Misunderstanding Metaredundancy And Confusing It With Instantiation

 Martin & Rose (2007: 308-9):

Following Lemke (1995), the relationship between levels in diagrams of this kind can be thought of as ‘metaredundancy’, the idea of patterns at one level redounding with patterns at the next level. Thus genre is a pattern of register patterns, just as register variables are a pattern of linguistic ones.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is not following Lemke — it is misunderstanding Lemke. As Halliday (1992: 23-5) explains, realisation is itself a redundancy relation, and metaredundancy is the redundancy in a series of redundancies:

But realisation is not a causal relation; it is a redundancy relation, so that x redounds with the redundancy of y with z. To put it in more familiar terms, it is not that (i) meaning is realised by wording and wording is realised by sound, but that (ii) meaning is realised by the realisation of wording in sound.  We can of course reverse the direction, and say that sounding realises the realisation of meaning in wording.

[2] To be clear, in addition to all the theoretical inconsistencies in this stratified model that were identified in the previous post, this confuses stratification ("metaredundancy") with instantiation ("patterns"). Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 593, 659):

System and text form a cline rather than a dichotomy, because between these two poles there is a semiotic region of intermediate patterns (conceived of as instance types – as text types, or as subsystems – as registers). 

… in the course of unfolding of text, lexicogrammatical selections create logogenetic patterns at all ranks. This is patterning in the text that has nothing to do with composition or size: instead of composition (the relationship between a whole and its parts), the patterning is based on instantiation (the relationship between an instance and a generalised instance type). The patterning represents a slight move up this cline from the single instance to a pattern of instances, as in a news report where one projecting verbal clause after another is selected until this emerges as a favourite clause type. The logogenetic patterns that emerge as a text unfolds form a transient system that is specific to that text; but from repeated patterns over many such transient systems may, in turn, emerge a generalised system characteristic of a certain type of text or register…