A coda is needed not to soften that critique, but to repair the ontology that made it possible.
What follows is not a counter-theory. It is a clarification of distinctions that were already present in Halliday’s model, and whose collapse made the preceding cascade inevitable.
1. Why “realisation” does not mean the same thing everywhere
Halliday uses the term realisation in more than one place. This is not a problem — unless the differences are ignored.
Within language, realisation names a relation between levels of symbolic abstraction. Between context and language, it names a relation between different semiotic systems.
Failing to distinguish these two relations is not a terminological slip. It is an ontological error.
2. Language as a denotative semiotic
Language, for Halliday, is a denotative semiotic in Hjelmslev’s sense.
It is organised into:
a content plane (semantics and lexicogrammar), and
an expression plane (phonology and graphology).
Within this semiotic, strata are related by realisation because:
wording symbolises meaning, and
sound or writing symbolises wording.
This is stratal realisation: symbolic recoding within a single semiotic system.
3. Context as a connotative semiotic
Context is not part of the content plane. It sits above it.
Halliday models context — culture as a semiotic system — as a connotative semiotic.
In a connotative semiotic:
the expression plane is itself a denotative semiotic, and
the content plane is a higher-order meaning potential.
In other words:
language functions as the expression plane of context, and
context provides the content plane of cultural meaning.
The relation between context and language is therefore also called realisation — but it is not stratal realisation.
4. Connotative realisation is enactment, not traversal
When Halliday says that semantics realises context, he does not mean that context supplies a plan that semantics must execute.
He means that cultural meaning potential is enacted as meaning-in-situation.
This relation is:
probabilistic, not procedural,
descriptive, not directive,
and open-ended, not teleological.
Context constrains what is likely and recognisable. It does not determine what must be produced.
To treat this relation as a traversal across layers is to misread enactment as execution.
5. Instantiation as a perspectival cut across semiotics
Halliday’s system–instance relation operates both:
within language (system ↔ text), and
within context (culture ↔ situation).
Instantiation is not a developmental pathway between these.
It is the perspectival cut through semiotic potential that produces:
a text as meaningful, and
a situation as socially legible,
in the same act.
Each instance re-construes the system it instantiates. Nothing is climbed toward; nothing is completed.
6. Genre as descriptive abstraction, not directive plan
Within this architecture, genre is a descriptive abstraction over recurrent ways of meaning in culture.
Genres do not impose stages.
They exhibit tendencies.
They summarise patterns after the fact; they do not prescribe trajectories in advance.
Once genre is treated as a plan to be enacted, the connotative relation collapses into a procedural one — and telos enters by default.
7. Pedagogy without closure
If context is connotative meaning potential and instantiation is a perspectival cut, pedagogy cannot be reduced to alignment.
Its work is interpretive:
exploring meaning potential,
testing construals against instances,
and keeping the system accountable to what actually happens.
Authority here is epistemic, not managerial.
Disagreement is not a failure of uptake. It is evidence that meaning is still in play.
8. What was at stake all along
This series began by rejecting a ladder.
It ends by restoring a distinction:
between symbolic stratification and semiotic contextualisation,
between realisation as recoding and realisation as enactment,
between alignment and meaning.
What was lost when these distinctions collapsed was not flexibility of method, but possibility itself.
9. The open question, restated
A different ontology of meaning has been available all along.
Whether it can be sustained — institutionally, pedagogically, and politically — remains an open question.
But it cannot even be asked unless context is understood for what it actually is.
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