(Accusing Halliday Of) Confusing Axial Realisation With Instantiation

Fawcett (2010: 61-2):

Passages in Halliday's recent writings such as the following two seem to be attempts to reconcile the two senses in which he now finds himself using the term "realisation" — senses which in the new model have in fact become incompatible. Is the concept of 'realisation' interstratal or intrastratal — or is it really possible that it can be stretched far enough to be used for both, without losing its integrity? In the first of the two passages Halliday writes:

realisation" is both "the relation between the 'strata', or levels [i.e .the original sense of "realisation"] of a [...] semiotic system — and, by analogy, between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic phases of representation within one stratum [my emphasis]. (Halliday 1993:4505) 

And in a slightly later work Halliday describes the use of the term "realisation" in the 'intrastratal' sense as an "extension" of the concept of 'realisation', saying: 

Realisation is [...] extended to refer to the intrastratal relation between a systemic feature and its structural (or other) manifestation [my emphasis]. (Halliday 1996:29) 

If Halliday had not used the words "within one stratum" and "intrastratal" in these two passages, they could have been interpreted perfectly satisfactorily as describing the relationship of realisation that holds between the two levels of instances in the model represented in Figure 4 of Chapter 3, i.e., (1) the selection expression of features and (2) the structure at the level of form. And in this case the use of the term "realisation" would not be an "analogy" or an "extension". But Halliday did use those words, and under a strict interpretation of their meaning, the relationship must, in his current framework, be surely be said to be one of 'instantiation' rather than 'realisation'. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading.  Halliday has only ever used the theoretical term 'realisation' in one sense; as an identifying relation between two levels of symbolic abstraction.  What varies is the dimension along which the relation obtains; e.g.

• globally between strata,
• locally within strata, between function (Process) and form (verbal group), and
• locally within strata between paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes.

[2] This is misleading on two counts.  Firstly, there is no "new" model, as previously explained.  Secondly, the 'interstratal' and 'intrastratal' senses of realisation are not incompatible.  Both involve an identity relation between two levels of symbolic abstraction.

[3] This makes it clear that Fawcett does not understand the meaning of 'realisation'; he merely takes it as a label for the relation between strata.  It thus also suggests he does not understand that strata represent levels of symbolic abstraction, as the inconsistencies in his flowchart (Figure 4) also suggest.

[4] To be clear, both of the Halliday quotes are concerned with the realisation relation between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes on the stratum of lexicogrammar.  As such, they do not describe the relation the two "levels of instances" in Fawcett's flowchart:

As previously demonstrated, a selection expression of features is an instance of systemic potential, whereas structure is the realisation of system, not an instance of it. That is, the flowchart confuses instantiation with (axial) realisation.

[5] To be clear, here Fawcett confuses axial realisation (the subject of the Halliday quotes) with instantiation, and does so on the basis of the confusion in his own model.

In short, Fawcett projects his own misunderstanding onto Halliday.