Problems With Intermodal Convergence As A Principle Of Instantiation

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 213-4):

These principles – mass, presence, and association – are by no means the only ones that organise how we take up different sets of choices from the immense set of possibilities in language. At the very least, other principles include that of convergence – how much different choices in a text ‘match’ each other or ‘diverge’ from each other (intralingually, interlingually, and/or intermodally) – which has been primarily taken up so far in studies of how different semiotic resources are used together (e.g. Ngo et al. 2022b; Painter et al. 2013; Zappavigna and Logi 2024); 

Reviewer Comments:

[1] As previously explained, the authors' notion of 'principles of instantiation' is their misunderstanding of the contextual parameters of field tenor and mode as the metafunctional meanings of language misunderstood as mass, association and presence. Moreover, the notion that context can provide 'principles of instantiation' for language misunderstands instantiation as an interstratal relation.

[2] To be clear, 'convergence' is not analogous to mass, association and presence as 'principles of instantiation' because convergence is a relation between distinct semiotic systems, not a relation between a semiotic system and its context. Moreover, 'convergence' is the simplistic notion that instances of distinct semiotic systems are either alike or not. For a close examination of the model of intermodal convergence in Ngo et al. 2022b, see the review posts here.