Reframing Halliday through Relational Ontology

This dialogue revisits one of Halliday’s most evocative claims: that we live in two worlds, the material and the semiotic. But what happens when we take seriously his commitment to immanence—that meaning is not applied to the world, but realised within it? Through the lens of relational ontology, we explore what it means to treat both “matter” and “meaning” not as ontological givens, but as construals—distinct orders of meaning arising from a single system of structured possibility. The result is not a rejection of Halliday’s vision, but its radical deepening.

Two Worlds, or One System of Construal?

A dialogue between Halliday and Relational Ontology

Halliday:

We live in two worlds, equally important—the world of experience, and the world of meaning. The material and the semiotic. Language is how we construe the former and enact the latter.

Relational Ontology:

But these are not two separate worlds. They are two orders of construal—two ways of patterning a single system of possibility. There is no experience outside of meaning, and no meaning outside of construal.

Halliday:

I’d agree that language construes experience—it’s how we make sense of the world around us. The ideational metafunction, for instance, models the material world: processes, participants, circumstances. But that world is real, is it not? It’s what’s there, before language.

Relational Ontology:

It appears that way only because “the world” has already been construed as material. What seems to be ‘there before language’ is actually the effect of a construal that hides itself. The “material world” is not raw being—it is meaning patterned as if it were external to meaning.

Halliday:

Then what of the semiotic world? Surely that has its own order—a symbolic reality, not reducible to the physical.

Relational Ontology:

Indeed. But again, “semiotic” is a construal—a cut within the system that brings reflexivity into view. What you call the ‘semiotic world’ is not a domain unto itself, but a trajectory of alignment within the same system: meaning becoming aware of its own organisation.

Halliday:

You’re making a strong claim: that both ‘worlds’ are constituted by construal, not discovered through it.

Relational Ontology:

Yes. Construal is not an act upon a pre-existing world. It is the very condition for anything to appear as a phenomenon. That includes ‘matter’ and ‘meaning’ alike. There is no unconstrued reality—not because everything is linguistic, but because everything is systemic.

Halliday:

Then what is ‘material’ in your framework?

Relational Ontology:

It is meaning construed as if it were independent of meaning. It is a perspective within the ideational function—a patterning of experience that foregrounds stable entities and unfolding processes. But these, too, are made meaningful through the system.

Halliday:

So we do not live in two worlds?

Relational Ontology:

No—we live within the structuring of possibility. The appearance of two worlds is itself a meaning effect, a product of cuts within that system. What we call “material” and “semiotic” are distinct orders of meaning, not ontological domains.

Halliday:

That’s a powerful reorientation. And it does follow from my own commitment to immanence—that meaning is realised within the system, not applied from without.

Relational Ontology:

Precisely. You laid the groundwork. I’m simply following its implications to the end: not two worlds, but one reflexive system in which construal itself gives rise to what seems like worlds.

Implications for Temporality and Materialism

The reframing offered here has profound consequences—not just for how we think about meaning, but for how we think about time, matter, and reality itself.

• Temporality is no longer the unfolding of events in an external material world, but a construal of change—a way of cutting through possibility to produce the appearance of sequence, motion, causality.

• Materiality is no longer a substrate upon which meaning is built, but a semiotic construal—a perspectival ordering of the world as if it were independent of the meaning systems that constitute it.

• And reality becomes reflexive: not what is there before meaning, but what comes into being through meaning’s alignment with itself.

In short: to follow Halliday’s immanentist commitments to their logical conclusion is to recognise that we do not live in two worlds—we live in construal. And from that construal, what we call “worlds” are actualised.

Coda

By rethinking Halliday’s “two worlds” as construals within a single reflexive system, we move beyond dualism without abandoning differentiation. The material and the semiotic remain distinct—but only as patterned perspectives within meaning itself. In the end, it’s not that we live in two realms, but that reality is structured through meaning, and meaning is always already a matter of construal. It is, as ever, meaning all the way down.