inter-stratal tension

Dimensions In The Construal of Experience

Mar 25

ChRIS CLÉiRIGhgeneral observations No Comments

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).