The Authors' Misunderstanding Of Instantiation

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 214):

As our survey has indicated, our understanding of instantiation is only at an incipient stage. But it already can offer new perspectives on long-standing challenges regarding how language engages with broader society. For example, when it comes to understanding change over time, whether phylogenetic, ontogenetic, or logogenetic, it offers a view not in terms of snapshots of the sets of resources used at particular times, but in terms of the principles that drive them. For example, in terms of Halliday’s classic study of the phylogenetic development of scientific language (1988), we can interpret the growth in the use of elaborated nominal groups, interlocking definitions and eventually the development of grammatical metaphor as being driven by a need for increased mass – for greater connections between meanings than had previously been possible. 

Reviewer Comments;

[1] To be clear, as this review has demonstrated, the authors simply do not understand instantiation, the relation between potential and instance at a given level of symbolic abstraction. Their notion of 'principles of instantiation', for example, misunderstands instantiation as an interstratal relation between context and language; and see [2] below. So the new perspectives the authors offer are not consistent with SFL Theory.

[2] This misunderstands the relation of instantiation to the three timescales of semogenesis. Even if the authors' 'principles of instantiation' were theoretically valid, they would only be relevant to logogenesis. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 37):

[3] To be clear, unlike Halliday's account, this interpretation is not an explanation. It merely rebrands the increase in grammatical metaphor as an increase in mass, and reduces all the reasons for the increase as a 'need'.