Slide 22: Cline Of Social Instantiation

We have construed social potential as networks of doing–&–happening and being–&–having.  A social instance, then, is the selective activation of features in these systems — ‘an instantial pattern over the potential’ as Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 45) put it for linguistic systems.  For example,

• ‘someone becoming unemployed’ is an instance of social being–&–having (phased intensive attribution), and
• ‘someone going to Centrelink’ is an instance of social doing–&–happening (transformative happening).

And just as for language (Halliday 2008: 119, 116), it is a feature of instantiation that each social instance minutely perturbs the probabilities of the social potential — social instantial frequencies shape the social systemic probabilities.