David Rose On Stratification [15/8/12]

At 10:39am on 15/8/12, David Rose sent the following email to Sysfling and Sys-func entitled All strata make patterns of meaning:

For those concerned with our ongoing discussion about the nature of stratification, this recent clarification from MAKH could form a point of articulation/agreement, around his (and Firth's) 'broader sense' of meaning...
'Realization is the relationship among strata… wordings realize patterns of meaning, which we refer to as the stratum of semantics. (Note that “meaning” is here being used in its narrower, more specific sense, to refer just to patterns in semantics. The same term “meaning” is also used in a broader, more general sense to refer to patterns made at both the semantic and the lexicogrammatical stratum – the “content plane”, in Hjelmslev’s terminology. Firth used to use the term to refer to patterns at all strata, those of expression as well as those of content.)'  from Complementarities in Language (2008:14)

Blogger Comment:

Note that in modelling strata and the realisational relation between them, Halliday uses "meaning" (as he says) 'in its narrower, more specific sense, to refer just to patterns in semantics'.  He then clarifies that this usage contrasts with the other 'broader, more general sense' of the term in his linguistic  tradition.

Once again, Rose has confused the process of semogenesis, in which all strata do indeed make meaning (abstract creative material process), with the hierarchy of stratification, in which meaning is realised in wording (symbolic identity).