Protolanguage, Appraisal & Grammaticalisation

Halliday (2008: 179-80):

In terms of children’s early language development, the interpersonal metafunction provides the prototype of how meanings come to be grammaticalised. The two systems that were first grammaticalised by one small child (Nigel, aged 0;10) were:

polarity: positive / negative 
modality: value: low / high

followed shortly by the two forms of “appreciation” in conjunction with the feature “positive”:

appreciation (positive): impact (“that’s interesting”) / quality (“that tastes nice”)

Note that these were not yet mother tongue; they were protolanguage, realised by sounds and gestures. But they were systemic, or at least proto-systemic; and they provided the model for the linguistic systems of appraisal, where each lexical item realises the intersection of an appraisal feature with polarity and/or modality.

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.