Outer and inner weathers : cartographies of the semantic self

In functional linguistics we go further than the poet, Frost, who did himself know the perturbations of a tumultuous psyche. Let us extend the metaphor for our semantic enquiry: the outer weather of our social interactions - our network of roles, relations, and obligations - creates the semantic pressures of our inner weather, of our semantic self. And this complex reciprocation (our 'socio-semantic self') becomes subtle and complex at an early stage. The three year-old who wants her father to take her out early on Sunday morning already employs strategic alignments and non-alignments between the semantics of proposal and the architecture of the grammar. She simply says 'I was thinking ... in my room, if I put my shoes on, we might go round to Jennie's.'