Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition M. A. K. Halliday and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen London: Cassell (Open linguistics series, edited by Robin Fawcett), 1999, xiii+657 pp; paperback, ISBN 0-304-70490-3, $102.00, £65.00

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday has been actively analyzing and documenting the interactions between syntax and semantics for over forty years, and his systemicfunctional theory has been a foundation for important work in computational linguistics for at least thirty years. The first major application of systemic theory was the SHRDLU system by Winograd (1972). The largest ongoing series of applications has been developed at the USC Information Sciences Institute: language generation (Mann 1982; Hovy 1988); discourse analysis and rhetorical structure (Mann and Thompson 1992); and the interface between the lexicon and world knowledge (Bateman et al. 1990; Matthiessen 1995). In this book, Halliday and Matthiessen present a comprehensive survey of semantics and its relationships to syntax and cognition. Although they present their subject from a systemic-functional point of view, they show how their approach is related to a wide range of work in both computational and theoretical linguistics. One notable omission from their 23-page bibliography is Noam Chomsky, whose period of active research almost exactly coincides with Halliday's. They do, however, give a fair summary of semantic theories based on Chomsky's approach, ranging from the early work of Katz and Fodor to the more recent work by Jackendoff. The book consists of 15 chapters organized in five parts. In Part I, the authors contrast the systemic approach with a view of knowledge representation as a "piecemeal accumulation" of concepts with "no overall organization." Instead of treating language "as a kind of code in which pre-existing conceptual structures are more or less distortedly expressed," they view language as a semiotic system that serves "as the foundation of human experience." The goal of systemic theory is to present a comprehensive view of how humans construe experience through language. Unlike Chomsky, they do not consider grammar as "autonomous" but as an integral part of the lexicogrammar, which realizes meaning in words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Part II, comprising Chapters 2 through 7, presents the meaning base, which corresponds to what many authors would call an ontology. The meaning base, however, represents categories of experience with a topmost node called phenomenon instead of categories of existence with a topmost node called entity. The first subdivision of phenomena is a three-way partitioning according to levels of complexity: