A Misunderstanding Underlying 'Association'

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 17):

We won't attempt a more detailed discussion of metafunctional diversification and Poynton's principles here. Suffice it to say that it is very difficult to restrict these patterns of usage to interpersonal meanings alone. So alongside mass and presence, (Doran, Martin, & Herrington, 2024) suggests the cover term association to manage the metafunctional distribution of all the status and contact (reciprocity and proliferation/contraction) patterns in play.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] This continues the authors' misunderstanding of context-metafunction resonance as requiring that variation in a contextual parameter, in this case: tenor, not be realised by variation in the language of unaligned metafunctions, in this case: ideational and textual meaning. As previously explained, it is variation in the interpersonal meaning of language that identifies variation in tenor (and vice versa).

[2] As previously demonstrated in the review of Rethinking Context: Realisation, Instantiation, And Individuation In Systemic Functional Linguistics (Doran et al 2024), the authors' 'association' is the meaning of language misunderstood as the contextual parameter of tenor.