Perhaps [Halliday's] greatest contribution was to show us how ‘production’ and ‘exchange’ happen simultaneously, through grammatical metafunctions, that it is in fact a co-production between speakers. But this co-production is necessarily sequenced in time – one person then another. And each person evaluates the other as they speak or gesture. That’s what the ‘exchange’ metaphor attempts to capture... to technicalise and iconise.
I’m interested in the fields these metaphors are imported from. Put ‘exchange’ together with ‘powerhouse where meaning are made’, with what we know of the old man’s history and what motivated his career, and we get the field of Marxist theory of economic production and exchange, combined with Hjelmslev’s theory of semiotic strata.
In my view this helps to explain how he conceptualised the grammar/semantics relation in 1961, when his research focus was grammar... with grammar as the productive ‘base’ where meanings are made, that redounds with a semantic ‘superstructure’ of these meanings.
Blogger Comments:
[1] For some, Halliday's greatest contribution was his formulation of a scientifically rigorous theory of language.
[2] To be clear, Halliday did not show that language is 'a coproduction between speakers … sequenced in time'. This has been the experience of language users since time immemorial. This is one aspect of the data that is modelled in his theory.
[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The "exchange metaphor" does not attempt to "capture…to technicalise and iconise" any reciprocal evaluation by interlocutors. Exchange means giving and demanding (to be given) information or goods-&-services: the system of SPEECH FUNCTION. Whether or not interlocutors actually evaluate each other in their texts is another matter entirely.
[4] To be clear, this is nonsense. On the one hand, exchange is not Marxian theory; as a social phenomenon, it is data that can be interpreted in terms of Marxian, or any other, theory. On the other hand, the word 'powerhouse' was Matthiessen's addition to his editions of IFG (2004, 2014) and it was used to elaborate Halliday's original (1985, 1994) metaphor, drawn from the functioning of a computer, of grammar as the central processing unit of language, not to evoke "economic production and exchange".
[5] To be clear, as levels of symbolic abstraction in linguistic theory, strata ultimately derive from Saussure's sign, where Signified is the higher level and Signifier is the lower level. Hjelmslev conceived of the higher level as content, and lower level as expression, in his characterisation of a denotative semiotic. Hjelmslev distinguished this from a connotative semiotic, which has a denotative system as its expression plane, and Halliday adopted this to model culture as the content plane and language as the expression plane of a connotative semiotic.
[6] This misrepresents the theoretical architecture of Scale & Category Grammar (Halliday 1961). Halliday (2002 [1961]: 39):
The words 'semantics' and 'semantic' were not used in Halliday (1961). The word 'context' in the above diagram was characterised by Halliday (ibid.) as follows:
The context is the relation of the form to non-linguistic features of the situations in which language operates, and to linguistic features other than those of the item under attention: these being together “extratextual” features. … Context is in fact (like phonology) an interlevel relating form to extratextual features.
And again, the compositional relation between a productive base and its superstructure is not analogous to the symbolic abstraction relation between grammar and semantics.
