David Rose Misunderstanding The Dimensions Of SFL Theory Through Biological Analogies

David Rose replied to John Bateman on Sysfling on 23 August 2023 at 21:02:

It’s a missing piece of other theories John, but central to SFS. 

It originates and is reproduced in interaction, the original replicating nucleus of semiosis, analogous with the original proteins of life... always replicating in/as a community. 

As those proteins make life possible, axis makes culture possible. 

Its ideational and textual functions are much later developments, like the eukaryotic cell... ranks the first multicellular organisms, strata the first complex ones (the proteins of which we still share with all other organisms).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, it is nucleic acids, not proteins, that replicate in biological systems. But even with this correction, the analogy is invalid, since if anything replicates in semiosis, it is in the semiotic system, not the interactions of meaners.

[2] To be clear, proteins make life possible in the sense that they are the expressions (Tokens) of genes (Values). Axis, on the other hand, in SFL Theory, is a local dimension with two orders: paradigmatic and syntagmatic. Culture, by contrast, is the contextual semiotic realised by language and other social semiotic systems. Thus, it is not axis that makes culture possible but social semiosis.

[3] To be clear, this misunderstands the metafunctions as independent of one another. 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.

[4] To be clear, the eukaryotic cell was a phenotypic innovation in biological evolution, whereas the metafunctions were in language from the start as types of meaning that might be said to have "phenotypic effects".

[5] To be clear, multicellular organisms arose from the aggregation of eukaryotic cells, but ranks did not arise from the aggregation of the ideational and textual metafunctions. Rank is one way of modelling formal constituency.

[6] To be clear, complex multicellular organisms evolved from simpler multicellular organisms, but strata did not evolve from rank. Strata are different levels of symbolic abstraction, different perspectives on the one phenomenon, and are a dimension of all semiotic systems from the start, though only language has a stratified content plane.