Matthiessen’s thoughts on some key issues in systemic functional linguistics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Once systems of a new order of complexity have emerged, these systems will evolve together with systems of the lower order (“co-evolution”); and one consequence of this is that systems of different orders will evolve towards greater complexity together, in a kind of dialectic.

2 I’ll come back to Halliday’s (2005) interpretation in some other contexts: he suggests that all systems can be interpreted as mixtures of the material and the semiotic, relating his interpretation to discussions of “information” (which he takes to be a special aspect of meaning  – meaning that can be measured) as order in material systems.

3 In the case of the fishing activity, the members of the team may engage in chanting of some kind to help them get the right rhythm needed for the coordinated activity. I mention Kerala simply because that’s one place where I have observed this kind of activity, more specifically Kovalam Beach.

4 Cf. also my reference to a scene from Houston’s Beat the Devil in Matthiessen (2014).