

Thanks to these two metafunctions, in the modern “globalised” world of corporate and state capitalism it is language that maintains and reinforces the political and economic power structures in which we live and move. Discourse analysts often refer to this phenomenon as “the language of power”. But there can only be a language of power because of the power of language; and the power of language depends, in turn, on the complementarity of system and text.

The Two Major Functions Of Language

Halliday (2008: 125):

Language has an almost unlimited capacity for construing our experience of reality — not surprising, because that is one of the two major functions, or “metafunctions”, in which it evolved. It sets up a virtual universe of meaning as interface between ourselves and the external world. The other major function was that of enacting our social identities, managing the complex interpersonal and institutional relationships within which human beings, and human cultures, have evolved.

Describing An Instance: Proportionality And Agnation

Halliday (2008: 121, 124):

It follows from these two properties that the description of any one instance is its relationship to other instances: describing and relating are one operation not two. Each instance has meaning by virtue of what it might have been (but was not).

Systemic Agnation

Halliday (2008: 121):

Agnation means that the outputs of different passes through the same network will be related; and the distance between them can be measured, by the number and location of the features that they share — how much their “selection expressions” have in common.

Systemic Proportionality

Halliday (2008: 121):

Proportionality means that the terms in the system stand in a constant relationship to one another; their significance will vary according to the context, but (for example) hats is to hat as hairs is to hair as silk is to silks, even though hats are more than hat, hairs are less than hair, and silks are kinds of silk.

Understanding Instantiation: Proportionality And Agnation

Halliday (2008: 121):

Seen from the system end, instantiation means making a pass, or passes, through the network, selecting a systemic feature at each choice point. The key properties, for understanding this as a meaning-making operation, are proportionality and agnation.

The Generativity Of System Networks

Halliday (2008: 120, 121):

One problem that has sometimes been raised in this connection is that the number of options seems too vast. […] But (as Wimsatt pointed out, criticising Chomsky’s notion of the innateness of grammar — what he referred to as “generative entrenchment” and the “developmental lock”), what is relevant is the number of choice points; […] The system network is not a modelling of neural processes — it is an analytical tool for the grammarian. But there is nothing improbable in the range of possibilities that such networks are able to represent.

The Network As Theory Of The System

Halliday (2008: 120):

The network is a theory of the system — that is, of the linguistic system, at any one stratum, as a whole. It is a paradigmatic theory, because the concept of system itself is paradigmatic. […] Any theory of possibilities is essentially paradigmatic. It is by networking the system that we show, not just how meaning is made, but how it is possible for meaning to be made. The system networks of the grammar are an attempt to state the possibilities of the grammar as a whole, its total potential for construing meaning in wording.

Instantiation And Phylogenesis

Halliday (2008: 119):

The system is the potential that informs and gives value to the text. Each instance minutely perturbs the probabilities of the system. Any part of the system may remain stable over long periods of time; but the system as a whole is metastable: it persists by continually evolving within its overall eco-social environment.

Bernstein’s Concept Of “Code”

Halliday (2008: 114):

… Bernstein’s concept of “code”, which he defined as sociolinguistic coding orientation […] with its opposition of “elaborated / restricted”, was the basic mechanism of cultural transmission: it was the different semiotic practices, or “meaning styles”, of different social classes that was responsible for transmitting social class distinctions across the generations.

“A Register” Vs “A Dialect”

Halliday (2008: 114):

Whereas dialect variation was variation according to the user, register variation was variation according to the use. Like dialect, register was the name of a kind of variation; so if we talk of “a register”, this is again analogous to “a dialect”, in the sense that each refers to a clustering of features that typically go together. In the case of register, these will be explained in terms of the view from above — the context of situation [i.e. context as instance] and the context of culture [i.e. context as system]. In other words, a pattern of regularities in this middle range of generality (pertaining to less than the language but more than the individual text) is most clearly observed from the “system” position, where it will appear as a motivated resetting of the global probabilities of the language.

Functional Variation: Intermediate Regions Between The Observational Poles Of System And Instance

Halliday (2008: 113-4):

System and instance are the two observational poles: observers, we may position ourselves up close, as instance observers, or else at a distance, as system observers. The two vantage points raise different questions about language. But the phenomena we are trying to explain may be just those whose regularities are found in some intermediate region along the instantiation cline, so that it is not all obvious which position we should be observing from. … [Functional variation] appears either instantially in the form of “text types” or systemically as variation in “register”. If we find systematic variation in the meanings selected in a number of specimens of discourse, we might group together those instances that are alike in certain respects, in their grammar or in their text structure, and recognise a set of text types. But if want to explain such variation, we shift our stance to that of the system observer and recognise specific sub-systems [i.e. registers] that are motivated “from above” — from the context, associated with some culturally defined forms of social practice.

Other Features Of The Metaphoric Code

Halliday (2008: 108-9):

Over and above this feature of comprehensiveness, the metaphoric code has other features which, while they might be mildly dysfunctional in a scientific context, can be exploited to some effect when it is transported into a bureaucratic setting. It can be oblique, impersonal and ambiguous: “oblique” because it stands at several removes from experience; “impersonal” because agents and other participants are often left out; “ambiguous” because the signals of syntactic relations among elements are usually absent.

The Comprehensiveness Of The Metaphoric Code

Halliday (2008: 108):

… metaphoric variety is not, in fact, some kind of specialised sub-system. Rather, it is an alternative system, a parallel universe of discourse which offers — in fact imposes — its own account of any portion of reality. In other words, it can be brought into play in any context of situation.

Metaphoric “Rewordings” Are New Ways Of Construing Experience As Meaning

Halliday (2008: 107):

It has to be stressed that these metaphoric “rewordings” are not, in fact, new ways of saying old things (although it can be made to look as if they are). They are not so much “rewordings” as “remeanings”, new ways of semanticising human experience.

How The Systemisation Of Grammatical Metaphor Enabled The Emergence Of Scientific Registers

Halliday (2008: 105):

The effect of the metaphoric processes, now operating in syndromes that permeated the entire text, was to create a new virtual reality in which phenomena of all kinds — not only entities but also processes, qualities, circumstances and logical relations — could be classified into taxonomies, measured, and used to reason with; and each new step in the argument could become the given for a further move. It was as if the grammar was holding the world still, in its place — freezeframing it, so to speak — as it was being observed, quantified, and theorised about. Where the grammar of daily life, with its commonsense theory of experience based on the clause, presented a flux of doings and happenings and the people and things that take part in them, the new grammar of science, based on the nominal group, stabilised the flux and imposed order on the phenomenal world.

Developing Technical, Theoretical Forms Of Discourse: Metaphoric And Transcategorising Potential

Halliday (2008: 100):

Two aspects of a language are involved: (1) the metaphoric potential, realigning the relations between the semantics and the lexicogrammar (“de- and re-coupling”); (2) the transcategorising potential, moving lexicalised elements across syntactic classes. The first of these is the essential operation; the second is the mechanism by which it is achieved.

Nominalisations: Systemic Vs Instantial

Halliday (2008: 97-8):

The nominalisations functioning as technical terms are those which have become systemic; they can no longer be “unpacked” (that is, replaced by a more congruent form). We can say — using a lexical metaphor — that the metaphor is “dead”: a technical term is, essentially, a dead grammatical metaphor. The ones functioning to build up the argument remain instantial; they can readily be unpacked and replaced by an agnate congruent wording.

Grammatical Metaphor As Theory-Building: Creating Technicality And Rationality

Halliday (2008: 97):

[Grammatical metaphor] is functional [in theory-building] in two distinct though complementary ways. 

1. On the one hand, it creates technicality. The virtual entities that come into existence through semantic junction embody a large amount of technical knowledge; and these technical terms can be organised into technical taxonomies thanks to the constructional resources of the nominal group.
2. On the other hand, it creates rationality. In the same way, by “packaging” a lot of previous information in the text, the nominalisation makes it possible to build up chains or sequences of logical argument; these are construed by the text-forming resources of the grammar (in English, the organisation of the clause into Theme and Rheme, and of the information unit into Given and New.)

Grammatical Metaphor As Temporal Process: Becoming Systemic Vs Remaining Instantial

Halliday (2008: 97):

A virtual entity such as heat resistance is construed logogenetically: it is built up in the course of the text — which may be a single text or, more probably, the macrotext of some scientific subdiscipline. (Virtual processes, on the other hand, like cause and inhibit, tend to be general across all registers of learned discourse.) Such an entity is quite likely to become systemic: it enters the system and becomes a “technical term”. Other nominalisations may remain purely instantial: they function at that moment in the text, but are created each time out of the general resources of the grammar.

Grammatical Metaphor As Temporal Process: Semogenic Timescales

Halliday (2008: 96-7):

All metaphoric processes take place in time. But there is more than one dimension of time involved. There is phylogenetic time: the history of the linguistic system. There is logogenetic time: the history of the text. There is also a third time dimension: ontogenetic time, the history of the individual, as learner and user of language.

The Effect Of Semantic Junction: Virtual Phenomena

Halliday (2008: 96):

The effect of this semantic junction is to create virtual phenomena which exist on the semiotic plane. Thus motion and heat are virtual entities; cause and follow (“come after in time”) are virtual processes; while heat resistance is a virtual class of a virtual entity resistance. Such virtual phenomena are critical for the construction of theory;

Grammatical Metaphor As Semantic Junction

Halliday (2008: 96):

By these and other such metaphoric processes, new meanings are created at the intersection of the two categories involved. A “semantic junction” takes place, and this construes new and complex semiotic entities having the features of both. For example, motion is a junction of “process”, which is the category meaning of a verb move, and “entity”, which is the category meaning of a noun, as in motion. Likewise, heat is both entity, because it is a noun, and quality, because the congruent form is hot which is adjective. The verb cause is a junction of process, because it is a verb, and logical-semantic relation, because the congruent form is so which is a conjunction.

Grammatical Metaphor As Syndrome

Halliday (2008: 95):

Almost every instance of grammatical metaphor involves a syndrome of related features.  There are many different patterns of co-occurrence, but most involve one or more of the following three. 

1. Processes and qualities, congruently realised as verb and adjective, get nominalised (transformed into nouns): move becomes motion, (be) hot becomes heat. 
2. Logical-semantic relations, like cause and time, congruently realised as conjunctions, get verbalised (transformed into verbs): so becomes causes, then becomes follows. 
3. Various clausal configurations are transformed into nominal groups, typically with structure Classifier + Thing: resists (the effects of) heat becomes heat resistance, replacing assets becomes asset replacement.

The Four Essential Aspects Of Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday (2008: 95):

1. metaphor as syndrome,
2. metaphor as semantic junction, 
3. metaphor as temporal process, 
4. metaphor as theory-building.