David Rose Promoting Jim Martin's Misunderstandings Of Instantiation And Stratification

David Rose wrote to sys-func on 24 may 2022 at 18:56:

All strata instantiate!

Martin, J. R. (2009). Realisation, instantiation and individuation: some thoughts on identity in youth justice conferencing. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 25, 549-583.

Martin, J. R. (2010). Semantic variation: Modelling realisation, instantiation and individuation in social semiosis. New discourse on language: Functional perspectives on multimodality, identity, and affiliation, 1, 34.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, instantiation is the relation of system to instance. The process of instantiation is the selection of features, and the activation of realisation statements, in logogenesis, the unfolding of text.

[2] To be clear, Martin's Figure 3 misunderstands the cline of instantiation in three ways. Firstly, in misrepresenting the cline as a hierarchy of generality, it blurs the distinction between delicacy (type of x) and instantiation (token of x). Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 15):

Note that it is important to keep delicacy and instantiation distinct. … The difference is essentially that between being a type of x (delicacy) and being a token of x (instantiation). Both may be construed by intensive ascription.

Secondly, it misrepresents different perspectives on the same scale of diatypic variation, genre/register and text type, as different points on the cline. To be clear, register is diatypic variation viewed from the system pole of the cline, whereas text type, and genre in this sense, is diatypic variation viewed from the instance pole of the cline.

Thirdly, it misconstrues reading variation as instantial of text variation. Importantly, a reading is not an instance of a text, because, viewed from the system pole, a reading is not a subpotential of a text, and viewed from the instance pole, a text is not a 'reading type'.

[3] To be clear, Figure 4 presents Martin's misunderstanding of stratification. Put most succinctly, Martin mistakes the content plane of Hjelmslev's connotative semiotic for the entire connotative semiotic, and fills his connotative with varieties of a denotative semiotic: register and genre. 

That is, Martin misconstrues functional varieties of language as the context of language, and thereby distinguishes varieties of language from language. (This is analogous to distinguishing functional varieties of cattle — dairy, beef — from cattle.)

However, this distinction is contradicted in Figure 4, where the two systems of context, genre and register, are nevertheless both instantiated as text, an instance of language. (Figure 4 conceals this self-contradiction by not labelling genre and register as context.)

Martin's model becomes more explicitly nonsensical when the instantiation clines of genre and register in Figure 4 are filled out in the detail provided in Figure 3, yielding:

• genre system >> genre/register of genre >> text type of genre …
• register system >> genre/register of register >> text type of register …

In sharp contrast, Halliday (2005 [1995]: 254) provides the original coherent model: