Three Of The Misunderstandings Behind 'Mass', 'Association' And 'Presence'

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 199):

In this section we turn from realisation to instantiation and introduce a multifunctional perspective on some of the traditional concerns of field, tenor, and mode studies in previous work. 

• Re-visiting traditional work on field leads us to a multi-functional perspective on knowledge-building we refer to as mass (Martin 2017); 
• re-visiting traditional work on tenor leads us to a multi-functional perspective on enacting social relations we refer to as association; and 
• re-visiting mode leads us to a multifunctional perspective on organising information flow we refer to as presence (Martin and Matruglio 2013). … 

We propose mass, association, and presence as principles of co-selection during the process of instantiation – which we believe provide a partial account of the phenomenon of permeability in Hasan’s work as introduced above.

Reviewer Comments:

To be clear, from this point on, the theoretical confusions in this paper multiply.

[1] The authors here continue their confusion of context with language:

• 'mass' confuses field (context) with "knowledge building" (ideational language + semogenesis);
• 'association' confuses tenor (context) with enacting social relations (interpersonal language); and
• 'presence' confuses mode (context) with organising information flow (textual language).

[2] It will be seen that these multifunctional perspectives involve viewing each of the metafunctions from the perspective of each of the metafunctions. A grammatical example of this approach would be to view clause transitivity from ideational, interpersonal and textual perspectives. To be clear, it is the clause itself that is viewed from metafunctional perspectives, not any of the metafunctional strands of the clause.

[3] As previously explained, instantiation is the relation between potential and instance at a given level of symbolic abstraction. As such, variables that are said to be at the level of context — mass, association and presence — cannot be principles of instantiation for the level of language. That is, here the authors misunderstand instantiation as a relation between context and language. If mass, association and presence are said to be potential at the level of context, then they themselves are instantiated at the level of context.

[4] To be clear, 'permeability' here simply means that options in one parameter of context, say field, can preselect or exclude options in another, say tenor or mode. The same phenomenon occurs in language where an option in THEME, say, preselects or excludes options in MOOD or TRANSITIVITY.