Realisation Operations

Fawcett (2010: 281):

The general concept of 'realisation' is made specific through five major types of realisation operation. As we saw in Section 9.2 of Chapter 9, it is they, together with the potential structures, that specify the 'form potential' of a language.

Notice, however, that when they are applied (i.e., to a selection expression of features generated on a traversal of a system network, as described in Appendix A), they generate syntactic structures. The first four operations directly generate four of the relationships in syntax to be described below. And the last two provide the framework for generating structures with the recursion of co-ordination, embedding or re-iteration. Thus the realisation operations in the grammar are directly related to the relationships in the syntax of an output from the grammar — while not, as I emphasised in Chapter 9, being the same as them. In other words, we need both a theory of 'syntax potential' and a theory of syntactic instances'.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, it is the operations that are specific, not realisation. Realisation is the same in each case: the relation between two levels of symbolic abstraction.

[2] To be clear, potential structures do not feature in the representation of Fawcett's model (Figure 4):

[3] To be clear, in Fawcett's text-generation algorithm, realisation operations are misconstrued as:

(i) the form that realises the meanings of system networks and

(ii) the potential that is instantiated as syntactic structure.

[4] To be clear, Fawcett's argument for the distinction between 'syntax potential' and 'syntactic instances' is simply that the two are related, but not the same. That is, he does not provide any argument as to why, or how, syntactic structures can be understood as instances of realisation operations.