Robots, Register and the Perils of Sameness: Or, How AI Accidentally Rediscovers Halliday

(Alternative conference titles, should the first prove too polite)

1. Saving Register from Genre: How Large Language Models Rediscover Halliday

2. Same-ification and Salvation: AI, Genre Pedagogy and the Return of Register

3. The Beige Apocalypse That Wasn’t: AI, Probability and the Ecology of Register

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Abstract

Recent commentary suggests that artificial intelligence may “same-ify” human expression by encouraging writers to adopt statistically typical linguistic patterns. Curiously, this concern mirrors a long-standing educational practice within systemic functional linguistics: the explicit teaching of genre structures designed to stabilise institutional discourse. This paper playfully explores the irony. While genre pedagogy deliberately standardises schematic staging in order to support equitable access to valued registers, large language models instead approximate probabilistic distributions across lexicogrammatical selections. In doing so, they arguably reproduce a view of linguistic variation closer to the register model associated with M. A. K. Halliday. The result is an unexpected inversion: genre pedagogy promotes structural convergence, while AI quietly reveals the probabilistic landscape of register variation. The paper concludes by suggesting that fears of AI-driven homogenisation may underestimate both the resilience of linguistic systems and the mischievous tendencies of writers.

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Keywords

Same-ification • Genre pedagogy • Register (Hallidayan) • Probability distributions in clause networks • Institutional taupe • Hedging, nominalisation & the art of being beige • AI as accidental linguistic theorist • Stylometric mischief • Deviation vs. centre • Gratuitous parenthetical irony

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1. The New Panic: AI and the Same-ification of Language

A recent article in Nature (here) warns that AI may “same-ify” human expression by encouraging writers to adopt the stylistic centre of institutional discourse. The concern is straightforward: if writers rely on AI suggestions, linguistic diversity might diminish.

The argument is not implausible. Large language models are trained on vast corpora of text and generate outputs that reflect statistical regularities in those corpora. As a result, their responses often resemble a remarkably competent version of mid-range academic prose: balanced, hedged, nominalised, and syntactically well behaved.

Readers recognise the style immediately.

It is the linguistic equivalent of beige.¹

Yet the alarm about homogenisation invites a small question: when exactly did institutional discourse become famous for its exuberant stylistic diversity?

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2. The Long Tradition of Deliberate Same-ification

Within educational linguistics, the stabilisation of discourse is not a bug. It is a feature.

The genre pedagogy associated with J. R. Martin explicitly teaches students to reproduce recognisable schematic structures. Genres are described as staged, goal-oriented social processes, and classroom practice frequently involves modelling and jointly constructing these structures.

Students learn that an exposition typically proceeds through stages such as:

• thesis

• argument

• reiteration.

Similarly, explanations, reports, and discussions each have characteristic rhetorical organisations.

This approach has been enormously successful in addressing inequities of access to institutional discourse. By making the structures of valued genres explicit, students gain the resources required to participate in educational contexts that might otherwise exclude them.

But the pedagogical mechanism is clear:

students are taught to reproduce particular textual shapes.

If the goal were linguistic same-ification, genre pedagogy would already represent a remarkably effective technology.²

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3. Register: A Probabilistic Alternative

The model of variation associated with M. A. K. Halliday operates rather differently.

Register is not defined primarily by schematic structure. Instead, it emerges as a configuration of linguistic probabilities associated with a situation type.

Texts in a given register tend to favour particular selections across the system network:

• certain lexical fields

• certain clause structures

• certain patterns of grammatical metaphor

• certain rhetorical rhythms.

None of these selections are obligatory.

They are simply more likely.

From this perspective, variation is intrinsic to the system. Writers navigate a probabilistic landscape rather than reproducing a fixed template.

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4. Enter the Machines

Large language models do something unexpectedly compatible with this probabilistic view.

Rather than enforcing genre structures, they approximate statistical distributions across linguistic selections. When prompted to produce a piece of writing, they generate sequences that lie near the centre of the probability distribution learned from their training data.

The results often resemble the “average” text within a register.

Importantly, however, the model does not require a specific schematic structure. It simply produces a sequence that is statistically plausible.

From a systemic perspective, this behaviour looks rather like a machine wandering around the central region of a register’s probability landscape.³

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5. The Comic Inversion

This produces a small but entertaining theoretical inversion.

Genre pedagogy says:

“Here is the structure your text should follow.”

AI says:

“Here is a statistically typical example. Do with it what you will.”

The first approach explicitly prescribes textual staging.

The second merely offers a probabilistic suggestion.

From the perspective of structural variation, the machine is arguably the less prescriptive actor.

This does not mean that AI encourages stylistic innovation. Its outputs tend toward the statistical centre of discourse. But the human writer remains free to accept, modify, or reject those suggestions.

In practice, many experienced writers do precisely that.

AI becomes a baseline — the centre against which deviation becomes visible.

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6. Probability, Deviation and the Ecology of Discourse

Linguistic systems evolve through the interaction of stabilisation and deviation.

Institutions favour predictable discourse because it supports coordination and evaluation. Pedagogical programs therefore cultivate reproducible textual forms.

At the same time, individual writers continually push against those forms. They vary clause patterns, introduce unexpected metaphors, disrupt rhetorical staging, and otherwise explore the edges of the system’s potential.

Large language models add an interesting new element to this ecology.

By producing central examples of a register with remarkable efficiency, they make the statistical centre visible.

And once the centre becomes visible, deviation becomes easier to recognise — and sometimes more tempting.

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7. The Unexpected Outcome

The fear that AI will homogenise language assumes that writers passively accept its suggestions.

But writers have historically been rather bad at doing what they are told.⁴

If AI assistance becomes widespread in administrative and academic writing, the likely result may not be uniformity but contrast: a thick plateau of statistically central prose surrounded by distinctive peaks where individual writers deliberately bend the system.

In other words, the machines may end up performing a useful service.

They produce the average paragraph so that humans can enjoy rewriting it.

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8. Conclusion: Register Rescued by Robots

The concern that AI will “same-ify” human expression reveals an interesting assumption about linguistic systems: that uniformity is something newly introduced by machines.

Yet institutional discourse has long relied on explicit mechanisms for stabilising textual form, from style manuals to genre pedagogy.

Large language models do something subtly different. They reproduce probabilistic tendencies without enforcing structural templates.

In doing so, they inadvertently illustrate a central insight of systemic functional linguistics: that language operates as a network of choices organised by probability rather than rigid rule.

The machines, it seems, have rediscovered register.

One suspects that M. A. K. Halliday might have found this rather amusing.

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Footnotes

1. Readers are invited to imagine a colour chart of academic prose. The centre would likely be labelled “institutional taupe.”

2. This observation is not intended as criticism. Stabilisation of discourse is often necessary for equitable participation in institutional contexts. The present argument merely notes that homogenisation, where it occurs, is not an innovation introduced by machines.

3. An image which, if taken too literally, may lead to the alarming idea of robots hiking through the system network carrying probability maps.

4. Indeed, the history of literature might be described as a long series of attempts by writers to avoid sounding like everyone else.

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Imagined Conference Q&A

(The author acknowledges that any resemblance to real conference discussions is entirely coincidental.)

Q1: Are you suggesting that genre pedagogy homogenises writing?

A1: Not at all. Genre pedagogy performs a crucial role in enabling equitable access to institutional discourse. The present argument merely observes that some degree of structural convergence is likely to follow. This should not be confused with homogenisation. It should instead be understood as very successful coordination.

Q2: But surely large language models reinforce dominant discourse patterns?

A2: Indeed they do. They reproduce the statistical centre of the discourse they are trained on. Which is precisely why their outputs often resemble the average paragraph in an academic article. This should not alarm us. It should merely reassure us that the machines have been reading the same journals as the rest of us.

Q3: Does this mean AI will replace writers?

A3: Only if writers wish to produce the most statistically typical paragraph available. Those with stronger stylistic preferences may instead find AI useful as a convenient example of what the centre of the register looks like — thereby clarifying which direction they would prefer to move away from it.

Q4: How does this relate to register theory?

A4: Large language models approximate probability distributions across linguistic selections. This is strikingly compatible with the view of register associated with M. A. K. Halliday, in which linguistic variation emerges from probabilistic tendencies rather than rigid templates. The machines, it seems, have independently rediscovered the importance of probability.

Q5: What would happen if students simply used AI to generate their essays?

A5: In that case they would submit a remarkably competent piece of mid-range institutional prose. This would likely resemble many other remarkably competent pieces of mid-range institutional prose. The resulting situation might therefore provide a valuable opportunity to discuss the difference between reproducing a register and having something interesting to say within it.

Q6 (back of the room): Are you seriously proposing that robots might save register from genre?

A6: Certainly not. But it is occasionally helpful when a machine produces the average paragraph. It reminds us that the system always contains more possibilities than the centre suggests.

When Renaming Replaces Modelling: Stratification, Instantiation, and the Flattening of SFL Architecture

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.

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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.

Lower strata realise higher strata.

Higher strata are realised by lower strata.

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.

A crucial distinction follows from this:

semogenesis (the fact that meaning is made across the system) is not the same thing as stratification (the organisation of symbolic abstraction).

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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

• redefining context potential (context of culture) as a stratum of genre

• redefining context instance (context of situation) as a stratum of register

• 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 systems of context 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.

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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:

• reference becomes identification

• lexical cohesion becomes ideation

• conjunction becomes connexion

• 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.

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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:

• explanatory power is replaced by descriptive proliferation

• architectural constraints disappear

• 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.

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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.

Geoff Thompson On Genre

Thompson (2014: 42-3):

If we now turn, more briefly, to genre, this can be seen in very simple terms as register plus communicative purpose: that is, it includes the more general idea of what the interactants are doing through language, and how they organise the language event, typically in recognisable stages, in order to achieve that purpose. An image that may help you to grasp the difference between register and genre is to see register as cloth and genre as garment: the garment is made of an appropriate type of cloth or cloths, cut and shaped in conventional ways to suit particular purposes. Similarly, a genre deploys the resources of a register (or more than one register) in particular patterns to achieve certain communicative goals.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, in SFL Theory, 'communicative purpose/goal' is rhetorical mode, a textual system of context. Every register realises the mode as well as the field and tenor of a situation type. The notion of 'genre' here is thus redundant.

Thompson's aim here was to include Hasan's notion of genre in his coverage of SFL, but Hasan herself identified her 'genre' as Halliday's 'register'.

Text Structure Of Spoken Narratives

What Is A Connotative Semiotic?

For Hjelmslev, connotation is a second-order of signification which uses the denotative sign (signifier and signified) as its signifier and attaches to it an additional signified.

Applied to SFL theory, the expression plane (signifier) of language and the content plane (signified) of language together constitute a denotative semiotic.  And language as a denotative semiotic is the expression plane (signifier) of the culture as semiotic system (signified).  It is this relation between language and culture that constitutes a connotative semiotic.

connotative semiotic (culture ↘ language)

signified	culture as content
signifier	language as expression

denotative semiotic (language)

signified	content plane of language
signifier	expression plane of language

Note that Martin, while claiming to be 'following Hjelmslev' (1992: 493), misinterprets varieties of the content of a denotative semiotic — genre, register — as (the content of) a connotative semiotic.

A Critical Examination Of Jim Martin's ISFC 2017 Plenary Abstract

James R Martin

University of Sydney

Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

​The tyranny of metafunctions: transcending trinocularity in SFL

SFL is well known for its trinocular vision: three language strata (phonology, lexicogrammar, and discourse semantics), three metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal and textual) and three hierarchies (realisation, instantiation and individuation). And each trinity is a complementarity, not a partition – always already there; you can’t do meaning from any one perspective without the other two.

In this paper I will take the trinocularity of metafunction as point of departure, and consider its role in both enabling and disabling the evolution of SFL. I’ll begin with context, and issues arising with respect to modelling register and genre. I then turn to disciplinarity, and problems arising from a purely ideational view of knowledge structure. As a third step I’ll look at identity and the need for an [sic] transfunctional view of communion.

In conclusion I’ll comment on the way in which the centrality of metafunction to our conception of language has shaped the evolving architecture of the theory as a whole, as scholars expand the frontiers of social semiotics from the standpoint of SFL’s dialectic of theory and practice (i.e. appliable linguistics).

Blogger Comments:

[1] The reason Martin is attempting to demonise the metafunctions here, through such negative appraisals as 'tyranny' and 'disabling', is that his model of genre is not differentiated metafunctionally.  That is, this talk is, inter alia, an attempt rebrand one of the defects in his model as a strength.

[2] This is misleading.  The three language strata in SFL are phonology, lexicogrammar and semantics.  The stratum of discourse semantics is Martin's invention only, and it is theorised on multiple misunderstandings of the categories and scales of SFL theory, as demonstrated in great detail here.

[3] This misunderstands realisation.  Realisation is not a hierarchy.  Realisation is the relation between two levels of symbolic abstraction, and it obtains along several different dimensions of SFL theory; e.g. 

• between axes: syntagmatic structure realises paradigmatic system;
• between ranks: group/phrase rank syntagms (forms) realise clause rank function structures;
• between strata: lexicogrammar realises semantics; and
• within semantics: metaphorical meanings realise congruent meanings — see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 288) or here.

Note that Martin (1992) understands neither realisation nor instantiation, as demonstrated here (realisation) and here (instantiation).

[4] The reason Martin uses the word 'partition' here, instead of the more appropriate word 'module', is that his own model is theorised on his misunderstanding of SFL as a modular theory.  Martin (1992: 390):

Each of the presentations of linguistic text forming resources considered above adopted a modular perspective. As far as English Text is concerned this has two main dimensions: stratification and, within strata, metafunction.

Martin (1992: 391):

Within discourse semantics, the ways in which systems co-operate in the process of making text is much less well understood. … A more explicit account of this co-operation is clearly an urgent research goal; English Text has been concerned not so much with addressing this goal as with making it addressable by proposing four relatively independent discourse modules to beg the question [sic] … . The point is that integrating meanings deriving from different metafunctions is not a task that can be left to lexicogrammar alone.

Martin (1992: 488):

In this chapter a brief sketch of some of the ways in which discourse semantics interacts with lexicogrammar and phonology has been presented. The problem addressed is a fundamental concern of modular models of semiosis — namely, once modules are distinguished, how do they interface? What is the nature of the conversation among components?

As Halliday & Webster (2009: 231) point out, SFL is a dimensional theory, not a modular theory:

In SFL language is described, or “modelled”, in terms of several dimensions, or parameters, which taken together define the “architecture” of language. These are 

• (i) the hierarchy of strata (context, semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology, phonetics; related by realisation); 
• (ii) the hierarchy of rank (e.g. clause, phrase/group, word, morpheme; related by composition); 
• (iii) the cline of instantiation (system to instance); 
• (iv) the cline of delicacy (least delicate to most delicate, or grossest to finest); 
• (v) the opposition of axis (paradigmatic and syntagmatic); 
• (vi) the organisation by metafunction (ideational (experiential, logical), interpersonal, textual).

[5] This confuses language with linguistics.  We don't "do" meaning from metafunctional perspectives, but we can analyse it from one or all metafunctional perspectives, using a theory that models meaning in terms of metafunctions.

[6] This is misleading.  The context stratum in SFL construes the culture as a semiotic system.  The stratification of context into genre and register — i.e. context–specific varieties of language — is Martin's invention only, and it is theorised on multiple misunderstandings of the categories and scales of SFL theory, as demonstrated in great detail here (context), here (genre) and here (register).

[7] This is misleading. In SFL, knowledge is modelled as meaning, and meaning is modelled in terms of all three metafunctions. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: x):

… “understanding” something is transforming it into meaning, and to “know” is to have performed that transformation. There is a significant strand in the study of language […] whereby “knowledge” is modelled semiotically: that is, as system–&–process of meaning, in abstract terms which derive from the modelling of grammar.

The notion of a "purely ideational view of knowledge structure" is thus an example of the logical fallacy known as the attacking a strawman:

A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man".

This strawman necessarily has its origins in a misunderstanding of SFL theory by Martin himself.  One possibility would be that he has confused knowledge with field, the ideational dimension of the cultural context (misconstrued by Martin as register).  See here for some of the misunderstandings of field in Martin (1992).

[8] The interest in 'communion' here, as with Martin's previous work on affiliation, reflects Martin's true ideological position.  Bertrand Russell, in his History Of Western Philosophy (pp 21-2), identifies this, and explains why it is consistent with Martin's hostility to science, his interest in heroes, like Nelson Mandela (Martin & Rose 2007), his opposition to liberal humanism (Martin 1992: 587-8), and his treatment of students:

Throughout this long development, from 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them.  With this difference, others have been associated.  The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be, in greater or lesser degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically.  They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that ‘nobility’ or ‘heroism’ is to be preferred.  They have had a sympathy with irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion.  The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists, have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion.  This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of what we recognise as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought.  In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come.

Why Jim Martin's 'Friday Seminar' Abstract Is Misleading

Sue Hood wrote to sys-func and sysfling at 17:48 on 25/4/16:

The seminar this Friday (April 29th) will be presented by Jim Martin – see the abstract below.

Meaning matters: A short history of systemic functional linguistics

This talk presents a brief history of systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL), taking Halliday’s 1961 WORD paper, ‘Categories of the theory of grammar’, as point of departure. It outlines the key strands of thought which have informed the development of SFL, focusing on (i) why it referred to as systemic, as functional and as systemic functional, (ii) how it developed this orientation with reference to phonology, lexicogrammar and discourse semantics and (iii) how it has extended this perspective to models of context (register and genre) and multimodality (taking into consideration modalities of communication beyond language). The talk ends with a brief note on recent developments and a comment on the dialectic of theory and practice through which SFL positions itself as an appliable linguistics.

Blogger Comments: 

[1] Here Martin uses an historical account of SFL as a pretext for presenting his own models of discourse semantics, register and genre as having replaced Halliday's model in the development of SFL.  As demonstrated here, Martin's models are inconsistent at many scales with Halliday's theory and derive from multiple misunderstandings of the SFL model.

[2] Martin's argument for a 'discourse semantics' stratum is invalid, as demonstrated here.

[3] Martin's argument for register and genre as contextual strata is invalid, as demonstrated here, here, and here, and the model itself is inconsistent with the notions of stratification, context, register and genre, as demonstrated here.

Halliday & Hasan On Field, Mode And Tenor As Distinct From Register

Halliday & Hasan (1976: 22):

The FIELD is the total event, in which the text is functioning, together with the purposive activity of the speaker or writer; it thus includes the subject-matter as one element in it.

The MODE is the function of the text in the event, including therefore both the channel taken by the language — spoken or written, extempore or prepared — and its genre, or rhetorical mode, as narrative, didactic, persuasive, 'phatic communion' and so on.

The TENOR refers to the type of rôle interaction, the set of relevant social relations, permanent and temporary, among the participants.

Field, mode and tenor collectively define the context of situation of a text.

The linguistic features which are typically associated with a configuration of situational features — with particular values of the field, mode and tenor — constitute a REGISTER.

Blogger Notes:

Note that field does not mean the 'activity sequences' — or any other meanings — construed in the text.  Field characterises the situation in which such construals are made.

Note that genre, in the sense of the function of the text in the situation — narrative, didactic, persuasive etc. — is a dimension of the mode of the situation.

Note that field, mode and tenor are dimensions of the context, not dimensions of register.

Note that a register is constituted by linguistic features, not contextual features; i.e. a register is not constituted by the values of field, mode and tenor.

Genres As Text Types

As text types, genres are registers,
viewed from the instance pole of the cline of instantiation,

but they are registers that vary with
the mode* features (textual metafunction)
of the situation type (context)
that they realise as language (not context)


*Mode: the part language plays in any given context