… the sequence of classes realising the functionally specified elements within the configuration of functions […] is called a syntagm to distinguish it from the (function) structure. It specifies constraints on the units serving within the clause — the units on the rank below the clause on the grammatical rank scale.
The textual metafunction is an enabling one; it is concerned with organising ideational and interpersonal meaning as discourse — as meaning that is contextualised and shared. But this does not mean processing some pre-existing body of information; rather it is the ongoing creation of a semiotic realm of reality.
The interpersonal metafunction is concerned with enacting interpersonal relations through language, with the adoption and assignment of speech rôles, with the negotiation of attitudes, and so on — it is language in the praxis of intersubjectivity, as a resource for interacting with others.
One essential task for our semantics is that of modelling a particular phenomenon of the content plane that is known as grammatical metaphor. This is the phenomenon whereby a set of agnate (related) forms is present in the language having different mappings between the semantic and grammatical categories … One way in which we shall seek to demonstrate the validity and power of a semantic approach is by using it to handle grammatical metaphor, and to show how this pervasive aspect of the lexicogrammar expands the potential of the meaning base.
But this closeness of fit between the semantics (i.e. the meaning) and the grammar does not mean that our grammatics can take over the semantic domain. Adopting a functional approach enables us to extend the domain of grammar in significant ways in the direction of semantics — not thereby reducing the scope of the semantics but rather enabling us to investigate how experience is construed in semantic terms …
But to show that a grammar is a theory of experience we use a functional, semantically motivated grammatics, since this allows us to seek explanations of the form of the grammar in terms of the functions to which language is adapted.
In linguistics, while we do distinguish “language” (the phenomenon) from “linguistics” (the study of the phenomenon), we fail to make such a distinction with the word “grammar”, which means both the grammar of a language and the study of grammar. To avoid such a pathological ambiguity, we find it helpful to refer to the study of grammar by a special name, grammatics. […] Thus we can say that a grammatics is a theory of grammar, while a grammar is (among other things) a theory of experience.
What this means is that experience is construed twice in the content plane, once semantically and once lexicogrammatically.
Semantics, or the system of meaning, is realised by lexicogrammar, or the system of wording (that is grammatical structures and lexical items); and lexicogrammar is realised by phonology, or the system of sounding. …
This is the traditional formulation; more properly: semantics is realised by the realisation of lexicogrammar in phonology.
The ambiguity [of ‘level’ as either stratum or rank] resides in the overlap of two grammatical relations, those of elaboration (‘be’) and of extension (‘have’) …
… the hierarchy of units according to their constituency potential.
Here the relationship is not one of ‘consists of’ or ‘is a subset of’: the [cotangential] circles show the stratal environment of each level — thus lexicogrammar appears in the environment of semantics and provides the environment for phonology. This ordering of levels is known as stratification. … each level is a network of inter–related options, either in meaning, wording or sounding, which are realised as structures, based on the principle of rank. …
Language, therefore, is a resource organised into three strata differentiated according to order of abstraction. These strata are related by means of realisation.
We might refer to the Hjelmslevian notion of the “content plane” as incorporating both a grammar and a semantics (Hjelmslev 1943). Grammar and semantics are the two strata or levels of content in the three-level systemic theory of language, and they are related in a natural, non-arbitrary way. The third level is the level of expression, either phonology or graphology.
A systemic grammar is one of a class of functional grammars, which means (among other things) that it is semantically motivated, or “natural”. In contradistinction to formal grammars, which are autonomous, and therefore semantically arbitrary, in a systemic grammar every category (and “category” is used here in the general sense of an organising theoretical concept, not in the narrower sense of ‘class’ as in formal grammars) is based on meaning: it has a semantic, as well as formal, lexicogrammatical reactance. [The reactance of a category is its distinctive treatment.]
Thus “knowledge” and “meaning” are not two distinct phenomena; they are different metaphors for the same phenomenon, approaching it with a different orientation and different assumptions. But in almost all recent work in this area, the cognitive approach has predominated, with language treated as a kind of code in which pre-existing conceptual structures are more or less distortedly expressed. We hope to give value to the alternative viewpoint, in which language is seen as the foundation of human experience, and meaning as the essential mode of higher-order human consciousness. […] What we are doing is mapping back on to language those patterns that were themselves linguistic in their origin.
Our contention is that there is no ordering of experience other than the ordering given to it by language. We could in fact define experience in linguistic terms: experience is the reality we construe for ourselves by means of language.
We contend that the conception of 'knowledge' as something that exists independently of language, and may then be coded or made manifest in language, is illusory. All knowledge is constituted in semiotic systems, with language as the most central; and all such representations of knowledge are constructed from language in the first place.
A meaning base differs from a knowledge base in the direction from which it is construed. In modelling the meaning base we are building it ‘upwards’ from the grammar, instead of working ‘downwards’ from some interpretation of experience couched in conceptual terms, and seen as independent from language.
… our own approach, both in theory and in method, is in contradistinction to that of cognitive science: we treat “information” as meaning rather than as knowledge and interpret language as a semiotic system, and more specifically as a social semiotic, rather than a system of the human mind. This perspective leads us to place less emphasis on the individual than would be typical of a cognitivist approach; unlike thinking and knowing, at least as these are traditionally conceived, meaning is a social intersubjective process. If experience is interpreted as meaning, its construal becomes an act of collaboration, sometimes of conflict, and always of negotiation.
The construction of experience is usually thought of as knowledge, having the form of conceptual taxonomies, schemata, scripts and the like. We shall offer an interpretation complementary to this, treating experience not as knowing but as meaning; and hence as something that is construed in language. In other words, we are concerned with the construal of human experience as a semantic system; and since language plays the central rôle not only in storing and exchanging experience but also in construing it, we are taking language as our interpretive base.
… it has been the concern of systemic theory since the 1960s to model the “content plane” in terms of a stratal pairing within language, with “semantics” as the “upper model” that is construed [intellectually constructed] by the lexicogrammar as a whole.
… we stress that the categories and relations of experience are not “given” to us by nature, to be passively reflected in our language, but are actively constructed by language, with the lexicogrammar as the driving force. By virtue of its unique properties as a stratified semiotic system, language is able to transform experience into meaning.
The semantic perspective enables us to emphasise four aspects of human consciousness which have been rather less foregrounded in cognitive approaches. One is that of meaning as a potential, a systemic resource which is deployed in — and ongoingly modified by — individual acts of meaning in language. […] The second is that of meaning as growth, a semogenic resource which is constantly expanding in power by opening up new domains and refining those that are already within its compass. The third is that of meaning as a joint construction, a shared resource which is the public enterprise of a collective (whereas “thinking” is essentially a private phenomenon “located” within the individual). The fourth is that of meaning as a form of activity, a resource of energy which is powered by the grammar at the heart of every language.
… “understanding” something is transforming it into meaning, and to “know” is to have performed that transformation. There is a significant strand in the study of language […] whereby “knowledge” is modelled semiotically: that is, as system–&–process of meaning, in abstract terms which derive from the modelling of grammar.
… cognition “is” (that is, can most profitably be modelled as) not thinking but meaning: the “mental” map is in fact a semiotic map, and “cognition” is just a way of talking about language. … Instead of explaining language by reference to cognitive processes, we will explain cognition by reference to linguistic processes.
… what people do with language (whether this is modelled as social action, as cognitive process or as some form of abstract value system).
The system and the text are not two different phenomena: what we call the “system” of a language is equivalent to its “text potential”. Analysing discourse means, first and foremost, relating the text to the potential that lies behind it. There are perhaps three areas of discourse analysis that have figured prominently in systemic-functional research: literary-æsthetic, technical-scientific, and sociopolitical. In the first of these, the text carries value in its own right; when you analyse texts of this kind, you are aiming to explain not only why and how the text means what it does but also why it carries the value that it does. […] In analysing scientific and technical texts, the linguist is likely to be foregrounding the special properties that distinguish these texts from other varieties of written and spoken language, such that they are able to play a central part in the creation and transmission of knowledge. Scientific theories evolve from the conjunction of material and semiotic processes, and the advancement of science is powered by linguistic as well as technical resources. […] On the socio-political side, the researcher is investigating how discourse creates, maintains and transmits the social order (and hence may also be used to subvert it).
Semiotic phenomena — the patterns that evolve in a system that creates meaning — have this property: that they depend on the brain’s ability to adopt a multiple perspective. Meaning has to be at the same time both process and entity; both potential and actual; both general and particular. And since the only strategy we have for describing and explaining a system like this is that of refracting it through another cycle of meaning — a scientific theory — we find it difficult to transcend these awkward disjunctions.
The third complementarity is the outcome of the child’s learning to read and write; it means gaining access to the new dimension that was added to language by the evolution of writing systems. […] writing opened the way to a new and different mode of meaning, that we refer to as “written language”; that is where the complementarity resides, and full mastery of it not only takes a long time but also depends on maturation: it is simply not possible (or has not been up until now) for an eight- or nine-year-old to cope with the type of semiotic complexity that written language involves.
The next of the three complementarities to develop is that between grammar and lexis. This is achieved when the child moves out of protolanguage into mother tongue, typically during the first half of the second year of life. In the protolanguage there is no stratum of lexicogrammar — this has not yet developed; so obviously there can be no grammar and no lexis. The protolanguage is not grounded in reference, so there are no resources for the referential mode of meaning. Referential meaning develops with the mother tongue, beginning with the move into “common” as opposed to “proper” names (that is, naming classes rather than individuals), and then opening up this new semiotic dimension as the meaning potential expands to accommodate both particularised and generalised meanings. — meaning as lexis, and meaning as grammar.
[This complementarity] is in fact the very beginning of semiosis — of meaning as a distinct mode of behaviour, distinct from material action. At the very beginning of life, each act (crying, smiling, waving limbs about) is recreated on each occasion; it is not dependent on memory of previous acts. There are instances, but there is no underlying system — no persisting resource such that each act comes as its realisation. Then the time comes when the child retains the act in the form of memory; it is not reinvented on each occasion, but as it were cloned from stock. […] When this moment has been reached [by the age of 5 months] the child has taken the first step towards his first semiotic system, the “protolanguage” …
As I described it, grammar and lexis form a complementarity of focus; system and text form a complementarity of angle; speaking and writing form a complementarity of state. We could gloss these further by identifying the dimension along which they are counterposed.
- Grammar and lexis are opposed in delicacy: meaning as generalities or as particulars.
- System and text are opposed in instantiation: meaning as (collections of) instances or as potential.
- Speaking and writing are opposed in (manner of) realisation: meaning as happening or as thing.
But they all have a critical property in common: they are all strategies for extending the semogenic power of language — its meaning potential as a semiotic system.
Again, like biological systems, semiotic systems evolve to withstand shock; a language may get perturbed, deflected, even thoroughly mixed with another one […]. This is where the complementarities come in: they provide the surplus energy, the flexibility that enables a language to flourish in its changing eco-social environment.
Language is a product of evolution, and like any evolved system it needs to be seen as a totality: to understand any part of it, we have to locate it in the context of the whole. But that “whole” is not some idealised, static construction; it is a conglomerate resulting from constant small adjustments each of which follows on from whatever had been there before. As with biological evolution, one is sometimes tempted to say that it would have been better to start from somewhere else! But however imperfect evolved systems are, they usually function better than designed ones. A language is a functioning whole, even though every single feature of it, taken on its own, could no doubt be improved. There always are […] leftover bits and pieces lying around from evolutionary processes […] but they get built into the workings of the language in one way or another.
But, if we see grammaticalisation as the dimensionalising of semantic space, are there other comparable processes? Lexicalisation is the complementary process, likewise in perspective “from above”, so not a shift from the grammatical to the lexical but a construal of meaning in lexical terms — that is, those regions in the semantics of a language that are realised as (sets of) lexical items.
More localised features are typically intersected and construed in bundles, usually being assigned some preferred rôle in the configuration of processes: as the process itself, as a participant in the process, as quality of a participant, or as a circumstance (i.e. being assigned to an open word class — in English and Chinese, verb, noun, adjective or adverb). These open word classes construe meanings that we call “lexicalised”; and their “vectors” may be just the presence or absence of some particular component feature.
What we usually call “grammatical” are those sets of features that are construed as single vectors, and which tend to permeate a large number of semantic domains; for example, all potential participants are countable or uncountable, and if countable, are singular or plural.
Thus the lexicogrammar — linguistic form — dimensionalises semantic space; and the grammatical system network theorises this process, just as the phonological system network theorises the dimensionalising of phonetic space.
polarity is as it were pre-metafunctional: it develops (and probably evolved) prior to the distinction between ideational and interpersonal meanings. (Rather in the same way that, in the physical world, positively and negatively charged particles seem to be prior to the distinction between matter and information!) It may be that the “energy levels” of modality (high / median / low) are also of this kind: both modality and polarity are regularly grammaticalised in combination with other features.
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.
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 isappraisal: 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.