What I find amazing in all your questions is that the machine has astounding control over interpersonal meanings. Astounding because I’ve always assumed that interpersonal meanings are embodied in feelings. The machine is showing us that interpersonal values are just as abstract as other meanings. That they’re learnt.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, on the one hand, interpersonal meanings cannot be reduced to "embodied in feelings". For example, the propositions one and one make two and the car is in the backyard are clearly not "embodied in feeling". On the other hand, 'feelings' are construed ideationally as well as enacted interpersonally. For example, the clause he felt happy is a construal of experience as ideational meaning.
[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, interpersonal meanings are of the same level of abstraction as ideational meanings: semantics.
[3] To be clear, the 'straw man' notion that interpersonal meanings are not learnt is nonsensical. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 532-3):
These three "metafunctions" are interdependent; no one could be developed except in the context of the other two. When we talk of the clause as a mapping of these three dimensions of meaning into a single complex grammatical structure, we seem to imply that each somehow "exists" independently; but they do not. There are — or could be — semiotics that are monofunctional in this way; but only very partial ones, dedicated to specific tasks. A general, all-purpose semiotic system could not evolve except in the interplay of action and reflection, a mode of understanding and a mode of doing — with itself included within its operational domain. Such a semiotic system is called a language.
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