Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is not just a collection of analytic tools. It is a theory with a very specific architectural commitment: meaning is organised across different levels of symbolic abstraction, related by principled relations such as stratification, realisation, and instantiation. These relations are not optional metaphors; they are what give the theory its explanatory power.
In what follows, we want to examine a prominent reconstrual of SFL—associated most clearly with the work of J. R. Martin—not in order to dispute its descriptive utility, but to show that it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of this architecture. The issue is not disagreement over details. It is a systematic flattening of relations that Halliday treated as categorically distinct.
This flattening has consequences: theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary.
1. Levels of symbolic abstraction are not modules
At the core of Halliday’s model is the idea that language is organised across strata that differ in level of symbolic abstraction. Semantics, lexicogrammar, and phonology are not parallel components that “interact”; they are asymmetrically related.
This is not a claim about where meaning “is”. It is a claim about how symbolic systems are organised so that meaning can be made at all.
When stratification is misunderstood as “all strata make meaning”, the architectural distinction collapses. Once that collapse occurs, all strata are treated as strata of meaning, rather than as differently abstract symbolic resources.
This is precisely where the reconstrual begins.
2. From stratification to interaction
In Martin’s work, strata and metafunctions are consistently treated as modules that relate by interaction rather than by asymmetrical realisation. This is visible in the claim that all strata “make meaning”, and more starkly in the treatment of phonology as a stratum of meaning.
From a Hallidayan perspective, this is a category error.
Phonology does not mean in the same sense that semantics does. It stabilises and transmits distinctions that are already semiotically differentiated at a higher level of abstraction. Treating phonology as a meaning stratum erases the very notion of symbolic abstraction that stratification was introduced to explain.
Once this move is made, the theory no longer has the resources to explain why different symbolic levels exist at all.
3. Instantiation is not descent
A parallel misunderstanding occurs with instantiation.
In Halliday’s model, instantiation is a perspectival relation between potential and instance. A system can be viewed from the pole of potential (as a system) or from the pole of instance (as a text or event). Nothing “moves” down a ladder. No stratum instantiates another stratum.
Instantiation is not a process. It is a way of seeing the same semiotic organisation from different perspectives.
In Martin’s reconstrual, however, instantiation is characterised as all strata instantiate, as if instantiation were a kind of downward movement of meaning. This confusion becomes decisive in his treatment of context.
4. How context became language
Halliday distinguishes context from language. Context is not a higher stratum of language; it is a different order of abstraction altogether. Field, tenor, and mode are contextual variables that are realised by semantic patterns in language, not systems within language.
Martin reconstructs this architecture by:
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redefining context potential (context of culture) as a stratum of genre
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redefining context instance (context of situation) as a stratum of register
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treating field, tenor, and mode as systems of register
This move converts a relation of instantiation into a relation of interstratal realisation, collapsing context into language. The result is a model in which register and genre are varieties of language rather than ways of relating semiotic potential to situation and culture.
The cost of this move is high: the theory loses the ability to distinguish contextual organisation from linguistic organisation in principle.
5. Renaming as a method of theorising
These architectural confusions would be serious enough on their own. But they are compounded by a distinctive method of theorising.
Rather than modelling new phenomena from data, Martin repeatedly takes existing Hallidayan analyses and renames them, presenting the renamed constructs as novel theoretical advances.
The most striking example is the stratum of discourse semantics.
Halliday’s stratum is simply semantics. In Cohesion in English (Halliday & Hasan 1976), cohesion is analysed as a set of lexicogrammatical resources.
Martin elevates cohesion to a new stratum and relabels its systems:
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reference becomes identification
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lexical cohesion becomes ideation
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conjunction becomes connexion
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Halliday’s semantic system of speech function becomes negotiation
These renamings are not accompanied by a new theory of symbolic abstraction. On the contrary, they are enabled by misunderstandings—such as confusing reference with deixis—which create apparent novelty by differentiation.
Misunderstanding becomes a generative resource.
6. Why this matters
This is not a dispute about terminology, nor about whose framework is “better”. It is about what happens when a theory built on differentiated relations is reconstructed as a flat landscape of interacting modules.
When stratification, instantiation, realisation, and variation are all treated as the same kind of relation:
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explanatory power is replaced by descriptive proliferation
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architectural constraints disappear
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theoretical novelty becomes indistinguishable from relabelling
The result may be productive in the short term, but it is unstable. It cannot explain its own foundations.
7. A broader lesson
The deeper issue here is not confined to SFL.
This case illustrates how a theoretical architecture can be hollowed out while its vocabulary is preserved. Once the relations that give concepts their force are flattened, the theory may continue to circulate—but it no longer does the work it once did.
Recovering Halliday’s model is not a matter of loyalty or orthodoxy. It is a matter of taking symbolic abstraction seriously.
Without that commitment, we are no longer doing systemic functional theory at all—we are simply rearranging its names.
