Misunderstanding Interstratal Realisation And Confusing It With Instantiation

Fawcett (2010: 34-5):

 

The relationship between the set of meanings and the set of forms is one of realisation. Thus the arrow pointing downwards shows that the meanings of a language are 'realised by' linguistic forms, and the arrow pointing upwards shows that forms 'realise' meanings. 

However, contrary to what some formal language theorists think, the two processes are not the reverses of each other. This is because the problems faced by someone who is trying to produce a text that will be effective and appropriate to a particular point in discourse are not the same as the problems that face someone who is trying to work out the meaning of an incoming text. (It is only in a very impoverished, form-based view of language that grammars may appear to be 'reversible'.) This principle applies both to abstract psychological models of how humans process incoming and outgoing language texts and to computer models of language processing (1993 and 1994a, Weerasinghe & Fawcett 1993). Thus, while the fuller model of language that we shall develop in the next two sections may appear to be oriented more to the 'production' of text than to analysing it, the term "realisation" is in fact directionally neutral. 

It is also too general to be useful, so that we need to build a picture of the steps by which this model turns 'meanings' into 'forms'. For this we need to move on to a second pair of concepts.

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[1] This confuses the realisation relation between strata with the instantiation relation between potential (system) and instance (text).  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 51):

But ‘text’ is a complex notion. In the form that we typically receive it, as spoken and written discourse, a text is the product of two processes combined: instantiation and realisation. The defining criterion is instantiation: text as instance. But realisation comes in because what becomes accessible to us is the text as realised in sound or writing. We cannot directly access instances of language at higher strata — as selections in meaning, or even in wording. But it is perhaps helpful to recognise that we can produce text in this way, for ourselves, if we compose some verse or other discourse inside our heads. If you ‘say it to yourself’, you can get the idea of text as instance without the additional property of realisation.

[2] This again misunderstands the relation between strata in SFL theory.  The relation is an intensive identifying relation of 'symbol' ('realise'), not one of 'time phase' ('turn into').

[3] The second pair of concepts that Fawcett introduces, system and instance, does not bear on the identifying relation between meaning and form.  The source of Fawcett's confusion (encapsulated in his Figure 4) will be identified in the post of 1 October 2017.