David Rose Promoting Jim Martin's Misunderstandings Of Realisation, Instantiation And Individuation

David Rose wrote to David Kellogg on sys-func on 27 May 2022 at 7:00:

 ... further from

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. 

 

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, Martin's Figura 13 above is almost identical to a Figure 5 in an earlier publication that was previously examined here. The only difference is the addition of the terms logogenesis, ontogenesis and phylogenesis in Figura 13.

Consequently, the theoretical inconsistencies previously identified in Martin's Figure 5 also apply to Figura 13.

Firstly, it presents instantiation and individuation as if they were internal dimensions of meaning potential like stratification. However, the clines of instantiation and individuation model different perspectives on meaning potential as a whole, rather than scales within meaning potential.

Secondly, it misrepresents text as an instance of context (culture) as well as language. In SFL Theory, it is situation that is an instance of context. This relates to Martin's misunderstanding of context as varieties of language, genre and register (which accounts for the superfluous stratum in the figure).

Thirdly, by its vertical dimension, it misrepresents the cline of individuation as applying to text as well as potential. This makes the nonsensical claim that every text is common to all language users, varying according to user.

To these inconsistencies can be added a further theoretical inconsistency created by Martin's inclusion of the terms logogenesis, ontogenesis and phylogenesis in Figura 13. This inclusion has the effect of setting up the following proportionalities:

instantiation : logogenesis ::

individuation : ontogenesis ::

realisation : phylogenesis

Now, while the instantiation of the system in text occurs in logogenesis, and the individuation of the system occurs in ontogenesis, the realisation of the system does not occur in phylogenesis. The fundamental inconsistency here derives from the fact that realisation is an internal dimension of the system, whereas instantiation and individuation are perspectival clines on the system as a whole.