Confusing Realisation And Instantiation

Fawcett (2010: 34):

In other words, just as an individual sign (such as a red 'stop') sign has both a form and a meaning, so too a sign system such as a natural human language has the two levels of form and meaning. Figure 3 can therefore be seen as a very simple model of a language as a whole.

The two levels of 'meanings' and 'forms' in Figure 3 are linked by two arrows. These indicate that a sign system is not a static object, but a device for turning meanings into forms, and forms into meanings. I have argued that a language is best thought of as a 'procedure' (Fawcett 1980:54f.) or, in computing terms, as a 'program' (Fawcett 1993).

Blogger Comments:

The general confusion here is between the realisation relation between strata and the process of instantiation.  (This will be clarified further in the discussion of Figure 4 on 1 October 2017.)

[1] A sign system is not "a device for turning meanings into forms, and forms into meanings" because meanings are not turned into forms, and forms are not turned into meanings.  Meaning and form are different views, at different levels of abstraction, on the one phenomenon.  The type of intensive identity relation between them is one of 'symbol' (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 269), whereas 'turn into' signifies an intensive identity relation of 'time phase' (ibid.)

On the other hand, as vectors, the arrows could be understood as representing the two directions of coding between the two levels of abstraction; see Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 280).  That is, the symbolic identity encodes meanings by reference to forms, and decodes forms by reference to meanings.  But this is not Fawcett's understanding.

[2] To be clear, the notion of language as a procedure rather than a "static object" is modelled in SFL as the process of instantiation, the selection of features and the activation of realisation statements during logogenesis (the unfolding of text at the instance pole of the cline of instantiation).  The term for the potential pole of the cline, 'system', is short for 'system–&–process' (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 507).