Temporal Meanings And SFL Worlds Of Experience

Temporal meanings and SFL worlds of experience

Rosemary Huisman

Later this year, Routledge is publishing my book, Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time, a Social-Semiotic Perspective. The general blurb - no doubt more intended to be impressive than informative - says:

This book brings together a model of time and a model of language to generate a new model of narrative, where different stories with different temporalities and non-chronological modes of sequence can tell of different worlds of human – and non-human – experience, woven together (the ‘texture of time’) in the one narrative.

The model of language referred to is that of SFL, especially as developed in the publications of M.A.K. Halliday and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. The model of time, of different temporalities in natural levels of complexity, is that of J.T. Fraser. Both Halliday and Fraser are influenced by Gerald Edelman's model of the brain, which links human consciousness with the development of language and temporal awareness. And for most narrative theorists, narrative is, at least, the way humans organise their awareness of time.

In this paper I focus on the contribution of SFL to the development of the narrative model. (In the book, the narrative model developed is then used to compare the "texture of time" in English literary texts of different historical periods.)

Blogger Comments:

In this seminar, time was equated with sequence. The problem here is that sequence is not time, but the ordering of processes in time. In SFL Theory, time is a circumstance of processes, and in physics, quantified as a dimension. See also Making Sense Of Time.