Initially the child construes experience of phenomena that are in, or are brought into, a shared visual field; once constituted into meaning, the experience can be shared, validated and scaffolded dialogically in collaboration with other members of his/her meaning group.
As well as being figures in their own right, such configurations can also be used as qualifications of a class of participant, such as cat — as figures serving to qualify that category with respect to its own rôle in the figure. Here the figure is being viewed in a participant perspective; this is achieved by downranking the figure so that it acquires the status of a property. Grammatically, this perspective would be realised in the nominal group as a Qualifier of some Thing …
… the definition construes a token-value relation between a fairly delicate semantic type that is lexicalised within the lexicogrammar and a restatement of this type by means of other resources in the ideation base. The restatement draws more on the resources towards the grammatical end of the scale, so that in the definition a lexicalised token is construed as a grammaticalised value. This entails a shift from construing experience through depth in the experiential taxonomy towards construing experience through expansion in a logical sequence.
… in his fourth year [the child] begins to extend his deployment of figures of being to include not only the ascriptive mode (‘a is a member of x’) but also the identifying mode (‘y equals x’) so that he can explicitly relate meanings in his ideation base in the form of definitions. […] He is now in a position to construe new meanings in terms of the semantic system itself; that is, they do not necessarily have to be ‘imported’ from direct extra-linguistic experience.
When [the child’s] meaning potential has gained critical semantic mass, he begins to construe its own internal organisation explicitly in an effort to sort out taxonomic relations within the system. … Again, the resource for construing ‘categories’ is the intensive ascriptive figure of being; but now both the Carrier and the Attribute are meanings internal to the semantic system.
Construing experience as meaning means locating classes such as squares and circles somewhere in the semantic system, both locally as terms in systems and also more globally in the ordering of these systems in delicacy.
The first stage in categorisation is naming individuals as members of classes; instances of visual experience shared by the young child and his father or mother are ascribed to some general class of experience by means of a figure of being. … Here some perceived phenomenon of experience is brought “into intersubjective focus” by being referred to exophorically — pointing verbally, so to speak, to some feature of the material setting, sometimes accompanied by or replaced by a pointing as a gesture. This phenomenon is construed by [the child] as the Carrier of a figure of being, and is ascribed as a member of some general class of experience, construed as the Attribute of the figure. [The child] is ‘importing’ experience of instances into the semantic system by ascribing them to general classes in that system. This is an act of naming, and later this act itself gets named by call.
Here one of the questions has been what resources are available in the semantic system for construing new meanings — for ‘category development’, both in the ontogenetic time frame and in the logogenetic time frame. One central semantic motif that has emerged from these studies is that of elaboration: both in relational clauses (realising figures of being & having) and in complexes, especially nominal ones (the traditional notion of apposition, realising sequences of participants). Here elaboration is at work ‘distilling’ new meanings over extended passages. That is, the semantic system includes a theory of how meanings are construed; and this theory is itself a resource for construing new meanings.
Thus when a young child says cats also aren’t people, he is using a type of figure of being & having to construe a taxonomic relationship in the ideation base, so that the membership of ‘cats’ (construed as Carrier) in the class of ‘people’ (construed as Attribute) can be probed, in this case to ‘outclassify’ cats from the class of people. Figures of being & having of the intensive and ascriptive kind thus construe, among other things, the taxonomic relation among classes or types in the semantic system. The ideation base is thus a resource both for construing experience and for construing its own construal of experience. It has the potential for expanding itself precisely because it includes a theory of how meanings are construed.
The types in the semantic system are instantiated according to probability values; these are manifested as relative frequencies in text. The equivalent in the spatial interpretation of meaning would be curvature or ‘chreodisation’. Chreodisation embodies time and represents the change of systemic probabilities over time.
Here meaning is construed in terms of a spatial metaphor; we can view the ideation base as an elastic, multidimensional semantic space. […] The notion of a vowel space (with it ‘cardinal vowels’) provides a familiar analogy. As a material construction, it is limited to the three dimensions of physical space; but as physiological space, it accommodates variation along a number of dimensions, and brings an elasticity to the expression plane that is in some extent analogous to the metaphorical elasticity that we are ascribing to the plane of the content.
This is one theoretical perspective on the organisation [of the ideation base] — a perspective realised in certain conventional systems of representation, such as the system network. It allows us to bring out quite clearly the global organisation of the ideation base as a resource for construing experience; and it also allows us to show how the semantic types in this global organisation are interrelated …
Naturally our categorisation tends to be oriented towards phenomena on a particular scale, those that lie within the bandwidth of those phenomena which are most readily accessible to our senses and which we engage with in day to day existence. This is the realm which impinges most closely on our physical, biological and social being; the semantic system has evolved with this as its primary semogenic environment. Lying beyond this are the micro- and macro-worlds that are accessible to us only by instrument and by inference. It is a powerful demonstration of the potential of the semantic system that it readily fashions new meanings that model these experientially remote domains. What is less obvious, perhaps, is that it has had to be equally resourceful in modelling the ongoing changes in our social environment, where both the overall social order and our local interpersonal networks are constantly being modified and realigned.
There would be indefinitely many ways of construing analogies among different elements in the total flux of experience; what our semantic resources enable us to do is to construe those analogies which yield categories resonating with what as a species, and as members of a particular culture, we have found to carry material and symbolic value.
Categorisation is often thought of as a process of classifying together phenomena that are inherently alike, the classes being as it were given to us by the nature of the experience itself. But this is not what really happens. Categorising is a creative act: it transforms our experience into meaning, and this means imposing a categorical order rather than putting labels on an order that is already there.
These semantic types are categories to which phenomenological instances are ascribed; they thus embody the fundamental principle of generalising across phenomenological variation. And they are located somewhere in delicacy between the most general type, the all-inclusive class of ‘phenomenon’, and the most delicate types we can recognise as being codified lexically in English.
Processes serve the most central or nuclear rôle in a figure; they embody the temporal properties of a figure unfolding in time. Other than metaphorical processes, the process element is either polar (positive/negative) or modal (some intermediate degree between positive and negative); it may embody phase, or aspect; and it will refer to the past, present or future time. Polarity and modality derive from the interpersonal perspective on the process.
We can recognise two simultaneous distinctions. One concerns the type of circumstantial relation construed; the primary contrast is between circumstances of projection and circumstances of expansion and within the latter we distinguish those of elaboration, extension and enhancement. The other concerns the experiential complexity of the circumstance; circumstances are either ‘simple’ or ‘macro’, the former being truly elemental while the latter are more like figures. … Among simple circumstances, the most usual are those of time, place, manner-quality and intensity, all of which are circumstances of enhancement. … Macro circumstances are those which are made up of a special type of figure having another participant inside it …
Some ‘simple things’ are metaphorical; the remainder are referred to as ‘ordinary’, and these are either conscious or non-conscious (this is the distinction that is actually made in the semantic system, not animate/inanimate or human/non-human). … Again, a number of simple qualities are metaphorical; of the remainder, the ‘ordinary’ qualities, one subtype is qualities of projection and the other is qualities of expansion.
… processes are realised by verbal groups, participants by nominal groups, and circumstances by adverbial groups or prepositional phrases. In addition to the three types of element that serve in figures, there is one further type of element — the relator. Relators serve to construe logico-semantic relations of expansion between figures in a sequence; they are realised by conjunction groups.
These rôle restrictions represent a kind of metaphysics of English transitivity. For example, according to English, ideas and locutions cannot act on things, but there is no general restriction on what kinds of things may act on other things. Not only persons, but also inanimate things and abstractions may kill people (a figure of doing): the rifleman/the rock/his stupidity killed cousin Henry.
Circumstances are typically less closely associated with the process and are usually not inherent in it. They specify the spatial or temporal location of the process, its extent in space or time (distance or duration), its cause, the manner of its occurrence, and so on.
The distinction between participants and circumstances is a cline rather than a sharp division, but it is semantically quite significant.
Participants are inherent in the process; they bring about its occurrence or mediate it. There are a number of specific ways in which a participant may take part in a process, it may sense it, it may receive it, it may be affected by it, it may say it, and so on. The different configurations of participants are the bases for a typology of process types.
… a figure is constructed as an organic configuration of parts. Each part stands in a specific relation to the figure as a whole. The parts of a given configuration are (i) a nuclear process, (ii) one to three participants of different kinds taking part in the process, and (iii) up to around seven circumstances of different kinds associated with it.
A figure is a representation of experience in the form of a configuration, consisting of a process, participants taking part in this process and associated circumstances. There are, of course, indefinitely many kinds of process in the non-semiotic world; but these are construed semiotically, according to the way in which they configure participants, into a small number of process types — being, doing, sensing, and saying. The first three of these have clearly defined subcategories. Then, each figure may be either projected (by another figure, or in some other way) or else not; and if projected, it may be an idea or locution or something else [which embodies grammatical metaphor] …
A sequence is a series of related figures. Consequently, sequences are differentiated according to the kinds of relations figures can enter into — temporal (x happened, then y happened, etc.), causal (x happened, so y happened, etc.), and so on … . In any pair of figures related in a sequence, one figure may (i) expand the other, by reiterating it, adding to it or qualifying it; or (ii) project (report, quote) the other by saying it or thinking it. In either case, the two may be either equal or unequal in status, or semantic weight. … Sequences are organised by interdependency relations and they are indefinitely expandable.
While figures are said to consist of elements and sequences are said to consist of figures, the ‘consist of’ relation is not the same: elements are constituent parts of figures, functioning in different rôles; but figures form sequences through interdependency relations.
A phenomenon is the most general experiential category — anything that can be construed as part of human experience. The phenomena of experience are of three orders of complexity: elementary (a single element), configurational (configuration of elements, i.e. a figure) and complex (a complex of figures, i.e. a sequence).
The semantic types represented by the features of systems in the system network do not constitute discrete Aristotelian categories; they are values on semantic clines — core regions to use the metaphor of semantic space. We can bring this out by adopting a topological view on meaning; we can also explore the possibility of interpreting features as names of fuzzy sets.
However, instantiation also defines a scale between the potential and the instance, with intermediate patterns of instantiation.
The instance is thus a set of features selected, with associated realisational specifications — an instantial pattern over the potential.
As a process, instantiation can be represented as involving traversal of the system network and activation of realisation statements.
A realisation statement is a minimal specification of a piece of structure or configuration of rôles presented in a paradigmatic context; it is always associated with a particular systemic feature. … The general form of a realisation statement is ‘realisation operator + one or more realisation operands’ … The operators … are insert, conflate and preselect.
Non-logical systems are purely declarative — terms such as “choice” and “entry condition” do not imply a procedural interpretation; they merely indicate that the system network can be traversed.
A system network is an acyclic directed graph, consisting of systems partially ordered in delicacy. Each system constitutes a choice (alternation, opposition) between two or more terms. These terms are represented by features, and a system as a whole is a Boolean combination of features:
- It has an entry condition, the condition under which the systemic choice is available. The entry condition may be a single feature or a complex of features, conjunct and/or disjunct. These features must serve as terms in other systems [except in the case of a logical recursive system].
- It has a set of terms, the options that are available given the entry condition. The terms are represented by features, which are related by exclusive disjunction.
Collectively, a set of related systems for a system network (since features in the entry conditions to systems must be terms in other systems).
The problem of multi-dimensional organisation in phonological systems was solved by the introduction of oppositions that can intersect (such as front/back, open/closed, and rounded/unrounded for vowels); in Trubetzkoy’s (1939) theory, the oppositions were treated as classificatory dimensions and the values as ‘sound properties’. In the late 1940s, however, Roman Jakobson (1949) reinterpreted these properties as components or distinctive features of the phoneme; this was in effect a reification of the earlier sound properties. Phonemes were said to consist of components (just as longer phonological sequences consisted of phonemes) instead of being said to realise terms in phonological systemic oppositions. In other words, a paradigmatic abstraction (sound property in an opposition) was given a syntagmatic status (component of a phoneme). Jakobson’s notion of component or distinctive feature was then taken over into generative phonology. …
Many of the problems with componential analysis arise from misinterpreting the 'components' as if they were constituents of some structure, rather than being paradigms of abstract features; …
… the representational semiotic may also be a diagrammatic one — e.g. network graphs, tree diagrams, our circle diagrams. […] diagrams will only serve us as ‘visualisations’ as long as they construe a metaphor of abstract space at the theoretical stratum.
As we have already noted, the representational semiotic may be language itself — the theory may be represented discursively in the register(s) of linguistics. In this case, the relationship between theory and language is […] a relationship where theory might be construed as a connotative semiotic (in Hjelmslev’s, 1943, conception: a semiotic system whose expression plane is a semiotic system) …
At the same time, this overall ideation base can be expanded by various semogenic strategies, among which we are foregrounding that of grammatical metaphor.
The meaning potential itself is one pole on the dimension of instantiation: it is instantiated in the unfolding of text, with patterns of typical instantiation (specific domains of meaning) lying somewhere in between the potential and the instance.
From a systemic-functional point of view, this means that the ideation base is construed as a multidimensional, elastic semantic space. This space is organised as a meaning potential, with an extensive system of semantic alternatives; these alternatives are ordered in delicacy. Each set of alternatives is a cline of semantic space rather than a set of discrete categories, and any alternative may be constituted structurally as a configuration of semantic rôles. The meaning potential is thus differentiated axially into (i) systems of options in meaning and (ii) structural configurations of rôles by which these options are constituted.
Metalanguage has the same basic properties as any semiotic system. This means that it is stratified. It construes language in abstract theoretical terms; but this construal is in turn realised as some form of representation — either language itself, in discursive constructions of theory, or some form of designed semiotic (system networks, constituency rules, conceptual networks, logical formulæ, and so on).
We have noted above that the semantics/lexicogrammar of natural language is itself a ‘realisation’ (an abstract construction) of daily experience. Likewise, the system we use to explore the semantics/lexicogrammar — our theory of semantics and our grammatics — is a ‘realisation’ of that part of daily experience that is constituted by semantics and lexicogrammar; that is, it is an abstract construction of language. This system is itself a semiotic one — a metalanguage; in Firth’s more everyday terms, it is language turned back on itself. So whereas a language is (from an ideational point of view) a resource for construing our experience of the world, a metalanguage is a resource for construing our experience of language.
The phonological representations are still abstract; they have to be manifested in bodily movements — in the ongoing movement of the parameters of the articulatory system. The sound system thus categorises bodily processes; and in this respect, it is similar to the semantic system: both are ways of construing human experience. Meaning is thus represented by modes of organisation that are similar to its own.
In the ideational domains, the representation is usually conventional; but even here there is a relationship of analogy, where we find in the sounding, modes of organisation similar to those of wording (and therefore of meaning). Systemically, we find that the system construes a phonetic space — notably the vowel space; and that this provides a model for semantic space. Structurally, we find that sound is structured both as [logical] chains of segments (e.g. rhythmic units interpreted as syllable complexes) and as [experiential] configurations of segmental constituents (e.g. syllables interpreted as configurations of phonemes).
In the interpersonal and textual domains of content, it is often natural; thus interpersonal content tends to be represented prosodically by movements or variant levels in pitch, and textual content tends to be represented by prominence achieved phonologically (e.g. by the major pitch movement in an intonation contour) or sequentially (e.g. by using distance from initial position in the clause as a scale of prominence).
We can learn about the different modes of meaning — logical, experiential, interpersonal, and textual — by exploring their different modes of representation in the grammar — chaining, constituency, prosody, and wave. Grammar is thus a hybrid system for representing meaning in the sense of embodying different modes of representation; but it is this that allows it to maintain a natural relationship with respect to semantics, with each mode of representation realising a different mode of meaning.
Meaning is realised in two cycles. We have noted that the first cycle, the realisation in lexicogrammar, is natural, in the sense of being non-arbitrary: for example, the grammatical constituency structure of a clause provides a natural representation of the semantic configuration of a process, participants and circumstances. By attending to grammatical realisations, we can thus learn a good deal about the more abstract organisation of meaning at the higher stratum of semantics.
For instance, while more formally oriented accounts may approach transitivity patterns essentially in terms of sequences of grammatical classes such as ‘nominal group + verb (+ nominal group’ and speak of classes of verb followed by one nominal group (‘monotransitive’) or two nominal groups (‘ditransitive’), a systemic grammar interprets such sequences in terms of systems of distinct and contrasting process types.
tense — group: traditionally a mixture, because the model was taken over from Latin with richer word-rank realisations than English, but more recently in this [20th] century often a word category, past/non-past; reinterpreted (relative to this) as (i) past/present/future and (ii) recursive, with secondary tense.
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.