From Meaning to Matter, Part 1: Origins in SFL

Systemic Functional Linguistics has always offered more than a framework for analysing language. At its core, it provides a way of thinking about how reality itself is construed. In this first post of From Meaning to Matter, we trace the conceptual roots that make SFL a natural springboard toward a relational ontology.

A key insight in SFL is the system/instantiation distinction. Systems are networks of potential — structured choices available in a domain of meaning. Instantiation is the actualisation of these potentials: the choices made, the events that occur, the clauses that are actualised. In other words, systems describe what could happen, while instances are what does happen.

Another foundational insight is the clause complex. In SFL, clauses are not isolated units; they are always connected in sequences, expressing relations between processes, participants, and circumstances. This shifts attention away from things as the primary units of meaning, and toward relations between processes.

Taken together, these concepts reveal a remarkable possibility: SFL equips us to model reality itself as relational and processual. Rather than beginning with static entities, we can think in terms of networks of potential, actualised through perspectival cuts. Meaning emerges relationally, and the structures we observe in language provide a blueprint for how we might understand other domains, including physics and the material world.

In the next post, we will explore how these SFL insights extend into quantum theory and relativity, and how thinking in terms of potential and instance illuminates phenomena in physics as construed, relational, and evolving.