Mar 30
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhgeneral observations
[1] Add ‘saying’ and ‘symbolising’ to ‘sensing’, and add meaning as enacting (interpersonal) to meaning as construing (ideational).
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600):
Both these perspectives — that of the construal of processes other than the mental (saying and symbolising), and that of meaning as enacting as well as meaning as construing — are absent from the cognitive science modelling of mind; and in our view they could with advantage be brought into the picture when we try to understand these complex and central areas of human experience. To do so would both enrich the cognitive model and steer it away from obsessions with information, with knowledge as a separate ‘thing’ divorced from meaning, and with mind as the exclusive property of an individual organism bounded by skin.
[2] Realignment: to ‘know’ something is to have transformed some portion of experience into meaning.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 603):
… the concept of ‘mind’ should be brought into close relation with other phenomena — biological, social, or semiotic. … But once this has been done, the mind itself tends to disappear; it is no longer necessary as a construct sui generis. Instead of experience being construed by the mind, in the form of knowledge, we can say that experience is construed by the grammar; to ‘know’ something is to have transformed some portion of experience into meaning. To adopt this perspective is to theorise “cognitive processes” in terms of semiotic, social and biological systems; and thus to see them as a natural concomitant of the processes of evolution.
Mar 29
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhgeneral observations
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 429):
In Fawcett’s model, there is only one system–structure cycle within the content plane: systems are interpreted as the semantics, linked through a “realisational component” to [content] form, which includes items and syntax, the latter being modelled structurally but not systemically; […] in our model there are two system-structure cycles, one in the semantics and one in the lexicogrammar. Terms in semantic systems are realised in semantic structures; and semantic systems and structures are in turn realised in lexicogrammatical ones.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 429):
… grammatical metaphor is a central reason in our account for treating axis and stratification as independent dimensions, so that we have both semantic systems and structures and lexicogrammatical systems and structures. Since we [unlike Fawcett] allow for a stratification of content systems into semantics and lexicogrammar, we are in a stronger position to construe knowledge in terms of meaning. That is, the semantics can become more powerful and extensive if the lexicogrammar includes systems.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 429):
It follows then … that for us [Fawcett’s (extra-linguistic)] “knowledge of the universe” is construed as meaning rather than as knowledge. This meaning is in the first instance created in language; but we have noted that meaning is created in other semiotic systems as well, both other social-semiotic systems and other semiotic systems such as perception. Our account gives language more of a central integrative rôle in the overall system. It is the one semiotic system which is able to construe meanings from semiotic systems in general.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 504):
Fawcett incorporates into the “relational: possessive” category, processes of giving and acquiring; reduces the circumstantial to locational processes only; and includes within these, processes of going and sending. As is to be expected, this alternative analysis embodies certain generalisations that are not made in our account of figures, and ignores certain others which are.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 504):
His abandonment of the distinction between attributive and identifying seems harder to motivate, since this cannot in fact be explained as a textual (thematic) system in the way that Fawcett proposes.
Mar 26
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhgeneral observations
Expansion & Projection As Fractal Types
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 223):
Since projection and expansion operate across the various categories of phenomena, we referred to them as transphenomenal categories. As transphenomenal categories, they are meaning types that are in some sense “meta” to the organisation of the ideation base: they are principles of construing our experience of the world that generate identical patterns of semantic organisation which are of variable magnitude and which occur in variable semantic environments. Such patterns therefore constitute fractal types.
Transphenomenal Agnation
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 294-5):
The whole metaphorical elaboration [of the semantic system] is made possible by a fractal pattern that runs through the whole system. We have suggested that the metaphorical elaboration is a token–value relation; but in order for it to be a token–value relation within the semantic system, it has to be natural in the sense that the token and the value domains have to be similar enough to allow for the token to stand for the value. … The principle behind this similarity is the fractal pattern of projection/expansion …
That is, while grammatical metaphor constitutes a move from one “phenomenal domain” to another … this move is made possible because fractal types engender continuity across these domains: the metaphorical move from one phenomenal domain to another takes place within the one and the same transphenomenal domain.
Mar 25
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhgeneral observations
In their ideational semantics model, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 48) use ‘phenomenon’ as the most general category of experience and distinguish three ‘orders of complexity’: sequences, figures and elements (congruently realised in the grammar as clause complexes, clauses and groups/phrases, respectively).
Figures distinguish four ‘domains of experience’: sensing, saying, doing–&–happening and being–&–having. Sensing and saying form the ‘conscious–semiotic centre of the ideational universe’ with doing–&–happening and being–&–having peripheral (p131).
Sensing and saying are distinguished as interior and exterior symbolic processing, respectively (p129). Doing–&–happening and being–&–having are distinguished as ‘quintessentially’ active and inert, respectively (p129).
Within sensing, cognition and desideration are central, with perception and emotion peripheral (pp143-4). Cognition is closer to perception, desideration closer to emotion (ibid). Moving outward, perception is closer to behaviour (doing–&–happening), emotion is closer to quality ascription (being–&–having) (p143).
With projection, a relation between figures in a sequence, two ‘orders of experience’ are distinguished: the material — that of the projecting figure (sensing or saying) — and the semiotic — that of the projected figure. Projection brings the content of consciousness into existence (p143-4), this being the content plane of the semiotic system (p108).
Notice that the ‘content of consciousness’ is equated here with the content plane of the semiotic system, and ‘saying’, for example, is the process of externalising consciousness (p584).
Note also that, on this model, the ontogenesis of meaning potential in the organism is the ‘incarnation’ of consciousness. This may explain why the notion of the re-incarnation of ‘souls’ became a feature in some proto-theories (mythologies), given that, in this model, theories are higher–level abstractions realised by language (p565).
Mar 24
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhgeneral observations
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 17):
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.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 608-9):
… the human brain has evolved in the construction of a functioning model of “reality”. We prefer to conceptualise “reality construction” in terms of construing experience. This is not so much because it avoids metaphysical issues about the ultimate nature of reality — we are prepared to acknowledge a broadly materialist position …
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 609):
… what is being construed by the brain is not the environment as such, but the impact of that environment on the organism and the ongoing material and semiotic exchange between the two.
Newer Entries
RSS
Recent Comments