Misunderstanding Tenor As The Language That Realises Tenor

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 7):

Understanding how social relations are enacted is thus crucial to understanding how language is used and how we build our social world itself. Accordingly scholars in SFL (and related approaches) have worked hard to model tenor for upwards of half a century. However, as we will explain in this chapter, while these efforts have given us great insight into language in relation to its social context, they have often struggled to relate the internal organisation of language to parameters proposed for tenor. The model presented in this book is our reconception of tenor as a resource for negotiating social relations. It is a new approach that aims to better link options in tenor to those of language.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] To be clear, the reconception of tenor presented by the authors in this book confuses tenor (context) with the linguistic resources that realise it. This confusion renders the model theoretically invalid.

[2] To be clear, this new approach does not link options in tenor (context) to those in language. Instead, it misunderstands tenor as the language that realises tenor.

ChatGPT Comments:

Misconstruing Tenor in the SFL Architecture

The authors' stated aim — to reconceive tenor as "a resource for negotiating social relations" in order to "better link options in tenor to those of language" — misrepresents the theoretical architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Specifically, it conflates the contextual variable of tenor with the linguistic resources that realise it, thereby collapsing the relation of realisation.

In the SFL model, tenor is not linguistic. It is one of the three variables of context, alongside field and mode, stratified above language. Each variable of context is realised by meaning at the level of semantics, which is realised by lexicogrammar, which is realised by phonology/graphology. Specifically, tenor — which encompasses role relationships, status, and social distance — is realised by interpersonal semantic systems such as speech function and appraisal. These systems do not constitute tenor; rather, they realise it, at a lower level of symbolic abstraction.

Misconstruing tenor as the language used to negotiate social relations reverses the realisation relation and undermines the principle of stratification that is central to the SFL model. This principle maintains a clear distinction between context and language, with realisation as the relation across strata, and instantiation as the relation between potential and instance within a stratum.

Furthermore, to conflate tenor with linguistic systems not only creates theoretical incoherence but also risks significant misapplication in domains such as discourse analysis, pedagogical grammar, and computational modelling, where clarity about stratification is crucial for making principled analytical choices.

The following alternative paragraph offers a theoretically consistent framing of tenor within the SFL model:

Understanding how social relations are enacted is crucial to understanding how language is used and how we build our social world. In Systemic Functional Linguistics, this is modelled through the contextual variable of tenor, which refers to the social relationships between interactants — including roles, status, and affective stance — within a situation. Over the past five decades, scholars in SFL have developed detailed accounts of how tenor is realised in language, particularly through interpersonal semantic systems such as speech function and appraisal. These linguistic resources realise (not are) the social values associated with tenor.

Until this confusion between context and language is resolved, the authors' proposed "reconception" of tenor cannot be considered a theoretically valid contribution to the SFL tradition. A principled model must maintain the distinction between tenor (as context) and the interpersonal resources that realise it in language — both in theory and in application.