Construing Experience through Meaning

This text explores how human beings construe experience. This means experience as a resource, as a potential for understanding, representing and acting on reality. It is in terms of this potential that the particulars of daily life are interpreted: they make sense because they are instantiations of this potential. The construction of experience is usually thought of as knowledge, having the form of conceptual taxonomies, schemata, scripts and the like. The authors offer an interpretation that is complementary to this, treating experience not as knowing but as meaning; and hence as something that is construed in language. In other words, the concern is with the construal of human experience as a semantic system; and since language plays the central role not only in storing and exchanging experience but also in construing it, language is taken as the interpretative base. The focus of the book is both theoretical and descriptive. The major descriptive component is an account of the most general features of the ideational semantics of English, which is then exemplified in two familiar text types (recipes and weather forecasts).