Slide 30: Mental Potential: Sensing

One way to model sensing potential, in the most general terms, is to use Halliday & Matthiessen’s system network of mental clauses.

 [Figure 5-15 in Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 209): Mental clause systems]

This construes mental socio-semiotic potential, least delicately, as either higher or lower sensing and either emanating (‘like’ type) or impinging (‘please’ type) and either specified or unspecified phenomenalisation.  That is, mental socio-semiotic potential can be classified by these general categorial combinations.

The distinction between higher and lower sensing is the distinction between the projecting types: cognition and desideration, and the non-projecting types: perception and emotion.  We will see that it is primarily the potential to project that makes the socio-semiotic dimension of humanity so much more complex than the social.