ABSTRACT
This chapter explores language use in a social semiotic perspective, and describes one way that will bring out fundamental and foundational issues. The conception of fourth-order systems as systems of meaning is embodied in social semiotics, and the conception of them as knowledge is embodied in cognitive science. Biological systems and physical systems are both systems of matter, and social semioticians have begun to investigate the semiotic affordance of materiality, for example Kress, as in the study of design, which involves 'making meaning material', as Kress puts it. Halliday introduced the notion of language as social semiotic in a collection of essays written between 1972 and 1976, as part of his ongoing development of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Halliday's book, Language as Social Semiotic or LASS, became the source of the development of social semiotics in and around linguistics, including off-shoots in critical, cultural and multimodal studies.
