If Post 2 established that semiosis is the perspectival cut through possibility, then Post 3 confronts the next question:
What exactly is brought into being when a cut is made?
The answer cannot be “information,” “content,” or “reference.” Nor can it be a pre-existing “world” that the clause merely encodes. Those would all smuggle in representational metaphysics through the back door.
Instead:
A construal is the emergence of a world. Not a representation of a world — a world.
Let’s trace this carefully.
1. Phenomena Are First-Order Meanings, Not Objects
In the relational ontology I’ve been developing, a phenomenon is not a thing observed in the world that language then describes. Rather:
A phenomenon is what a cut makes possible.
It is the first-order organisation of meaning as construed experience — the world as it appears from within an instance of semiosis. No phenomenon exists unconstrued; no experience exists prior to meaning.
Thus:
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A clause does not report an experience.
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A clause is the event through which a phenomenal world is enacted.
This is why phenomena differ across perspectives: because they are different actualisations of potential, not different labels for the same underlying substrate.
2. Construal Is Not Instantiation
Construal is often conflated with instantiation, but they are not the same. Instantiation is core to the system/instance relation — the metasemiotic actualisation of system in a specific event.
Construal, by contrast, is:
the first-order shaping of what that event is as experience.
Where instantiation is a relation between potential and actual, construal is the emergent organisation of the actual itself.
This distinction is critical:
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Instantiation operates between levels (metasemiotic → semiotic).
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Construal operates within the semiotic (semiotic → phenomenal).
We need this separation because meaning, reality, and experience are not separate domains — they are different cuts across relational space, not different ontologies.
3. The Metafunctions as the Architecture of World-Making
Halliday’s metafunctions are often misunderstood as “components of grammar.” But they are more profound than that.
Metafunctions are perspectival dimensions of construal — ways in which a world can be brought forth:
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Experiential: the organisation of happenings, beings, relations → the topology of what counts as actual.
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Interpersonal: the organisation of stance, attitude, alignment → the topology of subjectivity.
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Textual: the organisation of flow, texture, relevancy → the topology of coherence.
They are dimensions of emergence — the constitutive axes along which a construed world can take shape.
A construal is experiential and interpersonal and textual because a world must be:
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populated (experiential),
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perspectivally inhabited (interpersonal),
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and ordered as a coherent unfolding (textual).
This is what it means to say:
Metafunctions belong to the realm of construal, not to the realm of instantiation.
They are not realised by system; they are realised within the instance.
4. A Construal Is a Mini-Ontology
This is the central claim of Post 3:
Every instance of meaning brings forth its own ontology.
Not a philosophical ontology but a relational one: a set of distinctions, participants, forces, perspectives, and patterns that cohere as a world for the duration of the event.
Even something as small as:
the cat sat on the mat
enacts:
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a particular cat (not any cat),
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a spatial relation,
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a vantage that differentiates mat from non-mat,
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a stable topology of “sittingness,”
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an interpersonal staging (statement, not command or question),
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and a textual sequencing.
Thus:
5. Why Representation Fails
If construal is world-making, representation collapses. We can no longer speak of:
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language “mapping” reality,
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clauses “encoding” experience,
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symbols “standing for” objects.
These metaphors assume that the world exists fully formed, “out there,” independent of the act of meaning. But relational ontology shows:
The world comes into focus as meaning comes into focus.
To represent a world would require that world to already be present. But semiosis is that which brings worldness into being in the first place.
Representation is thus not wrong; it is simply a parsing of construal from within a given construal. A second-order operation, not a first-order fact.
6. Construal Is Always Plural
Because construals are perspectival worldings, they are inherently multiple. There is no single phenomenon behind the variations — variations are the phenomenon.
This is why:
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no two analyses of a text are identical,
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scholars disagree not because someone is wrong, but because meaning is perspectival,
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and the horizon of possibility is always richer than any single construal of it.
Toward Post 4
In the next post, we turn to the metasemiotic:
Post 4 — The Metasemiotic Domain: Where System Lives
If construal is first-order world-making, metasemiosis is the second-order reflexive space in which systems, categories, distinctions, and theories of meaning emerge.
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