On text organization and instantiation from a systemic functional perspective

ABSTRACT

The paper departs from instantiation to explore text in relation to the quantitative properties of language - more specifically how probability plays a part in the matching of an instance and a particular socially-oriented use. Such matching not only links instantiation and stratification, but also helps explaining how different context configurations (patterns of register and genre) are accordingly related to steps in subpotentialization. The fact that language is an inherently probabilistic system may yield a quantitative account of this process if a more complete modelling of language is to be obtained. As part of our exploration, we compiled a corpus of procedures and applied dynamics modelling to tease out quantitative properties of instances associated with context. We described some properties of instantiation - reweighting, association, and dynamics -, which determine the probabilities of an instance configuration, as they also behave following register variation. The paper goes on to show quantitatively how the process of subpotentialization is obtained, leading up to a complementary definition of ‘text’ as a probable unit of instantiation.

Keywords:
systemic functional linguistics; instantiation; system dynamics; text modelling; register