The Confusion That Invalidates The Hierarchy Of Individuation

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 21-2):

Looking further afield this puts SFL in a stronger position to develop its third hierarchy, individuation (Martin, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2012; Zappavigna & Martin, 2018a, 2018b). A rough outline of the communion at stake is presented in Figure 1.11 as a scale of belonging.

This time round we are looking at the relation of a culture to the personae which member it – in terms of the way semiotic resources are allocated to personae and the way they use these resources to affiliate along a cline ranging through smaller coterie of shared values and on to large ones engendered by bonds associated with what we think of as class, generation, gender, and ethnicity. 

Here we can consider how choices in the realisation hierarchy and principles of instantiation are distributed across different communities, social fields of practice and channels of communication, as well as how they are used to create, maintain, collaborate within and struggle over these communities, social fields of practice and channels of communication.

Reviewer Comments:

To be clear, individuation is the differentiation of the meaning potential of a community ('reservoir') into the meaning potential of individuals ('repertoires'). As such, it is the elaboration of different types of meaning potential.

However, the hierarchy of individuation in Figure 1.11 confuses this elaboration of meaning potential with an extension ('affiliation') of meaners ('personae which member'); for 'association' as a type of extension, see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 146).

ChatGPT Comments:

Thank you, Chris — this is a precise and necessary critique. The passage from Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025) does indeed conflate the individuation of meaning potential with the affiliation of persons, resulting in a significant theoretical muddle. Your clarification — that individuation is an elaboration of potential, not an extension of personae — is exactly right. Below is a developed version of the critique that builds on yours and expands it in line with SFL theory:

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Review Critique: Misrepresenting the Hierarchy of Individuation

The authors here mischaracterise individuation by confusing two distinct semiotic logics: (1) the elaboration of meaning potential, and (2) the extension of social belonging. Individuation, properly understood within the SFL tradition (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999; Matthiessen, 2007), refers to the differentiation of the meaning potential of a community (a reservoir) into the more specific meaning potential of individuals (their repertoires). That is, it concerns the cline from collective to personal meaning potential — a relation of elaboration, not extension.

By contrast, the model offered here (and especially in Figure 1.11) reframes individuation as a matter of “personae which member [a culture]” and the “coteries of shared values” they affiliate with. This redefinition shifts the focus from semiotic potential to social identification, effectively substituting a theory of affiliation (in the sense of social alignment) for a theory of individualisation (in the sense of potential specification). The result is a conceptual slippage between:

• individuation as a semiotic process operating on meaning potential, and

• social extension or association as a process operating on personae.

This conflation overlooks a crucial distinction in SFL between:

• elaboration (where an element adds specificity within a semiotic system), and

• extension or association (where an element expands the boundaries of the system or links it to others).

As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 146) make clear, association — including affiliative belonging — is a kind of extension, not elaboration. When this logic is misapplied to individuation, the model shifts from describing the emergence of differentiated repertoires to describing the structuring of social groups, which is better accounted for under field, tenor, or affiliation and ideology, not individuation.

Moreover, by construing individuation as something that happens to personae who "member" a culture, rather than as a perspectival cline from collective to individual meaning potential, the model risks treating individuals as participants in social categories rather than as semiotic systems-in-development. This conflates the semiotic and the sociological — again blurring levels of abstraction and undermining the integrity of the stratified model.

In short: the authors substitute a theory of semiotic individuation with a theory of social bonding, which, while related in application, operates on a different semiotic axis. The result is a theoretically confused hierarchy that disorganises the role of individuation in the SFL architecture, and misleads the reader as to the nature of meaning potential itself.