Trinocular Perspective And Metaredundancy

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 11):

A model of this trinocular perspective on levels of language is presented in Figure 1.4.

In SFL the co-tangential circles of increasing diameter have been designed to capture what is technically referred to as metaredundancy — the ‘pattern of patterns’ principle whereby discourse semantics is conceived as a pattern of lexicogrammatical patterns and lexicogrammar is in turn conceived as a pattern of phonological ones (Matthiessen and Halliday, 2009).

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[1] This misunderstands the notion of 'trinocular perspective'. To be clear, taking a trinocular perspective means viewing one specific level of symbolic abstraction (i) from a higher level of symbolic abstraction, (ii) from its own level, and (iii) from a lower level. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 504):

A stratified semiotic defines three perspectives, which (following the most familiar metaphor) we refer to as ‘from above’, ‘from roundabout’, and ‘from below’: looking at a given stratum from above means treating it as the expression of some content, looking at it from below means treating it as the content of some expression, while looking at it from roundabout means treating it in the context of (i.e. in relation to other features of) its own stratum.

[2] This confuses the notion of a 'series of redundancies' with the notion of 'metaredundancy'. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 25) explain stratification as a series of redundancies:

When we say that language is stratified in this way, we mean that this is how we have to model language if we want to explain it. A language is a series of redundancies by which we link our ecosocial environment to nonrandom disturbances in the air (soundwaves). … The relationship among the strata — the process of linking one level of organisation with another — is called realisation.

This is distinct from metaredundancy, which is a redundancy on a redundancy, as exemplified by the redundancy of one stratum on the redundancy of the other two. As Halliday (1992: 24) explains:

… it is not that (i) meaning is realised by wording and wording is realised by sound, but that (ii) meaning is realised by the realisation of wording in sound. We can of course reverse the direction, and say that sounding realises the realisation of meaning in wording.