Misunderstanding Axial Realisation As Instantiation

Fawcett (2010: 174):

Thus most of this chapter will be wholly oriented to the theoretical-generative strand of work in SFL. It might at first appear that Chapters 10 and 11 are oriented to the text-descriptive strand. However, they are only 'text-descriptive' in the sense that the emphasis is on the text-sentences that are the output from the operation of the grammar, and it is these that constitute the texts that are analysed in 'text-descriptive' work. These two chapters are also in fact primarily theoretical, in that the concepts covered there are the theoretical concepts that are required in the description of the structure of English that is needed by a computer for parsing a text — and, indeed, by a human text analyst. The concepts that characterise instances are therefore as much a part of the overall theory as the concepts required in the grammar itself to generate those outputs.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Fawcett's theory of language is actually concerned with what computers and linguists require for parsing a text.

[2] As previously explained, Fawcett equates 'instance' with 'output', and consequently misunderstands structures (syntagmatic axis) as instances of realisation rules (paradigmatic axis).