Seriously Misunderstanding Instantiation

 Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 17-8):

Realisation is a hierarchy of abstraction, with higher strata realised by patterns of meaning at lower ones. Instantiation on the other hand is a cline of generality, with higher rungs constituting a larger meaning potential than lower ones (a system to text relation). The realisation hierarchy we assume here was outlined in Figure 1.3 above (with genre as a more abstract pattern of register patterns, register as a more abstract pattern of discourse semantic patterns and so on). This can be contrasted with the version of the instantiation cline presented as Figure 1.7 (c.f. Martin, 2010, 2014). There, moving down from system, we have a cline of sub-potentialisation (system, diatype, text type, text); moving up we have a concomitant cline of generalisation (text, text type, diatype, system).

 Blogger Comments:

[1] This seriously misunderstands instantiation. To be clear, instantiation is not a cline of generality. Generality is the scale of delicacy. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 14, 144-5):

Note that it is important to keep delicacy and instantiation distinct. In early work on semantic networks, they were sometimes neutralised (cf. Woods', 1975, review). The difference is essentially that between being a type of x (delicacy) and being a token of x (instantiation) …

In other words, the elaboration sets up a relationship either of generality (delicacy), of abstraction (realisation), or of token to type (instantiation).

[2] To be clear, register ("diatype") and text type are not two different points of variation on the cline of instantiation, but the same point viewed from opposite poles of the cline. It is register when viewed from the system pole, and text type when viewed from the instance pole. Halliday (2005 [1995]: 254):

[3] To be clear, the cline of instantiation in Figure 1.7 only models language, not context. Martin (1992) replaced the system and instance poles of the cline of instantiation at the level of context with the strata of genre and register, respectively. In Martin's model, there are no situation types.