What Fawcett Means By 'Instances Of Meaning'

Fawcett (2010: 39):

Since there is a potential at the level of meaning, we should logically expect that there will also be instances at this level — and indeed there are. On each traversal of a system network, a set of semantic features is collec[t]ed, and the grammar then makes a copy of these, which is called a selection expression. There are two reasons for collecting the features as a set. The first is that they constitute the systemic description — and so, I would argue, the semantic description — of that unit in the text-sentence that is generated. The second is that the realization rules (to which we shall come in a moment) need to be able to refer to the whole set of the selected features, because many of the rules require two or more features to have been co-selected in order to 'fire', i.e., to be triggered into operation.

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This continues the discussion of Figure 4 (p36):

[1] On the SFL model, a traversal of a system network entails the selection of features, not the collection of them.  The notion of the grammar making a copy of collected features is not a model of humans engaged in the instantiation of texts, but a model of text generation by computer.

[2] This reason does not support the notion of collecting features, since the selecting of features, by itself, constitutes a "systemic description" of the instance.

[3] This "need" arises as a consequence of conceiving of a grammar as a flow chart between modules in which system networks and realisation rules are separated as two different levels of symbolic abstraction: system as 'semantic potential' and realisation rules as 'form potential'.  In SFL theory, the instantiation of systemic potential, at a given level of symbolic abstraction (stratum), involves both the selection of features and the activation of realisation statements.

For three internal inconsistencies in Fawcett's model see On 'The Main Components Of A Systemic Functional Grammar'.