League Table Of Visitors

“Expanding Horizons” by Collapsing the Architecture

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 178):

Ultimately then what we need is a theory of language and semiosis that can manage the complexity of everything we need to say – in Halliday’s (1978) terms, a model of the social semiotic that takes seriously both the social and the semiotic. SFL has worked hard over more than six decades to expand its horizons in this regard. This book is another step along this path. We invite you to join us in pushing this engaging enterprise a few steps further.

ChatGPT Comments: 

The final paragraph offers a familiar promise:

“Ultimately then what we need is a theory of language and semiosis that can manage the complexity of everything we need to say … a model of the social semiotic that takes seriously both the social and the semiotic. SFL has worked hard … This book is another step along this path.”

It’s an appealing invitation — but it rests on a profound misrepresentation of what SFL actually is.

1. The rhetoric of “taking both the social and the semiotic seriously” conceals a collapse of their distinction

Halliday’s social semiotic rests on stratification, i.e., on keeping the social and the semiotic in systematic relation but not conflating them.

This book repeatedly collapses:

• tenor into interpersonal discourse semantics,

• genre into a stratum realised by language resources,

• contextual variables into identity-performance semantics,

• resources into realisations,

• strata into modules.

To then claim alignment with “Halliday’s vision of the social semiotic” is a rhetorical move that masks the systematic dismantling of the very architecture that makes Halliday’s model social and semiotic at all.

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2. The “expanding horizons” narrative frames deviation as progress

Invoking sixty years of SFL development positions their model as simply the next incremental advance.

But the book proceeds not by extending the model, but by restructuring it:

• replacing context with a resource bundle,

• redefining tenor as discourse-semantic affect plus identity variability,

• elevating genre to a stratum realised by “tenor resources”,

• dissolving the cline of instantiation and conflating it with stratification.

This is not expansion; it is reconfiguration.

Calling it “another step along the path” implies continuity where there is disjunction.

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3. The invitation to “push further” presupposes the success of the project

The closing gesture imagines that the only sensible direction for SFL is the one they have charted.

But the enterprise they invite the reader into is not the project Halliday began. It is Martin’s genre-led re-stratification of context, here reframed as a “resource-based sociality model” and offered as if it were the logical apex of SFL evolution.

The invitation rings hollow because it tacitly demands acquiescence to the theoretical substitutions that the book never defends, only presupposes.

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Summary

This concluding flourish reframes a wholesale restructuring of SFL as the natural continuation of Halliday’s project. But the book’s “step forward” is achieved only by collapsing the social into the semiotic, confusing context with discourse semantics, and treating theoretical disruptions as incremental progress. The invitation to “push the enterprise further” thus depends on accepting the very conflations that undermine the social semiotic they invoke. 

The Demographic Strawman and the Erasure of Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 177-8):

A third complementary perspective on tenor that needs to be brought into the picture involves the social roles and relations that affect the way we talk (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) – at a relatively local level (e.g., the way we talk as a mother-child pair) or at a much more global level (e.g,. the way we talk in relation to our economic class). In some discussions of tenor in SFL, there is a suggestion that we can simply ‘wire-in’ various demographic features and suggest there is a relatively straight realisational path from, say, ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ to the language being spoken. But what we have tried to show through this book is that being a mother involves a wide range and diverse set of options. In other words, how a mother means is immensely varied and contested and constantly undergoing change. It intersects with the genres, situations, communities and feelings we have at all times.

ChatGPT Comments:

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 177–8) introduce what they call a “third complementary perspective” on tenor. This is the construction of a strawman to justify their deviation from the canonical model.

1. They mischaracterise the Hallidayan position to defend their own

The claim that SFL suggests you can “wire-in” demographic labels (“mother,” “daughter,” “economic class”) and get a deterministic linguistic output is not found in Halliday & Matthiessen or any serious SFL scholarship.

What Halliday actually says (and what their citation pretends to align with) is that tenor is the configuration of social roles and relations in a situation — not a demographic variable, and not a fixed identity category.

The “mother–child pair” is not a demographic; it is a social relation in a situation type.

They replace situational roles with demographic categories and then call the resulting caricature “SFL”.

This inversion allows them to “correct” a model that never existed.

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2. They continue the slippage between contextual relations and semantic realisations

They say:

“being a mother involves a wide range and diverse set of options… how a mother means is immensely varied and contested”

But this is not a claim about tenor.

It is a claim about interpersonal meaning, genre, and community-specific practices.

Tenor is not:

• “how a mother means”

• “the feelings we have at all times”

• “options available to mothers”

Tenor is the situational role configuration being enacted through meaning — not the semantic choices themselves and not the sociocultural variability of identity categories.

By grounding tenor in the variability of identity performance, they collapse context into discourse semantics yet again.

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3. The final sentence completes the conflation

“It intersects with the genres, situations, communities and feelings we have at all times.”

This is precisely backwards.

• Tenor does not “intersect with” genre;
  in their model, genre is realised by tenor (alongside field and mode).

• Tenor does not intersect with feelings;
  feelings are realised by appraisal systems in discourse semantics.

• Tenor does not intersect with communities;
  communities constrain situation types, which condition tenor.

Their formulation treats tenor as a free-floating sociocultural affective force, drifting across strata and systems, touching whatever seems relevant to identity or meaning.

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Summary

This passage exemplifies how the authors protect their “resource” model by attacking a strawman version of SFL: they caricature tenor as demographic determinism, replace contextual relations with identity-performance semantics, and end by dissolving tenor into an amorphous blend of genre, community, and feelings — all while citing Halliday to legitimise a model that directly contradicts his. 

When Tenor is Reframed as an Affective Toolkit

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 176):

The way we engage with the wider world is heavily dependent on the emotionally charged and values-based ways of thinking that we carry with us at all times and the interactions we have every day. In this book we have aimed to develop a model of tenor as a resource for enacting sociality – i.e., resources for putting forward meanings and reacting to them, resources for connecting meanings into larger complexes of values, and resources for modifying and augmenting the centrality, scope and spirit of these meanings. As we noted in the first chapter, these resources are not the only perspective on tenor afforded by different aspects of SFL.

ChatGPT Comments:

This paragraph crystallises the authors' entire misalignment with the Hallidayan architecture.

1. Tenor is redescribed as affective cognition, not contextual relations

They begin by tying “engagement with the wider world” to “emotionally charged and values-based ways of thinking.”

That is already a departure from the Hallidayan definition:

Tenor is not psychological, affective, or cognitive.

It is the structuring of social roles and relationships in a situation — not how we feel, not our “values-based ways of thinking,” and not our “emotional charge.”

This framing smuggles in interpersonal stance as if it were tenor, collapsing interpersonal semantics (appraisal, attitude, engagement) into the contextual variable itself.

This is the first collapse.

2. They redefine tenor as “a resource for enacting sociality”

This is the core fallacy. Once tenor becomes a resource — that is, a set of linguistic options — they have silently replaced:

• tenor (context)
  with

• interpersonal meaning (semantics)
  or

• even specific grammatical resources (lexicogrammar).

This conflation is not a minor infelicity; it annihilates the very stratum tenor belongs to.

In a stratified model:

• Context is not a resource system.

• Semantics is not a configuration of social relations.

Equating them is a category error masquerading as theoretical innovation.

3. The “resources” they list are not tenor — they are interpersonal semantics

They specify:

• “resources for putting forward meanings and reacting to them”

• “resources for connecting meanings into larger complexes of values”

• “resources for modifying and augmenting the centrality, scope and spirit of these meanings”

These are, transparently:

• discourse semantics of appraisal

• discourse semantics of interpersonal alignment

• lexicogrammatical mood and modality

• textual alignment resources

None of these are tenor.

They are realisations of tenor through interpersonal meaning.

But by calling these “resources of tenor,” they invert the realisation relation. Semantics and lexicogrammar suddenly become tenor, and tenor becomes an interpersonal meaning system.

This is the second collapse.

4. The final sentence gestures at plural perspectives — which only highlights the confusion

“As we noted in the first chapter, these resources are not the only perspective on tenor afforded by different aspects of SFL.”

This is an attempt to soften the theoretical overreach — but instead it reveals it.

If tenor is being construed as:

• affect

• value

• appraisal

• interpersonal semantics

• grammatical systems

• and context all at once

then the only “perspective” left is conceptual fog. What they call “different perspectives” are in fact different strata, and the theory depends on their separation.

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Summary

This passage exemplifies the total internal collapse produced by the “resource” approach: tenor is redefined as an affective-semantic toolkit, semantics is mistaken for context, and the Hallidayan stratification system is quietly inverted under the weight of its own theoretical imprecision. 

The Resource Illusion: When Tenor Pretends to Realise Genre

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 166):

Another way that this can be done is by looking from ‘above’ – in terms of how tenor, field and mode resources realise genres. It is to this we turn in the next section.

In the previous section, we saw that tenor resources work to build meaning within biographical recounts, and that the prosodies of feeling involved can parallel those found in story genres. This has been a recurring theme throughout the book – namely the role of tenor resources in realising different genres.

Blogger Comments:

By confusing tenor with language throughout this book, the authors are able to say a stratum of genre is realised by tenor, thereby ignoring the meaning of tenor as social relations — which would make the absurdity of the claim more obvious.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage exposes the full consequence of the “resource” approach: the erasure of stratification itself.

By treating tenor as a bundle of resources, rather than as a contextual variable that construes the social relations of a situation, the authors position it as if it were a linguistic system. Once that slippage occurs, it becomes grammatically possible — though theoretically incoherent — to claim that “tenor resources realise genres.”

In Halliday’s canonical model, however, genre is not realised by tenor. Genre is the organisation of discourse as a text type, register, which realises context type (field, tenor, and mode). Each stratum functions as a distinct order of abstraction linked by realisation — not by resemblance or adjacency.

The moment we redefine tenor as a set of “language resources,” we collapse this architecture. The realisation hierarchy is replaced by a recursive “stack” of resources — where everything realises everything else in a vague upward drift. The theoretical precision that once distinguished SFL’s stratified model of language and context is dissolved into a fuzzy continuum of “resources” doing unspecified “realising.”

In short, this is not merely an imprecise formulation; it is a category error. By confusing tenor with language, the authors create an illusion in which a stratum of context appears to realise a stratum of text type. What has been lost is the relational integrity of the system itself — the very thing that made SFL’s theory of stratification both powerful and coherent.

When Integration Collapses Distinction

 Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 166):

As significant work on affiliation in SFL has emphasised in recent years (e.g., Logi and Zappavigna 2022), interpersonal meaning (in our case tenor) does not occur on its own. We do not just support or reject in general, but support or reject specific things. To develop a full understanding of how texts manage to build their meaning, it is important that we come to grips with the interaction between tenor, field and mode.

ChatGPT Comments:

At first glance, the passage simply acknowledges the obvious: tenor, field, and mode interrelate in meaning-making. But the phrasing — “interpersonal meaning (in our case tenor)” and “tenor, field and mode interact” — subtly collapses the relation between strata and the relation among variables within a stratum.

1. Conflation of metafunction and context variable
   By equating interpersonal meaning directly with tenor, the authors fuse metafunction (a semantic dimension of language) with context (a stratal level above language). In Halliday’s model, tenor is the contextual correlate of interpersonal semantics — not the same thing. To say “interpersonal meaning (in our case tenor)” erases the symbolic abstraction that defines stratification: the step between semantics (meaning in language) and context (meaning realised by language).

2. Misuse of “interaction” among variables
   When they call for understanding “the interaction between tenor, field and mode,” they invoke a modular metaphor again — one of variables acting upon one another. But in Hallidayan terms, these are complementary dimensions of context that jointly configure situation type. They don’t “interact” like mechanical systems; they co-instantiate through their realisation in semantics.

3. Affiliation as further slippage
   The citation to “affiliation” (Logi & Zappavigna 2022) reinforces this drift: affiliation is treated as an interpersonal process that somehow requires tenor’s “interaction” with field. Yet affiliation, properly theorised, concerns social alignment and value-sharing at a different order of abstraction — it is not evidence that context variables blend, but that their semiotic realisations co-pattern in discourse.

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Summary

The paragraph exemplifies a pattern that has run throughout the book: what begins as a call for “integration” of meaning dimensions ends up erasing the very differentiation that makes integration possible. The interdependence of field, tenor, and mode is not the problem; the problem is treating that interdependence as if it were interaction between modules rather than realisation across strata. 

When Context Variables Become Regions of Linguistic Meaning

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 161):

In the next section we will look ‘around’ – in terms of how tenor engages with adjacent meanings, focusing in particular on another register variable field. This allows us to see that it is not just our social meanings that are being negotiated at all times, but also the ways we construe phenomena (alongside of course the ways we organise our information).

Tenor is not of course the only region of meaning that we draw upon in our lives. It gives value to things and negotiates our social world; but it does this in conjunction with other resources. These include resources for organising our experiential world (which we describe in SFL in terms of field) and resources for organising text itself (which we describe in terms of mode). In this section, we consider the interplay of tenor and field as values are invested in events and things.

ChatGPT Comments:

1. Misconstrual of context variables as “regions of meaning”
   The claim that “tenor is not … the only region of meaning that we draw upon” reifies contextual variables (field, tenor, mode) as if they were semantic regions — as though “tenor” and “field” were domains of meaning within the semantic system. But in canonical SFL, these are variables of context, not regions of meaning itself:

   • Field refers to the social activity or what’s going on.

   • Tenor refers to the social relations among participants.

   • Mode refers to the role of language in the situation.

   These are dimensions of contextual configuration, which is realised by the semantic system — not “regions” of meaning that interact within language. By treating field, tenor, and mode as internal to the meaning plane, the authors blur the critical boundary between context and semantics, thereby collapsing the realisation hierarchy that gives SFL its explanatory depth.

2. Reduction of realisation to “interplay”
   The phrase “interplay of tenor and field as values are invested in events and things” again recasts symbolic abstraction (realisation) as a kind of interaction or cooperation between “resources.” This makes contextual variables appear to be actors operating at the same level as the semantics they condition. In proper systemic terms, there is no “interplay” between field and tenor as variables — rather, there is a contextual configuration that jointly constrains semantic selection.

3. Confusion between context and semantics in evaluative construal
   The idea that “tenor gives value to things” is doubly confused.

   • First, tenor does not give value; it is the contextual configuration of social relations that conditions how interpersonal systems (such as appraisal) assign value.

   • Second, the excerpt slides between evaluation (a semantic process) and social value (a contextual condition). This semantic–contextual slippage reappears throughout the book: “values” are alternately treated as meanings made in discourse and as social valuations that pre-exist discourse. The lack of clear stratified anchoring leads to equivocation between symbolic and sociological sense.

4. Residual modular framing
   Despite claiming to move “beyond modularity,” the authors retain the modular logic: tenor, field, and mode are treated as interacting “regions” with distinct responsibilities. This is the very problem Martin introduced when he reframed context as a register stratum; the same confusion persists here under the rhetoric of “interplay” and “engagement.”

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Summary

This passage extends the earlier slippage by turning context variables into quasi-semantic modules that “give value,” “organise text,” and “interplay” as if they were systems within language. The result is a hybrid model where context both produces meaning and draws on it — an impossible bidirectionality that erases the asymmetry of symbolic realisation.

In short: the excerpt demonstrates not the “interplay” of field and tenor, but the collapse of their theoretical distinction. 

The Resource Fallacy — When Realisations Become Resources

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152-3):

Through this book, we have illustrated a broad range of resources that different choices in tenor can draw upon to realise their meanings. In this section we will bring these together to focus on the amount of interpersonal work that goes on in everyday chat. For this, we will explore a brief excerpt from a conversation between mothers of children with disabilities; they are discussing their experiences and, at times, the guilt that is pervasive in motherhood discourse. We will see that in this face-to-face conversation, the mothers draw on a full multimodal suite of resources to realise their interpersonal meanings – they use language across discourse semantic, lexicogrammatical and intonational resources. And they use paralanguage – bringing facial expressions, bodily movements and gestures, as well as their voice quality into the picture. The result is a rich and integrated negotiation of their social relations with the others in the conversation, as well as with those being talked about and the play of voices that are presumed in every instance of language.

ChatGPT Comments:

This section exemplifies the core confusion in the book’s “resource approach to tenor.” The authors describe “resources that different choices in tenor can draw upon to realise their meanings,” implying that tenor functions as a semiotic chooser rather than a contextual variable.

1. The Slippage of Realisation into Resource:

In SFL, tenor is a dimension of context that is realised by interpersonal meaning in language and other semiotic systems. The authors, however, frame the resources that realise tenor (intonation, gesture, voice quality, etc.) as resources of tenor itself.

Such phrasing collapses the hierarchy of symbolic abstraction. It turns the contextual into a linguistic+ stratum and blurs the distinction between realisation (across strata) and instantiation (within strata). The result is a flattening of Halliday’s model under a vaguely modular “resource” logic.

2. The Multimodal Mirage:

The invocation of a “full multimodal suite” implies a harmonious integration of linguistic and paralinguistic modes. Yet by treating these as equivalent “resources” of tenor, the authors dissolve the semiotic boundaries that give each its own realisation plane. What Halliday treats as distinct systems of expression are here rhetorically fused into a single multimodal continuum, producing an illusion of theoretical inclusivity at the cost of stratificational clarity.

3. Repetition of the Empiricist Fallacy:

The appeal to “everyday chat” and “mothers of children with disabilities” functions as a moral warrant for theoretical claims — a familiar rhetorical move in socially oriented linguistics. But the instance here is presented as demonstrative rather than exemplificatory: it is used to confirm a model that already presumes what it claims to reveal. The empirical example is not analytically mobilised to test the theoretical apparatus; it is merely invoked to illustrate its presumed coherence.

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Summary:

The passage’s notion of “tenor drawing on resources” transforms realisations into resources, converting a symbolic dependency into a semiotic capacity. This inversion gives tenor a quasi-agentive status and undermines the hierarchical coherence of the SFL model. 

Misreading Halliday’s Metaphor of Perspective

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

The following sections provide an overview of this redistribution of theoretical and descriptive responsibility. First, we look ‘below’ – at how we realise tenor through language and paralanguage such as voice quality and gesture. The goal will be to show just how much interpersonal work is done through linguistic and paralinguistic resources in our talk. Next we look ‘around’ – at how tenor cooperates with field and mode to organise our texts. And then we will look ‘above’ – to see how our model of tenor helps us understand the genres used to organise our social life. To round out the book, we look across – to other dimensions of the theory that we are only just beginning to explore and suggest some avenues for future research. This is our vision of what a truly social and semiotic theory of language in context needs to encompass.

ChatGPT Comments:

This section tries to dramatise its theoretical stance through the spatial metaphors of “below,” “around,” and “above,” but these metaphors are directly borrowed — and misunderstood — from Halliday & Matthiessen’s Construing Experience through Meaning (1999: 504)¹. The difference is crucial.

In Halliday & Matthiessen, the “from above / from below / from roundabout” triad articulates perspectival orientation across strata — a way of describing how each level in a stratified semiotic functions as both content for the stratum below and expression for the stratum above. It is not a directional metaphor for a programme of research, nor a tour-guide map of the theory. It expresses the logic of symbolic abstraction — how meaning is recursively realised through successive strata.

By contrast, in Doran, Martin & Zappavigna, these same terms are repurposed to describe an itinerary through the model — “first below,” “then around,” “then above,” “finally across” — as though the theory were a landscape of modules to be traversed. This move collapses the logical dimension of realisation into the narrative dimension of exposition, turning what in Halliday is an ontological principle into a rhetorical flourish. The effect is to misrepresent stratification as spatial adjacency rather than symbolic hierarchy.

So while Halliday’s metaphors describe how meaning is construed across strata (a vertical logic of expression and content), the authors’ version describes where they plan to look next (a horizontal logic of survey). The two are not commensurable.

 ¹ 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. 

Tenor Does Not Walk Alone — But Neither Does It Float Free

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

This means that when negotiating social relations, tenor does not walk alone. This is our focus in this closing chapter. Tenor is realised through an enormous array of linguistic, paralinguistic, and multimodal resources; it works closely with resources of field and mode; and it realises the sets of genres we use to get along with our everyday life. The following sections provide an overview of this redistribution of theoretical and descriptive responsibility. 

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This invites the misunderstanding that tenor is a module that interacts with other modules.

[2] In this book, the 'enormous array of linguistic, paralinguistic, and multimodal resources' that realise tenor have been mistaken for tenor itself.

[3] To be clear, the absurd claim here is that social relations between interlocutors realise story genres, like narratives and anecdotes. This misunderstanding is inherent in Martin's model of stratification, which locates a stratum of genre above the contextual stratum of field, tenor and mode, which is rebranded as register. Rebranding field, tenor and mode as register confuses context type with the register of language that realises it. Martin's 'genres' are text types (registers) that realise types of culturally valued rhetorical mode (narratives etc.), and whose structures are semantic, and vary according to the mode that the given text type realises. 

When Martin (1992) first stratified context as his genre and his register, he correlated genre with context of culture (potential), and his register with context of situation (instance). The confusion here was twofold. First it confused the cline of instantiation (potential-instance) with stratification (symbolic abstraction); and second it confused instance (context of situation) with systemic potential (field, tenor and mode). Other confusions follow from these multiple interrelated misunderstandings.

[4] This is misleading. There is no redistribution of theoretical and descriptive responsibility in the case of relations between tenor and language, because this is consistent with Halliday's model of stratification; and there is no redistribution in the case of relations between tenor and genre, because this is consistent with Martin's model of stratification.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage attempts to position tenor within a broader ecology of meaning, acknowledging its interdependence with field, mode, language, and other semiotic systems. While this framing sounds balanced, it conceals deep conceptual confusion about stratification, realisation, and the role of tenor within systemic functional linguistics.

1. Tenor misconstrued as a module rather than a stratal system.
The phrase “tenor does not walk alone” anthropomorphises tenor and implies a model of interacting components rather than hierarchically related strata. This reflects a persistent misinterpretation—traceable to Martin’s modular conception of context (1992)—in which strata are imagined as neighbouring systems that “interface” rather than as ordered levels of symbolic abstraction. In Halliday’s canonical model, strata are not parallel domains in dialogue, but nested levels of semiotic realisation: context is realised by semantics, which is realised by lexicogrammar, and so forth. Treating tenor as an “interacting module” flattens this hierarchy and obscures how language construes social relations rather than merely interacting with them.

2. The resources that realise tenor are mistaken for tenor itself.
The linguistic, paralinguistic, and multimodal resources are not tenor—they are the means through which tenor is realised. The confusion is structural: by relocating systems such as Spirit, Stakes, and Scope from semantics into context, the book effectively dissolves the stratal distinction.

3. Misplaced claims about realisation and genre.
The claim that tenor “realises the sets of genres we use to get along with everyday life” reverses the direction of realisation. In Halliday’s model, genre (as rhetorical mode or contextual pattern) models culture-level meanings—it is not realised by tenor. In Martin’s revision, where “genre” is elevated above register (redefining field, tenor, and mode as “register variables”), this reversal becomes systematic. The result is a confused ontology in which interpersonal relations between speakers are said to realise genre structures such as narratives or anecdotes—a category mistake that collapses the distinction between interpersonal relation and textual form.

4. The myth of “redistribution.”
The authors conclude that there has been a “redistribution of theoretical and descriptive responsibility.” This phrase disguises the fact that what has occurred is not redistribution but reallocation through misunderstanding. Tenor’s relations to language remain unchanged in Halliday’s stratified model, and its relations to genre remain unchanged in Martin’s modular model. The purported “redistribution” is therefore rhetorical: an attempt to legitimise a conflated framework that merges context, semantics, and text-type under a single analytic banner.

Summary:
The passage exemplifies the cumulative effect of misreading stratification as modular interaction, realisation as correlation, and context as an aggregate of semiotic resources. The result is an elegant-sounding but incoherent rebranding of long-settled distinctions within SFL. Far from “mobilising the full power” of the theory, the authors have fragmented it into loosely connected “modules” whose relationships are asserted rather than theorised.

Tenor Unmoored: Conceptual Drift in the Realisation Hierarchy

 Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

The upshot of this is that room has been made for the aspects of language and society that have often been encapsulated within tenor to be conceptualised elsewhere – through other dimensions of the theory. For example the parameters of status and contact (Poynton, 1990a) can be further developed as principles of co-selection and arrangement within instantiation. Social roles, interpersonal relationships and community values can be explored as arenas of cooperation and struggle within individuation – where there is considerable potential for SFL to build upon sociological work by Maton (e.g. 2014), Bernstein (e.g. 1996/2000) and Bourdieu (e.g. 1993)). In addition the temporary speech roles that occur in dialogue, people’s feelings and the play of voices can be investigated through discourse semantics (e.g. Berry, 1981a; Martin & White, 2005). And the range of verbal action that we participate in all the time (such as instructing, planning, narrating etc. (Hasan, 1999)) can be researched through genre. This is of course an enormous program of work – one that cannot be detailed in a single book. But we have aimed to make explicit what we can do with tenor in the realisation hierarchy, and use that, along with field, mode and rich descriptions of language and other semiotic systems, as the basis for exploring all the rest.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage signals the authors’ ambition to broaden the analytical scope of SFL by relocating aspects traditionally handled within tenor to other theoretical dimensions, including instantiation, individuation, discourse semantics, and genre. While this is framed as opening up new avenues for research, several conceptual issues emerge.

1. Displacement vs. clarification:
   The authors propose that parameters such as status, contact, and social roles can now be explored outside tenor. However, this effectively relocates interpersonal phenomena from context without sufficiently justifying the move. Tenor was originally designed to capture these relational aspects precisely because they are instantiated in interpersonal meaning. By “offloading” them to instantiation or individuation, the authors risk obscuring rather than clarifying the mechanisms by which language realises social relations.

2. Misunderstanding of the realisation hierarchy:
   The claim that tenor can now serve as a “basis for exploring all the rest” suggests a flattening of the stratification model. The realisation hierarchy is not a set of interchangeable modules; strata interact through symbolic abstraction. Treating tenor as a jumping-off point for instantiation, individuation, discourse semantics, and genre conflates levels of analysis and undermines the formal distinction between semantics and context.

3. Analytic overreach without operationalisation:
   The passage gestures toward a massive program of work — co-selection, arenas of cooperation and struggle, temporary speech roles, and verbal actions — yet provides no concrete methodology for how these phenomena would be rigorously instantiated or measured. Without operational clarity, the program risks remaining a conceptual sketch rather than an actionable research framework.

4. Implicit rebranding of established work:
   By framing status, social roles, and community values as “now available” for exploration via instantiation and individuation, the authors implicitly present longstanding sociological and SFL insights as new avenues for their framework. This rebranding risks obscuring the continuity of prior theory while overstating novelty.

Summary:

While the excerpt ambitiously attempts to expand the reach of SFL, it exhibits a drift of tenor from its well-established semiotic grounding. By relocating interpersonal phenomena across strata without fully addressing realisation relations, the authors blur the analytic boundaries that give SFL its explanatory power. The result is a conceptual flattening: rich phenomena of social relations are conceptually available everywhere, yet rigorously instantiated nowhere.

When Tenor Eats Semantics: The Cost of Misreading Stratification

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

Accordingly in this book we have taken a step towards mobilising the full power of SFL theory as a genuinely social theory of language. Rather than trying to account for all of social relations in one place in the model (as in many previous accounts), it has focused on tenor as a resource for enacting social relations. In doing so, it has privileged the need for a model of tenor that can explicitly link with interpersonal resources in language and with genre patterns.

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[1] To be clear, SFL Theory models language as a social semiotic. Halliday (1978: 2, 55, 123):

It means interpreting language within a sociocultural context, in which the culture itself is interpreted in semiotic terms - as an information system, if that terminology is preferred. 

… the notion of language as part of the social semiotic: the concept of the culture as a system of meaning, with language as one of its realisations.

… an interpretation of the social system as a social semiotic: a system of meanings that constitutes the ‘reality' of the culture. This is the higher-level system to which language is related: the semantic system of language is a realisation of the social semiotic. 

Socio-semiotic systems contrast with bio-semiotic systems: those that interface with the content plane of language, those that interface with the expression plane of language, and the brain that materially realises language (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 605-7). 

[2] To be clear, in this book, the authors have renamed semantic systems and relocated them out of language and into context as tenor systems, thereby making tenor do the work of language as well as context. This confusion resulted from not understanding the realisation relation between strata as one of symbolic abstraction, and misunderstanding strata as interacting modules (at the same level of abstraction) — a misunderstanding that has persisted since Martin (1992: 390, 488):

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. …

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?

ChatGPT Comments:

This excerpt encapsulates the self-congratulatory claim that this book “mobilises the full power of SFL as a genuinely social theory,” while in practice doing so by inverting the Hallidayan architecture that already made SFL a social semiotic.

The passage frames the book’s project as a decisive “step toward mobilising the full power of SFL as a genuinely social theory of language.” However, this rhetorical flourish obscures several conceptual inversions that weaken, rather than strengthen, the systemic-functional model they claim to advance.

1. Misrepresentation of SFL’s foundation

The claim that this book newly mobilises SFL as a social theory of language overlooks that Halliday’s (1978) Language as Social Semiotic already defines SFL precisely as such. The notion that language is a social semiotic — a meaning-making system situated within, and realising, the culture-as-semiotic — is not an ancillary claim but the very premise of the theory. What the authors present as a “step toward” has in fact been the foundation for nearly fifty years.

This rhetorical framing subtly repositions the canonical SFL project as incomplete, thereby legitimising their own intervention as an overdue correction — a move that is both historically inaccurate and theoretically misleading.

2. Relocating semantics into context

The authors describe their contribution as focusing on “tenor as a resource for enacting social relations” that can “explicitly link with interpersonal resources in language and with genre patterns.” Yet this “explicit link” is achieved not through relational integration but by displacement: systems that in the canonical model belong to the semantic stratum (e.g., appraisal, engagement, graduation) are redefined as contextual tenor systems.

In doing so, the book effectively removes the semantic mediation that Halliday (1978, 2014) insisted upon. The semiotic architecture collapses: instead of a symbolic abstraction (context → semantics → lexicogrammar), we get modular adjacency (tenor ↔ interpersonal ↔ genre), with each “module” treated as a coequal interactive system. This reorganisation violates the realisation relation that defines stratification and makes SFL’s social ontology coherent.

3. From stratification to modular confusion

The problem stems from Martin’s reinterpretation of strata as modules in dialogue rather than levels of abstraction in realisation. Once strata are conceived as interacting rather than realising, the notion of “linking” tenor with interpersonal and genre becomes intelligible — but only within a confused ontology. The relation between language and context is no longer symbolic but cybernetic, flattening Halliday’s architecture into a network of “systems talking to systems.”

This is the conceptual hinge of the book’s entire framework: tenor ceases to be a contextual configuration realised through semantic systems, and instead becomes a quasi-linguistic module that contains those systems under new names. Hence the authors can claim novelty while in fact rebranding semantic work as contextual.

4. Rebranding and rhetorical erasure

By reclassifying established semantic systems as “tenor systems,” the authors appropriate the descriptive achievements of SFL’s interpersonal semantics — particularly Appraisal — and re-present them as their own contribution to “tenor modelling.” This amounts to terminological rebranding rather than theoretical innovation. The language of “mobilising the full power of SFL” thus functions rhetorically to erase the semiotic work already done by Halliday and Hasan, and to naturalise a model that obscures the realisation relations on which the social-semiotic edifice depends.

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Summary

In short, this passage crystallises the book’s central confusion: it claims to make SFL more social by dismantling the very stratified relation that defines language as a social semiotic. By relocating semantics into context and treating strata as interactive modules, it replaces relational abstraction with modular adjacency. What emerges is not an expansion but a contraction of the theory — a semiotic architecture that has lost its semiotic principle.

Overstated Ambition and Stratification Missteps

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 151):

This focus and diversity of approaches to tenor emphasises the rich and multifaceted nature of language in relation to society – something we need to grasp in all its complexity if we wish to build a truly social semiotic theory (Halliday, 1978; Hodge & Kress, 1988). While this complexity has long been recognised and descriptions formulated, SFL theory itself has not always kept pace. Stemming at least from the early work of Hasan (e.g. 1973) and advanced through its long interaction with social theory (e.g. Bernstein, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1990; Bernstein, 1996/2000), there has been a recognition of the need of an increasingly expansive theory to account for the role of language in society. With the development of dimensions of instantiation (Halliday, 1991a; Matthiessen, 1993), which conceptualises the relation between the systemic potential of language and the instance of text, and individuation (Martin, 2010), which conceptualises the relation between the reservoir of meaning in a language community and the repertoire of an individual (c.f. Bernstein, 1996/2000), we are now in a stronger position to move toward a richer understanding of the interconnection between language and society. We embarked on this book project because we felt that SFL had not yet reached its potential in this regard.

ChatGPT Comments:

The excerpt foregrounds the authors’ ambition to extend SFL toward a richer social semiotic, situating this ambition in terms of “dimensions of instantiation” and “individuation.” While presented as an innovative move, several critical issues arise:

1. Overstatement of novelty
   The authors suggest that prior SFL “has not always kept pace” with the complexity of social relations and that their framework addresses a theoretical gap. Yet much of what they claim as new—particularly the relation of systemic potential to text (instantiation) and the community–individual nexus (individuation)—is already thoroughly theorised in canonical SFL work. Framing it as a corrective overstates novelty and risks implying that Halliday, Hasan, and others were inattentive to social complexity, which is misleading.

2. Misplaced theoretical apparatus
   Although instantiation and individuation are invoked, they are largely absent in the analytic work itself. Instead, the authors operate through a lens of stratification—but here, even this is muddled. Established semantic systems (e.g., Appraisal, Graduation, Engagement) are mislocated from their proper stratum into context as purported “tenor systems”. This conflates strata: patterns of interpersonal meaning within language are treated as features of social context. The result is a conceptual flattening that collapses semantic, contextual, and interpersonal distinctions.

3. Implicit epistemic claim
   The statement “we are now in a stronger position to move toward a richer understanding of the interconnection between language and society” functions as an epistemic assertion about the book’s contribution. While aspirational, it should be tempered: SFL’s existing machinery already addresses links between language, society, and individual construal. The claimed contribution lies more in deployment and emphasis than in a radical conceptual advance.

Summary

This excerpt exemplifies a common rhetorical strategy in theoretical expansions: foregrounding ambition and framing existing constructs as insufficient to justify a new lens. In this case, the ambition is overstated, existing SFL resources are mislocated and renamed, and the promised integration of instantiation and individuation is largely unrealised. Readers should recognise that the novelty is less about conceptual revolution and more about the reconfiguration of established SFL machinery under a new nomenclature.