ABSTRACT
In Language, Thought and Logic (1993), John Ellis stresses the need for a functional, not formal, linguistics and the central importance of ‘categorization’. M.A.K. Halliday reviews Ellis positively but regrets his ignorance of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Both Ellis and Halliday praise the 1930s work of Benjamin Whorf and this chapter discusses Whorf’s observations on ‘the configuration of experience’ in different languages, including the spatialization of temporal meaning in European languages (SAE). To explore how SAE languages configure experience through nominalization, the chapter gives a detailed account of M.A.K. Halliday’s work on grammatical metaphor – the semantic drift to ‘thingness’ – developed from his close study of scientific discourse and the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language. Thus, the chapter concludes, the noun ‘time’ is the nominalized wording for the logical relation of sequence (duration is discussed in Chapter 6).
