Misrepresenting The SFL Orientation To Meaning

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 171):

When we are first working our way into the linguistic system as pre-school children, nominal groups are used to construe the concrete sensible objects of our experience of the material world. They refer to the people and things that we can see, hear, smell, taste and feel.

 

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This is potentially misleading, because it invites a transcendent view of meaning, wherein meaning transcends semiotic systems, and the meanings of semiotic systems refer to the meanings outside semiotic systems. This is the opposite perspective on meaning to the immanent perspective on which SFL Theory is founded, wherein meaning is exclusive to semiotic systems; see, for example, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 415-8). 

In this view, experience is construed as meaning, with the meanings of perceptual semiotic systems reconstrued as the meanings of language that are realised by the wordings of language, such as nominal groups. That is, in SFL Theory, nominal groups do not refer; they realise the meanings (people and things) construed of experience.