Realizations: non-causal but real relationships in and between Halliday, Hasan, and Vygotsky

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper looks at a concept central to Michael Halliday’s linguistics: realization. Ruqaiya Hasan always defined this concept in a Vygotskyan way, as semiotic mediation. In so doing, she made three important addenda to it and questioned the fit between systemic-functional concepts of language and Vygotsky’s. I will suggest that recently translated pedological texts offer a reply – a kind of pre-ply, if you will – to some of the queries she had. I will then propose a “try-brid” pedology in which Vygotsky’s neoformations are realized as Halliday’s conversational stages and development is realized as Hasan’s contextual cline of instantiation. I hope, by the conclusion, to have shown you, with two anti-smoking cartoons by Korean primary school students, how the concept of realization becomes real.