Misrepresenting Halliday (1993) On Realisation

Fawcett (2010: 85-6):

Finally, let us look at what has happened to the term realisation (Halliday's 1966 replacement for the original "Categories" term "exponence"). Halliday originally brought the concept of 'realisation' into use as a result of the elevation of 'system' to model 'meaning potential', as we saw in Figure 4 (in Section 3.2 of Chapter 3). However, the original "Categories" concept of 'exponence / realisation' has now become the concept that denotes the relationship between two levels of language. In Halliday's words:

'Realisation' is the relationship between the 'strata' (or levels) of a [...] semiotic system" (Halliday (1993:4505).

Thus the term has significantly changed its meaning as a result of the elevation of 'system' to model 'meaning potential', just as 'system' itself and 'delicacy' have — but in this case the change of meaning has been marked by a change of name.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here Fawcett claims the meaning (Value) of a term 'realisation' has changed despite the fact that it is actually the term (Token) that has changed (from 'exponence'), not the meaning.

[2] This is misleading, because it is untrue.  Halliday adopted the term 'realisation' as the name for the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction, in the first instance, between strata.  As previously demonstrated, Fawcett's notion of 'the elevation of system to model meaning potential' confuses language as potential (system) with the semantic stratum (meaning).  Moreover, the fact that this is irrelevant to the notion of 'realisation' demonstrates that Fawcett does not understand the meaning of this theoretical term.

As the grammar makes plain, 'realisation' is a nominalisation of the intensive identifying Process 'realise' which relates a less abstract (lower level) Token to a more abstract (higher level) Value.

[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue.  Fawcett's own model (Figure 4) says nothing about changes to Halliday's model, actual or imaginary, even when the latter is understood.

[4] This is misleading, because it is untrue.  As demonstrated in previous posts, the terms 'system' (evidence here) and 'delicacy' (evidence here) have not changed their meaning.

More importantly, the meanings of terms in one theory, Scale & Category Grammar (Halliday 1961), are irrelevant to an examination of another theory, Systemic Theory (Halliday 1993).  Fawcett's entire enterprise in comparing terms across theories is an instance of the Red Herring logical fallacy.