SFL has always been a theory of meaning as system: a theory of potential, selection, and semiotic ecology.
But its deepest commitments — strata, metafunctions, semantics as choice, context as constraint — still rest on a metaphysics largely inherited from structuralism and cybernetics. Systems are treated as representational abstractions. Instantiation is treated as a process. Context is treated as a classificatory environment. Meaning becomes something language contains or models, rather than something actualised through perspectival differentiation.
Relational ontology changes the ground beneath all of this.
It treats systems as potentials for actualisation — theories of possible instances.
It treats construal as a perspectival cut, the shift from horizon to phenomenon.
It treats meaning as metabolic horizon-dynamics, not information.
It treats context as field-level ecological conditions that shape (and are shaped by) semiotic flows.
It treats register as adaptive viability, not taxonomy.
And it treats language not as an information system but as a metabolic organ in the planetary semiotic ecology.
What follows is not a departure from Halliday, but an attempt to fulfil his original project by returning it to its ontological bedrock.
The series proceeds as a single unfolding movement:
1. Construal as Relational Cut
Meaning is not representation but actualisation through distinction.
A phenomenon is not “what exists” but what stabilises when a horizon differentiates itself. Construal becomes the foundational semiotic operation.
2. Semantics as Horizon Metabolism
Semantics is reconceived as the metabolism of horizons — how meaning flows, stabilises, proliferates, and collapses.
Semantics is not symbolic content. It is the physiology of language.
3. Field Systems as Context
Context is rebuilt from field-dynamics rather than taxonomies.
Field, tenor, and mode become ecological pressures and affordances — constraints on horizon-formation — realised by semantics in canonical Hallidayan fashion.
4. Delicacy as Metabolic Refinement
Delicacy is no longer proliferation of tiny distinctions but refinement of metabolic pathways in semantic space: conservation, optimisation, differentiation under pressure.
5. Register as Ecological Viability
Register becomes an adaptation strategy:
a way systems maintain viability under specific situational conditions.
Not classification, but ecological survival.
6. Language as a Metabolic Organ of Semiosis
Language is reinterpreted as an evolved organ whose function is to stabilise and circulate semiotic horizons — a regulatory organ in the semiotic biosphere.
7. Toward a Relational Formalism for Linguistics
Finally, the series sketches a minimal ecology of relations:
relational operators, metabolic diagrams, horizon logics, and a symbolic-but-not-representational formalism that anchors SFL in relational ontology.
What this series offers is not a new linguistics beside SFL, but a deeper foundation beneath it — a way to preserve Halliday’s full architecture while giving it an ontological coherence, ecological grounding, and formal clarity it has always gestured toward but never fully articulated.
This is SFL rebuilt from the ground up —
not by replacing its commitments,
but by revealing the horizon that makes them possible.
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