Restoring Possibility: 10 The Coda of Possibility

This series has traced a cascade: privileging system → layered context → teleologised genre → compressed instance → false choice → assessment as alignment → constrained agency. Each step narrowed relational potential and obscured the semiotic ecology Halliday meticulously described.

The coda is not a softening. It is a restoration of distinctions that were lost in the ladder logic — distinctions that make possibility visible again.

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1. Realisation clarified

• Stratal realisation: symbolic recoding within a semiotic system (lexicogrammar symbolising semantics; phonology/graphology symbolising lexicogrammar).

• Connotative realisation: enactment of cultural meaning (semantics enacting context).

• Realisation is descriptive, relational, and probabilistic, not procedural or directive.

• Mistaking enactment for execution collapses possibility into predictability.

2. Instantiation restored

• Each instance is a perspectival cut through semiotic potential.

• Instances enact and re-construe the system; they do not climb toward it.

• Variation, improvisation, and multimodality are constitutive of meaning, not deviation.

The cline is relational, not hierarchical.

3. Context recovered

• Context is culture as semiotic system, not a series of controlling planes.

• It enables, constrains, and provides interpretive frames, but does not dictate outcomes.

• Culture is distributed, relational, and dynamic, not pre-packaged for compliance.

4. Agency reclaimed

• Actors are situated, embodied, multimodal co-constructors of meaning.

• Assessment and pedagogy should support, not constrain, relational agency.

• Possibility emerges when actors are treated as interpreters and enactors, not instruments of alignment.

5. Genre restored

• Genres are descriptive abstractions over patterns of meaning, not teleological stages.

• They summarise tendencies; they do not prescribe trajectories.

• Teleology is the ladder’s invention; description restores relational clarity.

6. The open semiotic space

By restoring these distinctions, the semiotic space reopens:

• Instances regain richness, agency, and contingency.

• System is respected without dominating.

• Context is relational, not layered.

• Genres describe, not prescribe.

The series ends with an ontology of possibility, where meaning is enacted, interpreted, and negotiated — not forced along predetermined trajectories.

7. What this series offers

• A diagnostic of how theoretical moves reshape practice, pedagogy, and agency.

• A clarification of distinctions embedded in Halliday’s architecture.

• A framework for sustaining semiotic richness and interpretive freedom.

Possibility is not an add-on; it is the point of reading Halliday relationally.