Voloshinov's philosophy of ideological signs as a frame for Halliday's social semiotics

This study aims to reconstruct the philosophical basis of Halliday’s Social Semiotic, since he draws no constructs from the philosophical tradition of language. His semiotics is a theoretical reflection rather than a systematic philosophical idea and thus requires philosophical legitimacy. The fundamental questions are: what is Halliday's formulation of the nature of language, and what is the adequate philosophical construct? To answer these, the researcher employed a philosophical methodology to analyze the underlying concepts and assumptions and align them with existing philosophical constructs. Halliday departs from empirical linguistics and discovers a semiotic fact, metafunction. This finding rejects the internal-external dualistic tradition. Meanwhile, departing from the Marxist philosophy of language, Voloshinov introduces the concept of ideological sign to refute Saussure's structural semiotics and, simultaneously, to overcome the langue-parole antinomy. His synthesis arises from the fact that language is a semiotic material for consciousness (inner sign) as well as for meaning (outward sign). This parallel leads to the proposition that metafunction is an ideological sign that semiotizes grammatical structures, enabling a speaker to unconsciously choose an option based on their context for their own interests.