Construing Experience As Meaning

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 98-9, 99n):

Imagine you’re looking up at the sky, with a number of things happening all the time:

Out of this ongoing change (represented pictorially by repeated elements), you can construe a quantum of change as one process configuration, realised in the grammar as one clause; for example: A kite is flying across the sky. With this, you’ve turned experience into meaning, and into wording.

² It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that there is some mode of objective phenomenal world that can be reflected in different ways in language (especially given our somewhat simplistic diagram, where we actually move from one semiotic representation to another, the first one standing for the outside world experienced); but there is not. We construe our experience actively by imposing organisation.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] Strictly speaking, this is actually the reconstrual of the meaning of perceptual systems as the meaning and wording of language.

[2] To be clear, this relates to the 'immanent' epistemological stance with which SFL Theory aligns: that meaning is construed by semiotic systems of the meaningless. The "trap" in this case is the contrary epistemological stance that meaning is transcendent of semiotic systems. 

Interestingly, most physicists are still "trapped" in this 'transcendent' view, despite the fact that Quantum Theory supports the contrary 'immanent' perspective (Wheeler's 'no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon). It is their unawareness of this epistemological distinction that leads physicists to describe quantum physics as 'bizarre' etc.

Is Language 'All There Is'?

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 20):

Once the labels are under control, then you will be empowered and a whole new way of reading texts is opened up to you – one in which you see texts as semiotic entities that make meaning, rather than as formal entities that pass pre-formed thoughts and feelings from one human being to another. You’ll start to see language as having a far more central place in human existence than you may have imagined before, and may even go through a phase of thinking that language is all there is – since it shapes and categorises everything around us the moment we try to say anything about anything at all. This radical Whorfian phase can be a trying one for peers from other disciplines; some of us never recover from it!

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this relates to the epistemological tradition with which SFL Theory aligns. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 416):

meaning is seen as immanent — something that is constructed in, and so is part of, language itself. The immanent interpretation of meaning is characteristic of the rhetorical-ethnographic orientation, including our own approach.

So, on the one hand, language is 'all there is' in the sense that 'all there is' is meaning construed of experience by language. And because, in this view, the content plane of language constitutes the content of consciousness, this epistemological stance is broadly consistent with the philosophy of George Berkeley, who claimed that the material constituents of the world have no subsistence without a mind, and with Quantum Theory, which has demonstrated, in the words of John Wheeler, that 'no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon'. 

But on the other hand, language is not 'all there is' in the sense that the meaning that language construes distinguishes language from other domains of experience, distinguishing, most fundamentally, a material order of phenomena from a semiotic order of metaphenomena — the meanings of language and other semiotic systems.

[2] It is not impossible that this is Matthiessen having an 'under-the-radar' dig at his co-author Martin, who even models the cultural context of language as language (register and genre).