Monday 13 April 2015

Conflating Realisation With Instantiation [Revised]

Martin (1992: 23):
From the perspective of discourse semantics, however, these relationships [cohesive relations] can be construed as "structural", although clearly involving a structure of a non-grammatical kind.  This construal is important in order to understand the sense in which the discourse semantic unit text instantiates discourse semantic systems.

Blogger Comments:

[1] It will be demonstrated in later posts that cohesive relations are not 'structural' — except as a Humpty-Dumptyism.

[2] This is misleading. Whether or not cohesive relations are construed as structural, or not, is irrelevant to the instantiation of system as text. Here Martin confuses axial realisation with instantiation: the relation of system to structure with the relation of system (potential) to instance (text).