Inclination and Ability Revisited: Register, Context, and the Lean of Potential

In systemic functional terms, register variation accounts for how language potentials specialise according to context type. Each register is a subpotential — a contextual configuration that makes particular kinds of meaning more likely to be instantiated. We can therefore understand ability as varying with register: each context type is realised by a distinct domain of ability, a distinct way of being ready.

Ability, in this sense, sits midway along the cline of instantiation. It belongs neither to the abstract potential of the whole system nor to the concrete instance, but to the region where potential differentiates into contextual modes of readiness. To be able, semiotically, is to have internalised the contextual possibilities of meaning.

The question then arises: does inclination also vary across context types?

At first glance, it might seem that it should. After all, different registers appear to value different orientations: the argumentative essay inclines toward exposition, the casual chat toward affiliation, the legal contract toward constraint. Yet this is only the surface modulation of something deeper.

Inclination is not a contextual variable but a systemic orientation — the overall bias of potential toward certain kinds of alignment. It does not vary with context, but through context. Contextual variation does not alter inclination; it is inclination taking form.

We can think of ability and inclination as complementary dimensions of potential:

• Ability differentiates the potential according to context type — it varies as the field of contextual readiness expands.

• Inclination orients that potential as a whole — it provides the directional lean that makes differentiation meaningful in the first place.

Ability therefore depends on inclination: every contextual competence is enabled by the system’s underlying bias toward certain ways of aligning. But inclination is not reducible to the sum of abilities. It is the tendency that holds the differentiated field together — the coherence of the potential as potential.

In short, ability varies across context types, while inclination persists through them. The former marks the system’s distributed readiness for meaning; the latter, its enduring orientation toward meaning as such — the lean of potential that underlies every contextual realisation.