In the system network, the organising metaphor is choice: a point of divergence where meaning takes one path rather than another. In functional linguistics this has never meant that speakers sit in front of a menu of options and deliberately select. Choice, as Halliday made clear, is a metaphor for potential differentiation—a way of modelling how meaning unfolds along structured pathways of contrast.
Yet if the network models potential, then choice must correspond not to an act within that potential, but to the perspectival cut that brings one relation into focus. Choice, in this sense, is a way of construing. It is not what we do with language, but how language itself becomes through the construal of potential differences.
1. The illusion of alternatives
In the canonical network diagram, lines branch and nodes multiply: indicative vs imperative, material vs mental, singular vs plural. The visual form suggests alternatives. But in a relational ontology, these are not rival options within an open set; they are mutually defining poles within a single structured coherence.
To say that the system offers “choice” is to say that potential differentiates itself relationally. Each “option” exists only by contrast with its complementaries. Actualising one is not the elimination of others, but the perspectival enactment of one relation within a field that still contains them all.
2. Choice as the cut of construal
If potential is structured coherence, then construal is the cut that gives that coherence a local face. In physics, this resembles the measurement that collapses a quantum state: a perspectival alignment that makes one relational configuration actual. In language, “choosing” is that alignment—the movement from the network’s virtual coherence to the instance’s concrete pattern.
In relational ontology terms:
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Potential = the structured relational field.
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Construal = the perspectival cut through that field.
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Choice = the articulation of that cut as meaning.
Thus, a system network does not describe how speakers pick words; it models how reality differentiates through construal. Meaning is the local face of potential, seen through the cut of choice.
3. The topology of unfolding
Seen this way, the network’s architecture takes on new significance. Each node represents not a decision point, but a local curvature of potential—a way the field of meaning can turn toward instantiation. The network’s pathways trace the topological grammar of construal: how potential itself unfolds through systemic differentiation.
In systemic terms, choice sequences (e.g., MOOD → declarative → indicative → interrogative) describe an order of relational dependency rather than a temporal or psychological process. Each level presupposes a prior coherence, and each cut deepens the perspective from which meaning can be actualised.
This gives the system network a second, less-noticed dimension: it maps not only paradigmatic alternatives but the relational layering of construal—how successive perspectival cuts bring more of the potential field into focus.
4. The network as perspectival mechanism
We can now reinterpret the network diagram itself as a perspectival machine.
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The leftmost systems represent broad, diffuse potential.
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Each move through the network refines perspective, tightening the relational field.
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The terminal points are not “final choices” but maximally constrained perspectives—points where potential is fully aligned with actualisation.
The system network therefore models the dynamics of construal: how potential becomes instance through a cascade of perspectival alignments.
5. Implications beyond language
When re-read in this way, the notion of choice acquires a significance that extends beyond semiotics.
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In physics, measurement functions as a perspectival cut through quantum potential—an analogue of choice as construal.
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In biology, differentiation expresses potential through construal at a different scale: the alignment of genetic and morphogenetic fields into actual form.
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In cognitive systems, perception itself can be treated as continual construal—each percept a local choice through the network of potential affordances.
Across these domains, the same logic recurs: actualisation arises not from external causation but from internal differentiation—from the way potential construes itself through relation.
6. Toward a relational grammar of potential
In the next post, this will take us to the notion of network topology—how the structure of potential itself might vary across domains. If language instantiates meaning through paradigmatic differentiation, other systems may instantiate energy, form, or value through analogous networks of relational potential.
But the ontological kernel remains constant:
Choice is not selection among things that are; it is the perspectival construal of what could be.
And the system network remains one of the few scientific formalisms built entirely on that principle.
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