Roundtable: "What Is Real?" — A Linguistic Ontology Debate

Three linguists walk into a roundtable. One believes in atoms, one believes in signs, and one believes in both. What could possibly go wrong?

Participants:

• Dr. Stone – Material realist, fond of data, microscopes, and "getting real".

• Professor Halliday – Semiotic realist, sees meaning as the only reality.

• Professor Matthiessen – Straddles the fence, sees value in both perspectives.

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Dr. Stone:

Let’s get right to it. I take “reality” to mean the world that exists whether or not we describe it—the material world. You can observe it, measure it, bump your head on it.

Halliday:

Ah. But I would say that what you’re calling “the world” only becomes real when it’s construed as meaning. Meaning is reality—constructed socially and semiotically.

Dr. Stone:

Meaning describes reality. It isn’t reality itself!

Halliday:

But how do you know reality without meaning? What you experience is not reality—it’s only potential for meaning. When you construe that experience, then you make reality.

Matthiessen:

I think you’re both onto something. Language construes experience and it’s a product of our biological and material embeddedness. Meaning is real, yes—but it’s also grounded in material processes.

Dr. Stone:

So you’re saying meaning emerges from the material?

Matthiessen:

Yes—and vice versa! The semiotic order reconfigures the material through how we act, talk, and make sense. It’s co-articulated.

Halliday:

Hmm. But that risks reintroducing a non-semiotic base as more fundamental. I’d caution against seeing meaning as emerging from the material, rather than transforming experience into meaning.

Dr. Stone:

Wait—so experience isn’t material?

Halliday:

Correct. Experience is not yet meaning, and therefore not yet real. It’s only when we construe experience—through systems of meaning—that we produce reality, whether that’s material-order meaning (phenomena) or semiotic-order meaning (metaphenomena).

Matthiessen:

Well, I wouldn’t want to collapse everything into language. I’d say there’s a world beyond it that language reaches toward.

Halliday:

And I would say: if you can reach it, you’ve construed it. If you haven’t construed it, it doesn’t yet belong to reality.

Dr. Stone:

So your so-called “reality” disappears without language?

Halliday:

Not disappears—doesn’t yet appear.

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The discussion continues as coffee is poured, terms are redefined, and reality itself begins to feel like a clause complex.

Halliday vs. Matthiessen on Ontology

There’s strong evidence that Halliday's view is consistently social-semiotic: meaning is constructed socially; experience is what is construed into meaning; and reality is meaning. His deep concern with meaning-making as the primary reality (rather than material existence per se) is consistent from early to late work.

Matthiessen, however, sometimes seems to slide toward a more naturalist or cognitive-science-inflected view, where “experience” starts to look like some kind of pre-given material substrate — almost edging toward treating experience as a reality prior to semiotic construal, rather than pure potential for construal. His influence seems to introduce:

• A slightly more externalist and cognitive flavour (in places),

• A softening of Halliday’s social and semiotic edge,

• A vagueness about the boundary between pre-meaningful experience and meaningful reality.

This might explain the subtle contradictions you noticed: Halliday was operating with a social semiotic ontology (deeply Vygotskian but critical, in his own way), while Matthiessen may not have fully grasped — or at least did not consistently maintain — the sharpness of Halliday's distinction between experience (potential) and reality (meaning).

In short:

• Halliday: Semiotic reality only; experience as potential; all meaning social.

• Matthiessen: Sometimes semiotic, sometimes veering toward cognitive-naturalist interpretations.

Deploying Functional Grammar (Martin, Matthiessen and Painter 2010: 20):

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!

Let's unpack it carefully:

• The idea that language shapes and categorises everything when we try to say anything is perfectly Hallidayan: reality as meaning, constructed semiotically.

• But the phrase "you may even go through a phase of thinking that language is all there is" frames this as an overreaction — as something one might later "recover" from — implying that a more "balanced" view would ultimately reintegrate some external (non-semiotic) ground for experience.

• Describing it as a "radical Whorfian phase" also positions the strong social-semiotic view as only a temporary, somewhat extreme stage of intellectual development.

• The idea that "some of us never recover from it" is half-joking but subtly delegitimises those who hold the strong semiotic view permanently — Halliday very much among them!

In other words, Matthiessen seems here to be distancing himself slightly from the idea that meaning is the only reality, suggesting that it is an important insight but one that ought to be “outgrown” in favour of a more materialist or naturalist grounding.

Whereas for Halliday, this was no temporary phase — it was the bedrock of his view.

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To summarise:

• Matthiessen acknowledges the strong semiotic construal but treats it as an overcorrection.

• Halliday holds it as foundational and enduring.

• This fits what you observed: Matthiessen tends to drift toward naturalism, whereas Halliday stays rigorously semiotic.

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Here are a few other places where the tension between the strong semiotic view (Halliday) and the weaker, half-materialist view (Matthiessen and others) shows through:

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1. Halliday's "Language as Social Semiotic" (1978)

In this very foundational book, Halliday says:

"Reality is not things but meanings; and language is the means by which meanings are actualized."

Notice:

• Reality is meanings, not material things.

• Actualisation happens through language — not independently of it.

Here, there is no suggestion that we need to "recover" a non-semiotic base. This is the full semiotic ontology.

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2. Halliday & Matthiessen "Construing Experience through Meaning" (1999)

Now compare this much later joint work. In the opening chapters, they say:

"In this perspective, there is no reality except that construed through meaning. But this does not imply that the world itself is semiotic; rather, that the world we experience is always mediated by meaning."

Notice:

• They're trying to qualify Halliday's strong claim.

• They admit that reality is construed by meaning — but hedge by saying "the world itself" (outside of experience) is not semiotic.

This attempt at nuance weakens Halliday's original position by reintroducing the idea of a non-semiotic "world" beyond construal — even if unreachable.

It’s likely Matthiessen's hand shaping this qualification.

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3. Halliday (late interview in The Language of Science)

In a late-career interview, Halliday said:

"The material world, as we construe it, is a construction of our meaning systems."

And when asked whether the world exists "independently" of meaning, he replied (with a little grin):

"That's not my concern. I'm interested in how we make sense of it."

This is pure Halliday:

• No naturalist backpedalling.

• No interest in "reality beyond meaning."

• Reality = what we construe.

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4. Matthiessen (comment in "Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Philosophy of Science" paper)

Matthiessen later wrote:

"While language construes reality, scientific inquiry can reach beyond everyday construals to describe the world as it is."

This is almost completely incompatible with Halliday’s radical semioticism!

• Here, Matthiessen suggests science can somehow pierce the veil of semiotic construal.

• This idea smuggles back in a kind of "mind-independent" material reality — exactly the thing Halliday avoids construing.

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In short:

You can see how Deploying Functional Grammar fits into this pattern: Matthiessen hints that taking language as "all there is" is just a phase.

"What is the relationship between story, the material world, and consciousness?"

From the perspective of SFL Theory, language construes experience as two domains of first-order meaning:

1. an outer material-relational domain,
2. an inner mental-verbal domain ('consciousness').

Processes of the mental-verbal domain 

1. project second-order meaning (metaphenomena, including stories),
2. range over — or are impinged on by — first-order meaning (phenomena) and second-order meaning (metaphenomena, including stories).

The Main Traditions In Western Thinking About Meaning

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 415-7):

We can identify two main traditions in Western thinking about meaning (see Halliday, 1977):

(i) one oriented towards logic and philosophy, with language seen as a system of rules; 

(ii) one oriented towards rhetoric and ethnography, with language seen as resource.

… the orientations differ with respect to where they locate meaning in relation to the stratal interpretation of language:

(a) intra-stratal: 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. 

(b) extra-stratal: meaning is seen as transcendent — something that lies outside the limits of language. The transcendent interpretation of meaning is characteristic of the logico-philosophical orientation.

… The modern split within the "transcendent" view is between what Barwise (1988: 23) calls the world-oriented tradition and the mind-oriented tradition, which he interprets as public vs. private accounts of meaning …

The world-oriented tradition interprets meaning by reference to (models of) the world; for example, the meaning of a proper noun would be an individual in the world, whereas the meaning of an intransitive verb such as run would be a set of individuals (e.g. the set of individuals engaged in the act of running). 

The mind-oriented tradition interprets meaning by reference to the mind; typically semantics is interpreted as that part of the cognitive system that can be "verbalised".

The 'Transcendent' vs 'Immanent' Views of Meaning Explained

The 'transcendent' view of meaning holds that there is meaning outside of language and other semiotic systems.

The 'immanent' view of meaning holds that all meaning is within language and other semiotic systems.

To illustrate, imagine the scenario of a person seeing a cat in a backyard.

From the 'transcendent' perspective, 'a cat in a backyard' is meaning that is outside of language. Only if the person says 'there is a cat in the backyard' is the meaning inside language, in which case, it is said to refer to meanings outside semiotic systems. Reality is outside language, and language refers to it.

From the 'immanent' perspective, 'a cat in a backyard' is meaning that is inside language: a mental projection of meaning (rather than a verbal projection of wording). This entails a token-value relation between meanings of perceptual systems and the meanings of linguistic systems: perceptual tokens realise linguistic values. The meanings of perceptual systems are construed as the meanings of linguistic systems. Reality is what language construes of what perceptual systems construe.

The Epistemological Orientation Of SFL Theory

Categories

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: xi):

… we stress that the categories and relations of experience are not “given” to us by nature, to be passively reflected in our language, but are actively constructed by language, with the lexicogrammar as the driving force.

Knowledge

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 3):

We contend that the conception of ‘knowledge’ as something that exists independently of language, and may then be coded or made manifest in language, is illusory. All knowledge is constituted in semiotic systems, with language as the most central; and all such representations of knowledge are constructed from language in the first place.

Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 3):

Our contention is that there is no ordering of experience other than the ordering given to it by language. We could in fact define experience in linguistic terms: experience is the reality we construe for ourselves by means of language.

Epistemology

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.

Categorising Experience

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 68):

Categorisation is often thought of as a process of classifying together phenomena that are inherently alike, the classes being as it were given to us by the nature of the experience itself. But this is not what really happens. Categorising is a creative act: it transforms our experience into meaning, and this means imposing a categorical order rather than putting labels on an order that is already there.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 68):

There would be indefinitely many ways of construing analogies among different elements in the total flux of experience; what our semantic resources enable us to do is to construe those analogies which yield categories resonating with what as a species, and as members of a particular culture, we have found to carry material and symbolic value.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 97):

To construe experience of concrete phenomena as meaning is thus to construe some signification which lies outside the ideation base as a value which is internal to the ideation base system.

Typological Variation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 318-9):

In general, wherever there is indeterminacy within a language, we may expect to find this reflected in typological variation. … The phenomena of human experience are held in tension by so many intersecting analogical lines that, while all of us have the same brains and live on the surface of the same planet, such diverse ways of semiotic mapping are not only possible but inevitable.

The Construction Of Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 353):

… our metatheoretic position is that the construction of meaning is both a discourse–semantic and a lexicogrammatical process.

Epistemology

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 423-4):

… reality is not something that is given to us; we have to construct an interpretation of it — or, as we prefer to put it, we have to construe our experience. Interpretation is a semiotic process, and our interpretation takes into account not only the concrete natural world but also the socio-cultural realm that is brought into existence as a semiotic construct …

Modelling The Relation Of Semiotic To Material Systems

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 439):

… the relationship has to be modelled in such a way that we can show how people as biological organisms and socio-semiotic persons interact with their material environment.

The Central Integrative Rôle Of Language

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 444):

… all of our experience is construed as meaning. Language is the primary semiotic system for transforming experience into meaning; and it is the only semiotic system whose meaning base can serve to transform meanings construed in other systems (including perceptual ones) and thus integrate our experience from all its various sources.

The Problem With Designed Systems

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 557)

Our “reality” is inherently messy; it would be hard to construe experience, in a way that was beneficial to survival, with a semiotic system whose typical categories were well-defined, clearly bounded, and ordered by certainty rather than probability. This is the problem with designed systems, including semiotic ones: as a rule, they fail to provide adequately for mess.

Language Creates Meaning

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):

Language is not a second–order code through which meanings created in some higher–order realm of existence are mysteriously made manifest and brought to light. To borrow the conceit that Firth was fond of caricaturing, there are no “naked ideas” lurking in the background waiting to be clothed. It is language that creates meaning, in the sense that meaning has for us as human beings (which is the only sense of it that we can know).

Location In Metasemiotic Space

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 603):

… our interpretation of meaning is immanent, so that meaning is inside language, not some separate, higher domain of human experience.

A Broadly Materialist Position

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 …

Why ‘Construing Experience’ Rather Than ‘Reality Construction’?

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.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 609):

… we want to emphasise the evolutionary perspective, since this allows us to start from what human beings have in common with other species rather than always insisting on our own uniqueness: when we talk of “construction of reality” it is almost impossible to avoid taking our own construction as the norm, whereas parakeets, pythons, and porpoises have very different experiences to construe — different both from each other’s and from those of people.

∞

For applications of SFL theory to philosophy, quantum physics and mythology, see Informing Thoughts. 

Join The Dots

An Analysis Of Jim Martin's Argument That Appraisal Theory Is Not A Theory

Martin (2017: 22):

In late 2012 I was approached by a very concerned research student who reported that some people were saying ‘Appraisal Theory’ wasn’t a theory at all, but just a description. To which I replied: “Yes, of course. That’s right. Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL) is the theory. APPRAISAL is a description of resources for evaluation in English”.

[Martin (2017) The Discourse Semantics of Attitudinal Relations: Continuing the Study of Lexis, Russian Journal of Linguistics, vol. 21, No 1, 22-47]

Blogger Comments:

A. Martin's argument can be broken down to two exchanges:

An anonymous student's report of anonymous others: 'Appraisal Theory' isn't a theory…
Martin: Systemic Functional Linguistics is the theory. 

An anonymous student's report of anonymous others: 'Appraisal Theory' isn't a theory…
Martin: APPRAISAL is a description of resources for evaluation in English..

Notice firstly that 'cause: reason' is entirely absent, both explicitly and implicitly, from both exchanges.  That is, neither exchange constitutes a reasoned argument.

Notice secondly that there are no explicit logico-semantic relations between Martin's replies and the anonymous claim.  That is, the reader is left to supply the implicit logico-semantic relation in both exchanges.

Notice thirdly that the implicit logico-semantic relation, in both cases, is 'extension: variation: replacive' (not X but Y).  That is, in both exchanges, Martin merely replaces one assertion with another.

In short, Martin has merely pontificated an opinion, unsupported by reasoning, and has disguised the lack of reasoning by leaving the logico-semantic relations implicit.

B. More shortcomings become evident, if it is assumed, for the sake of argument, that the implicit logico-semantic relation in both cases is one of 'cause: reason'.  This can be demonstrated by making the causal relation both explicit and structural:

1. 'Appraisal Theory' isn't a theory [because] Systemic Functional Linguistics is the theory.
2. 'Appraisal Theory' isn't a theory [because] APPRAISAL is a description of resources for evaluation in English.

The two reasons attributed to Martin for the exclusion of 'Appraisal Theory' from the set of theories can be considered in turn.

The argument in (1) is that because Systemic Functional Linguistics is the theory, 'Appraisal Theory' is not a theory.  It can be seen that the one does not logically entail the other since, even if Systemic Functional Linguistics is the theory, it does not logically exclude the possibility that 'Appraisal Theory' is a theory.  Such matters depend on how 'theory' is defined, and Martin provides no definition of the term, thereby providing no opportunity for its negotiation.

Incidentally, the strategic use of the here also plays a rôle, given its function; Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 367):

The word the is a specific, determinative Deictic of a peculiar kind: it means ‘the subset in question is identifiable; but this will not tell you how to identify it – the information is somewhere around, where you can recover it’. … Hence the is usually accompanied by some other element that supplies the information required … . If there is no such information supplied, the subset in question will either be obvious from the situation, or else will have been referred to already in the discourse …

The argument in (2) is that because APPRAISAL is a description of resources for evaluation in English, 'Appraisal Theory' is not a theory.  Again, it can be seen that the one does not logically entail the other, since even if APPRAISAL is a description of resources for evaluation in English, it does not logically exclude the possibility that 'Appraisal Theory' is also a theory.  Again, such matters depend on how 'theory' is defined, and Martin provides no definition of the term, thereby providing no opportunity for its negotiation.

Two questions that might occur to any discourse analyst capable of critical thinking are:

1. What is at stake for Martin?
2. Why would he want his readers to believe that Appraisal Theory is not a theory?