Category Errors, Faulty Analogies, and Confusions Between Semantics and Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 44-5):

Here we are emphasising the similarities in tenor between rejection and support done dialogically and monologically.  

In terms of discourse semantics, this indicates similarities between heteroglossia, which offers resources for managing multiple voices, and negotiation (dialogica), which offers resources for managing multiple turns.  

Put another way, we are suggesting a parallel between (23), where the tendering and rendering is established across two turns, and (24) where the tendering and rendering occurs in a single turn.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] Here again the authors misunderstand language choices (tendering and rendering, rejection and support) as the cultural context of language (tenor). As Halliday (1994: 390) puts it:

Tenor refers to the statuses and role relationships; who is taking part in the interaction.

[2] Here the authors conflate the speaker’s semiotic resources — heteroglossia and negotiation — with the linguist’s modelling of those resources. To be clear, heteroglossia is the speaker’s resource for acknowledging other possible points of view (‘voices’), not a resource for “managing” them. Likewise, negotiation is the speaker’s system of potential moves in an exchange, not a resource for “managing” multiple turns.

[3] Here the authors set up the following proportionalities:

dialogue is to monologue as

heteroglossia is to negotiation as

two turns is to single turn

To be clear, proportional analogies rely on structural or functional equivalence: if A is to B as C is to D, then the relation between A and B must be of the same kind as the relation between C and D — whether it’s one of scale, category, realisation, or function.

But in this case, the analogy fails on all counts. Dialogue and monologue differ in interactional structure, not functional type; negotiation and heteroglossia belong to different semantic systems with distinct organising principles; and turns and voices are not even comparable units — the former are structural units of exchange, the latter semantic projections of alignment. No relational consistency holds across the three pairs.

[4] In terms of SPEECH FUNCTION, (23) is an initiating statement followed by a discretionary response — a contradiction — while (24) is simply an initiating statement with no response (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 137). The authors rebrand these moves in the exchange structure as ‘tender’ and ‘reject’, and misclassify them as features of context (tenor) rather than of language (semantics).