This is a study edition of this important work by M A K Halliday‎.‎ The subject of this book is how human beings construe their experience of the world‎.‎ The construction of experience is usually thought of as knowledge‎,‎ represented in the form of conceptual taxonomies‎,‎ schemata‎,‎ scripts and the like‎.‎ The authors offer an interpretation that is complementary to this‎,‎ treating experience not as knowing but as meaning‎;‎ and hence as something that is construed in language‎.‎ In other words‎,‎ the concern is with the construal of human experience as a semantic system‎;‎ and since language plays the central role not only in storing and exchanging experience but also in construing it‎,‎ language is taken as the interpretative base‎.‎ The focus of the book is both theoretical and descriptive‎.‎ The authors consider it important that theory and description should develop in parallel‎,‎ with constant interchange between the two‎.‎ The major descriptive component is an account of the most general features of the ideational semantics of English‎,‎ which is then exemplified in two familiar text types ‎(‎recipes and weather forecasts‎)‎‎.‎ There is also a brief reference to the semantics of Chinese‎.‎Theoretical issues are raised throughout as they become relevant to the discussion‎,‎ with the theoretical base being drawn from systemic functional linguistics‎.‎ Both the theoretical and descriptive proposals offered in the book are compared and contrasted with approaches deriving from Al‎,‎ cognitive science and cognitive linguistics‎.‎

• Author‎:‎ Michael A‎.‎ K‎.‎ Halliday‎,‎ Christian M‎.‎ I‎.‎ M‎.‎ Matthiessen
• Publisher‎:‎ Continuum International Publishing Group
• ISBN‎:‎ 9780826488923