Problems With 'Principles Of Instantiation'

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 213):

In terms of instantiation, this model focuses on how different choices are brought together and sequenced. More technically, it is concerned with the principles that underpin couplings. It has long been acknowledged that choices in language are not put together in a random fashion, but work together to build meaning. This is, of course, the basis of Halliday’s conception of register. The current model aims to make explicit the principles determining how these choices come together. Importantly, it arises from an acknowledgement that these principles are not tied to any particular metafunction but are cross-metafunctional.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] The reader is invited to imagine a time when it was thought that choices in language were put together in a random fashion so as not to work together to build meaning.

[2] This is not, of course, the basis of Halliday’s conception of register. To be clear, Halliday's 'register' is a point of variation on the cline of instantiation between language-as-system and language-as-text. Different sub-potentials of culture (contextual configurations of field, tenor and mode) are realised by different registers, and registers differ in the selection probabilities of semantic and grammatical features.

[3] To be clear, the first half of this paper reconceptualised the contextual parameters of context, field tenor and mode, as the ideational, interpersonal and textual language that realises each. This simply mistook one level of symbolic abstraction for another.

The second half of this paper then reconceptualised the notions of contextual field tenor and mode that they replaced as 'principles of instantiation' of language. This again confused the contextual parameters of context, field tenor and mode, as the ideational, interpersonal and textual language that realises each, but went further by modelling this confusion of context and language as principles for the instantiation of language.

[4] This continues the authors' misunderstanding of 'context-metafunction resonance' as requiring that contextual parameters only specify linguistic realisations in their counterpart metafunction, as previously explained.