Christian Matthiessen’s upcoming conference talk promises to revisit one of the most distinctive achievements of Systemic Functional Linguistics: the system network. Few theoretical innovations have travelled so successfully — across languages, modalities, and even disciplines. The network’s power lies in its capacity to model potential: to render visible not what language has done, but what it could do.
Matthiessen’s theme — the success and expansion of the network — invites a deeper question: why does it work so well? What is it, exactly, that the system network models? And might its success reveal something more fundamental — about potential itself, not only in language but in any system that can be construed as a field of possibility?
This post begins a new series exploring those questions. It revisits the system network not as a mere linguistic diagram but as a formalisation of potential, and situates it within a broader relational ontology — one that understands reality itself as structured potential awaiting perspectival actualisation.
1. The system as theory of the instance
Halliday’s statement that “the system is a theory of the instance” remains one of the most concentrated insights in linguistic theory. The system is not a list of forms or a catalogue of probabilities; it is a theory of possible instances, a model of how meaning can unfold. The instance, conversely, is not a thing in time but a perspectival cut through the system — a local actualisation of what the potential allows.
From this perspective, a system network is not simply a chart of options but a structured topology of potential, a lattice of possible differentiations that can be actualised as meaning. Each choice in the network is not an act performed, but a relation of potential difference that can be realised when construed.
2. Potential as structured coherence
In ordinary discourse, potential is treated as an open horizon — “what could be.” But in a relational ontology, potential is not amorphous possibility. It is structured coherence: a field of relational tensions already organised by what it could become.
The system network formalises that structure. Its nodes and pathways do not merely enumerate alternatives; they encode the relational coherence of the system itself. To move through a network is to traverse the structured topology of potential: to trace how meaning differentiates itself while remaining internally related.
In this sense, the system network gives language theory an explicit topology of potential — a map of how meaning could unfold, not yet actualised, but already constrained by the relations that make its actualisation possible.
3. The network as relational model
When viewed through relational ontology, the system network is not a representation of an external reality but an instance of the same ontological logic it models. It enacts the relation between potential and actualisation.
In relational terms:
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System corresponds to structured potential, the theory of possible instances.
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Instantiation corresponds to a perspectival shift: a construal that cuts through that potential, bringing a portion of it into first-order meaning.
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Network corresponds to the topology of this relational coherence, the way potential differentiates into possible construals.
The network thus mirrors the deeper architecture of relational being: the continual movement between potential and actualisation, between coherence and construal.
4. Beyond language: toward an interdisciplinary topology of potential
If the system network succeeds because it formalises the structure of potential, then its relevance need not stop at language. Other disciplines also model potential:
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In physics, the quantum state space defines structured possibilities of measurement — a field of potential awaiting actualisation.
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In biology, the morphogenetic field structures the potential forms a body might take.
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In complex systems theory, phase space represents the set of possible states through which a system might evolve.
Each of these models, in its own domain, plays a role analogous to the system network. What distinguishes SFL’s contribution is its explicit semiotic articulation: it models not only potential but the construal of potential — meaning as structured possibility.
This is what makes the network such a fertile site for interdisciplinary conversation. Physics, biology, and complexity theory all model potential without modelling construal; linguistics models construal without extending its logic to matter. The system network stands at that intersection. It offers a formal language for potential that could, in principle, be generalised.
5. The promise of extension
Reimagined through relational ontology, the system network is not just a tool for analysing language; it is a prototype for modelling the architecture of potential itself. Its logic — of structured differentiation, of relational coherence, of perspectival actualisation — could inform new interdisciplinary models where potential, rather than object or process, becomes the primary category of analysis.
In this view, the system network is not an SFL artefact but an ontological insight: the first rigorous formalisation of relational potential in any field. Its success across disciplines may be less a matter of adaptation than of resonance — the recognition that all systems, linguistic or physical, are structured not by things that are, but by the ways potential can become actual.
6. Looking ahead
In the posts that follow, we’ll trace this idea outward:
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exploring how choice in the system network corresponds to perspectival construal,
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how physical and biological models of potential parallel semiotic ones,
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and how insights from other disciplines might, in turn, refine our understanding of the network’s topology.
For now, it is enough to note that the system network’s enduring success may arise not from its descriptive power, but from its ontological alignment: it models potential relationally, as Halliday’s own principle always implied.
The network, then, is more than a map of linguistic choice; it is a microcosm of relational possibility — a theory of the instance, and a theory of being as potential.
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