transitivity — clause: traditionally a word category, transitive = verb taking object / intransitive = verb not taking object; reinterpreted as (i) process types (material/mental/verbal/relational) and (ii) an ergative system (middle/effective) in the clause.
projection — clause complex: traditionally a form of ‘subordination’ within clause; reinterpreted as distinction between hypotaxis in clause complex vs. rankshift in clause, laying the foundation for a semantic distinction between reports and facts.
[Our move into semantics from grammar also differs from the traditional in that] The gateway to semantics is the clause rather than the word. Consequently, grammatical categories will typically be interpreted ‘from above’, with their context in the clause or the group, rather than ‘from below’ within their context in the word. This has rather far-reaching consequences for the understanding of the semantic systems realised by the grammar.
The concept of reactance is particularly significant for our purposes where it involves a relationship between an ideational category and features of other metafunctions, interpersonal or textual. For instance, the interpersonal grammar provides for participants, within the ideational dimension of the clause, to function as Subjects; but this potential is not in general open to circumstances, and this is a principal reason for distinguishing these two classes within the ideational metafunction.
There are many examples of cryptotypes in this sense, both as classes and as systems (i.e. cryptoclasses and cryptosystems), in our ideational semantics. For example:
- proces types: doing & happening / sensing / saying / being & having
- transitivity model: ergative / transitive
- projections: locutions / ideas
- expansions: elaboration / extension / enhancement
- number: plural / non-plural; singular / non-singular
A covert category may also be termed a cryptotype, a name which calls attention to the rather hidden, cryptic nature of such word-groups, especially when they are not strongly contrasted in idea, nor marked by frequently occurring reactances such as pronouns. They easily escape notice and may be hard to define, and yet may have profound influence on linguistic behaviour.
A covert category is marked, whether morphemically or by sentence pattern, only in certain types of sentence and not in every sentence in which a word or element belonging to the category occurs. The class membership of the word is not apparent until there is a question of using it or referring to it in one of these special types of sentence, and then we find that this word belongs to a class requiring some sort of distinctive treatment, which may even be the negative treatment of excluding that type of sentence. This distinctive treatment we may call the reactance of the category.
An overt category is a category having a formal mark which is present (with only infrequent exceptions) in every sentence containing a member [instance] of the category. The mark need not be part of the same word to which the category may be said to be attached in a paradigmatic sense; i.e. it need not be a suffix, prefix, vowel change, or other ‘inflection’, but may be a detached word or a certain patterning of the whole sentence …
We consider not only overt categories but also covert ones. The understanding of covert categories in the grammar is due to Whorf (1956: 88ff), who made the distinction between overt categories or phenotypes and covert categories or cryptotypes …
In traditional grammar, only certain grammatical categories were taken into consideration; these categories were (i) overt and (ii) word-based. In particular, inflectional categories of the word such as tense, case and number were described and then interpreted semantically. In a functional grammar, while such categories are not ignored, they tend to play a less significant rôle, appearing at the end point of realisational chains. For instance, it is not possible to base a functional interpretation of number in English simply on the presence or absence of ‘plural’ as a nominal suffix (as in grammar+s); the category of number is more complex, involving two complementary systems. Similarly, the general properties of of the construal of time in the English tense system are not revealed by only looking at the overt suffixial past tense marker (as in laugh+ed); again the scope of the semantics of tense in English is far greater than this overt word category would suggest.
… what makes such a theory (i.e. an ideation base as the construal of experience) possible is that it is a stratal construction that can be deconstructed, every such occasion being a gateway to the creation of further meanings which reconstrue in new and divergent ways. Thus a sequence is not ‘the same thing as’ a clause complex; if it was, language would not be a dynamic open system of the kind that it is.
Thus when we move from the lexicogrammar into the semantics, as we are doing here, we are not simply relabelling everything in a new terminological guise. We shall stress the fundamental relationship between (say) clause complex in the grammar and sequence in the semantics, precisely because the two originate as one: a theory of the logical relationships between processes.
Every scientific theory is itself a stratal-semiotic system, in which the relation among the different levels of abstraction is one of realisation. … since all such theories are modelled on natural language in the first place; and … the semantics of natural language is itself a theory of daily experience.
There is a sense in which realisation is the analogue, in semiotic systems, of cause-&-effect in physical systems; but it is a relationship among levels of meaning and not among sequences of events.
In any stratal system (i.e. any system where there are two strata such that one is the realisation of the other) there is no temporal or causal ordering between the strata. … the relationship is an intensive one, not a causal circumstantial one.
The production of discourse by an individual speaker or writer can be seen as a dialectic between these two semiotic activities: between (i) recycling elements, figures and sequences that that individual has used many times before, and so for him or her are already fully codified, and (ii) constructing new ones that are being codified for the first time (and some of which may remain codified for future use — especially with a child who is learning the system).
In general, the process of creating meaning involves constructing some kind of lexicogrammatical generalisation — some form of wording that is in some respect unique. It is not possible to quantify the degree to which any semantic feature or domain has been codified at any one moment of semohistory; but meanings that are more highly codified are those that have been to a greater extent condensed and/or compacted, where ‘compacting’ is generalising on the syntagmatic axis (e.g. animal that has four legs > quadruped), while ‘condensing’ is generalising on the paradigmatic axis (forming into a system at some point along the scale of delicacy). The [phylogenetic] evolution of language (i.e. of specific languages in their various registers), the [ontogenetic] learning of language by children, and the [logogenetic] production of language in the form of discourse constitute the historical contexts in which meanings are continuously being created along these lines.
Our [content plane] “sign” is not the Saussurean sign: we are not talking about the relationship between a word and its phonological representation (between content and expression, in Hjelmslev’s terms). The relationship is within the content plane, between a meaning and a wording — the non-arbitrary relationship between the system of semantics and the system of lexicogrammar.
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‘provides
environment for’ ð
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phylogenetic
(evolution of the system
in the
species)
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ontogenetic
(development of the system
in the
individual)
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logogenetic
(instantiation of the system
in the
text)
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ï ‘provides material for’
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As the [leftward] pointing arrow suggests, the individual’s (transfinite) meaning potential is constructed out of (finite) instances of text; the (transfinite) meaning potential of the species is constructed out of (finite) instances of individual ‘meaners’. Following the [rightward] arrow, the system of the language (the meaning potential of the species) provides the environment in which the individual’s meaning emerges; the meaning potential of the individual provides the environment within which the meaning of the text emerges.
Thirdly, there is the unfolding of the act of meaning itself: the instantial construction of meaning in the form of a text. This is a stochastic process in which the potential for creating meaning is continually modified in the light of what has gone before; certain options are restricted or disfavoured, while others are emprobabled or opened up. We refer to this as the logogenetic time frame, using logo(s) in its original sense of ‘discourse’.
Secondly, there is the development of the individual speaker (speaking subject). A speaker’s history may — like that of the biological individual — recapitulate some of the evolutionary progression along epigenetic lines. But the individual experience is one of growth, not evolution, and follows the typical cycle of growth, maturation and decay. This is the ontogenetic time frame.
First, there is the evolution of human language (and of particular languages as manifestations of this). Known histories represent a small fraction of the total time scale of this evolution, perhaps 0.1%; they become relevant only where particular aspects of this evolutionary change have taken place very recently, e.g. the evolution of scientific discourse. This is the phylogenetic time frame.
The view we are adopting is a constructivist one, familiar from European linguistics in the work of Hjelmslev and Firth. According to this view, it is the grammar itself that construes experience, that constructs for us our world of events and objects. As Hjelmslev (1943) said, reality is unknowable; the only things that are known are our construals of it — that is, meanings. Meanings do not ‘exist’ before the wordings that realise them. They are formed out of the impact between our consciousness and its environment.
Note that it is important to keep delicacy and instantiation distinct. … The difference is essentially that between being a type of x (delicacy) and being a token of x (instantiation). Both may be construed by intensive ascription …
Instantiation refers to the move from the semantic potential within the general system to instances of this potential within a particular text. Intermediate between these two on the instantiation cline are patterns of instantiation that recur in particular situation types — semantic domains located within the overall meaning potential as situated variants of it.
… the paradigmatic network is ordered in delicacy (subsumption, classification, specialisation), from the least delicate (most general) to the most delicate (most specific types).
… syntagmatic specifications occur in paradigmatic environments, as realisations of paradigmatic types.
These two modes of construal are related: on the one hand, syntagmatic organisation realises paradigmatic organisation; on the other hand, types in a network of paradigmatic organisation correspond to fragments of syntagmatic specification — this is one way in which such types are differentiated.
In paradigmatic construal, we construe a phenomenon as being of some particular type — some selection from a set of potential types. … In syntagmatic construal, we construe a phenomenon as having some particular composition — as consisting of parts in some structural configuration.
Since our approach is via the grammar, we have taken the boundaries of the grammar as criterial, using the clause complex — the highest rank of ideational organisation —to define the scope of the ideational-semantic representation. This is not a necessary constraint; but it is one that is motivated in terms of the overall design, and which may turn out to define the optimal moment of interfacing between the ideational and the other components. … The constraint does not imply, however, that the scope of ideational semantics does not extend over sequences longer than a clause complex.
There is no separate component of “pragmatics” within our interpretive frame. Since it emerged as a distinct field of scholarly activity, pragmatics has by and large been associated with two aspects of language.
On the one hand, it has dealt with those aspects of the meaning of a text which depend on specific instances — particulars of the situation and of the interactants, and inferences drawn from these. But just as, in grammatics, we do don't distinguish between the grammar of the system and the grammar of the instance — a systemic theory is a theory of both, and necessarily (therefore) of the relationship between them — so in semantics we would not want to separate the system from its instantiation in text. In this respect, pragmatics appears as another name for the semantics of instances.
And on the other hand, pragmatics has served as an alternative term for the interpersonal and textual domains of semantics. Here the distinction that is being labelled is one of metafunction, not of instantiation; but it seems undesirable to obscure the relationship between ideational meaning on the one hand, and interpersonal and textual meaning on the other hand by locating them in different disciplines.
The text base provides the resources that enable the speaker to produce contextualised discourse and to guide the listener in interpreting it. These include resources for engendering a wide variety of diverse rhetorical structures, for differentiating among the different values and statuses of the components of the unfolding text, and for ongoingly expanding the text so as to create and maintain the semiotic flow.
The interaction base provides the resources for speaker and listener to enact a social and intersubjective relationship, through the assignment of discursive rôles, the expression of evaluations and attitudes. The base includes both the semantic strategies speaker and listener deploy in dialogic exchanges and the social personæ of the interactants. This second component is a model of the interpersonal and ideational distance between speaker and listener.
The ideational semantic resources construe our experience of the world that is around us and inside us. The phenomena of our experience are construed as units of meaning that can be ranked into hierarchies and organised into networks of semantic types. The units of meaning are structured as configurations of functions (rôles) at different ranks in the hierarchy. For instance, figures are configurations consisting of elements — a process, participants and circumstances; these figures are differentiated into a small number of general types — figures of doing & happening, of sensing, of saying, and of being & having.
… clauses that are shifted downwards on the rank scale to serve as if they were groups or phrases. Such down-ranking is known as rank-shift. This has the powerful effect of expanding the resources of grammar by allowing the meaning potential of a higher-ranking unit to enrich that of a unit of a lower rank. … Such rank-shifted clauses construe what we call macro-phenomena.
The rank scale determines the overall constituency potential in the grammar: in English, clauses consist of groups (/ phrases), groups consist of words, and words consist of morphemes.
… 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.