If ideational meaning makes phenomena meanable, and interpersonal meaning exposes meaning to social risk, textual meaning exposes meaning to continuity and coordination.
It is not about cohesion, flow, or rhetorical polish. It is about survivability — the conditions under which meaning can persist long enough to matter.
Textual meaning actualises:
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Recognisability: enabling a reader, listener, or participant to track meaning across stretches of interaction.
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Coherence: aligning meanings so they do not fragment or collapse into noise.
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Durability: allowing meanings to survive through time, repetition, or reinterpretation.
This is the vulnerability surface of persistence: meaning can exist, and it can be socially uptake-ready, but without textual readiness, it dissipates. It falls apart. It ceases to matter.
Key clarifications:
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It does not structure ideas. Ideational meaning has already actualised phenomena. Textual meaning sustains them, but does not create them.
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It does not enforce social norms. Interpersonal meaning handles risk and sanction. Textual meaning handles persistence.
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It is not sequentially prior. The cuts are orthogonal: textual, ideational, interpersonal all operate simultaneously on the same act of actualisation.
Visualise a fragile message crossing a field of potential: ideational meaning illuminates what can be said, interpersonal meaning tests whether it can be said safely, textual meaning ensures it arrives intact. Remove any one, and the message fails.
The danger of ignoring this cut is subtle but insidious: textual readiness is often mistaken for style, structure, or presentation. But here, it is ontological: without it, meaning cannot hold. It is the final condition for survivability.
In the next post, we will draw the cuts together — ideational, interpersonal, textual — to show how the metafunctions are not layers or dimensions, but interdependent conditions on the actualisation of meaning.
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