Seriously Misunderstanding Stratification

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 17, 10):

Realisation is a hierarchy of abstraction, with higher strata realised by patterns of meaning at lower ones. … 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).

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This seriously misunderstands stratification. Less importantly, realisation is not a hierarchy, but the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction, as between axes or between strata. The hierarchy in this case is the hierarchy of strata: stratification.

Most importantly, higher strata are not "realised by patterns of meaning at lower ones". On the one hand, the function of the stratification hierarchy is to relate meaning, semantics, to other levels of symbolic abstraction: lexicogrammar and phonology below, and the context of language above. The authors' misunderstanding reflects Martin's mantra 'all strata make meaning' which confuses stratification (realising meaning) with semogenesis (making meaning).

On the other hand, the "patterns" of each stratum are the systems of each stratum. The term "patterns" suggests a confusion with instantiation: the patterns of instantiation that distinguish the variants on the cline of instantiation from each other.