Construing Experience Through Meaning: A Language-Based Approach to Cognition

by M.A.K. Halliday, Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen

This text explores how human beings construe experience. This means experience as a resource, as a potential for understanding, representing and acting on reality. It is in terms of this potential that the particulars of daily life are they make sense because they are instantiations of this potential.

Genres: Linguistics

657 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a British-born Australian linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistic model of language.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can you experience without language? Certainly. But can you make any sense of your experience without language? Language enables us to construe experience, to make meaning of the stream of experience that is our journey through life. Language helps to divide experience into categories which, through experience and socialisation, become recognisable to the extent that they seem natural. It must be pointed out that these categories do not exist 'out there'. The categories that we use to make meaning are those that have developed within our communities. They seem natural because they are the categories we use to make meaning in every interaction with our environment, including interactions with everyone else who is doing the same thing.