Seriously Misunderstanding Halliday's Weather-Climate Analogy For Instantiation

Martin & Rose (2007: 310):

By way of opening this chapter we looked at the issue of what to analyse from the perspectives of genre and ideology. Here, by way of closing down, we’ll return to the problem with reference to what Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) refer to as the ‘cline of instantiation’.

Instantiation involves the way we observe metastability in social semiotic systems as apparent flux or as inertia or as something in between. Halliday’s analogy here is weather and climate; weather the capricious flux we experience day to day, climate the comforting inertia we try to use to plan. But as Halliday points out, weather and climate are actually the same phenomenon looked at in different ways. 

And we can argue that weather changes climate, in ways that matter (global warming) and ways that don’t (like today’s temperature being two degrees above average) or that climate determines weather (like when we say it always rains in a rival city because the climate is terrible there).

Halliday’s point is that text interacts with system as weather interacts with climate.

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[1] This is misleading. To be clear, the cline of instantiation is the perspectival scale from potential to instance:

• from language as potential (system) to language as instance (text);
• from context as potential (culture) to context as instance (situation).

[2] This is not misleading, because it is true.

[3] To be clear, on Halliday's analogy, the climate is the potential that lies behind the weather (instances).

[4] To be clear, it is not that weather changes climate, because weather and climate are the same phenomenon viewed from different perspectives: instance vs potential. Instead, statistically significant changes in weather (instances) can alternatively be viewed as probabilistic changes in climate (potential).

[5] To be clear, a 2°C temperature difference in one day's weather (instance) is statistically unlikely to amount to a change in climate (potential).

[6] To be clear, it cannot be argued that climate determines weather, because climate and weather are two perspectives on the same phenomenon. This is analogous to claiming that the potential for car accidents determines actual car accidents (instances).

[7] To be clear, this is not an example of climate determining weather. It is an example of people talking about a weather pattern of a microclimate.

[8] This is misleading, but inadvertently true. It is misleading because Halliday does not claim that either that weather interacts with climate or that text interacts with system, not least because perspectives do not interact. It is inadvertently true because text interacts with system just as weather interacts with climate — not at all.