Syntagmatic Units Of Content And Notional Definitions Of Metafunctions

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 8-9):

Kress and van Leeuwen’s breakthrough depended on their paradigmatic perspective on how images make meaning – formalised as system networks and tables in Kress and van Leeuwen (1990: 49, 61, 86, 108). This relational approach enabled them to bypass the pseudo-problems arising when scholars searched for syntagmatic units in semiotic systems that realise systems in structure very differently from the way language does. As critiqued in Martin (2011b), very little of the work inspired by Kress and van Leeuwen has proceeded along similar lines – unfortunately relying instead on notional definitions of ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning to explore modalities of communication other than language.

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[1] To be clear, syntagmatic units are units of form, and so are restricted to the strata of lexicogrammar and phonology in language. As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 604) have argued, language is unique in having a content plane stratified into semantics and lexicogrammar, so other semiotic systems are organised into content and expression planes only. Consequently, the difficulty that scholars faced in finding syntagmatic units on the content plane of other, epilinguistic, semiotic systems was due to the fact that there are no forms to be found there.

[2] For some of the problems with Martin's work in epilinguistic semiotic systems, see

here (Working With Discourse 2007), and
here (Deploying Functional Grammar 2010).

[3] To be clear, in linguistics, 'notional' means

denoting or relating to an approach to grammar which is dependent on the definition of terminology (e.g. ‘a verb is a doing word’) as opposed to identification of structures and processes.

In SFL Theory, the metafunctions are not identified 'from below' by their structures, but 'from above' by their meanings (i.e. 'notionally'). Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 7-8):

The ideational metafunction is concerned with construing experience — it is language as a theory of reality, as a resource for reflecting on the world. The interpersonal metafunction is concerned with enacting interpersonal relations through language… . The textual metafunction … is concerned with organising ideational and interpersonal meaning as discourse — as meaning that is contextualised and shared.