Moving From The Misunderstandings Of Realisation To The Misunderstandings Of Instantiation

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 198-9):

As for tenor and field, these systems of mode – DISTRIBUTION, JUNCTURE, and PULSING – offer a model of the resources drawn on to organise text, rather than a common-sense classification of different modes. This model of mode as a resource is considerably less developed than that for field (Doran and Martin 2021) and for tenor (Doran et al. 2024), but it nonetheless offers a means of maintaining the context-metafunction resonance that has underpinned SFL’s conception of the relationship between the internal and external functionality of language.

Of course, this does not mean that other considerations often grouped under field, tenor, and mode (e.g. degrees of technicality, social contact, and context-dependence) do not need to be accounted for. Rather, it means that they need to be conceptualised in a theoretically clearer manner. To do this, we propose a perspective from instantiation that treats these and other variables as coupling principles – i.e. as principles for the co-selection and arrangement of choices in language.

 

Reviewer Comments:

[1] As previously shown, these "mode" systems all derive from misunderstanding context as language.

[2] As previous shown, the authors misunderstand context-metafunction resonance as requiring that a contextual parameter only implicate linguistic systems of the counterpart metafunction. On this misunderstanding, the field of logic implicating 'proposition' in the interpersonal system of the speech function would constitute a reduction in context-metafunction resonance.

Moreover, as previously shown, the authors themselves contribute to a "reduction of resonance" by interpreting exchange structure (interpersonal semantics) as a resource of mode (textual context).

[3] To be clear, instantiation is the relation between potential and instance at a given level of symbolic abstraction. As such, variables at one level, context, cannot be principles of instantiation for another level, language. That is, here the authors begin their misunderstanding of instantiation as a relation between context and language. This is the direct opposite of conceptualising context "in a theoretically clearer manner".