Rebranding Nominal Group Structure As Tenor

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 41):

In addition to being used in dialogue, internal rendering is often used to provide a ‘meta’ comment on language, often in service of establishing higher level periodicity (Martin & Rose, 2003/2007) and involving semiotic entities – such as question, statement etc. (Hao, 2020). 

This is illustrated in (17), where cultural critic Raymond Williams renders a question by 19th century Scottish cultural critic Thomas Carlyle as famous. This example also illustrates how rendering can be prospective of what is to come, rather than just retrospective.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] To be clear, dialoging and commenting are languaging, and so not tenor, which is context, not language. This is the fundamental theoretical misunderstanding that invalidates the model tendered in this publication.

[2] Martin's 'periodicity' is his rebranding of writing pedagogy as linguistic theory. See the examinations of periodicity in Martin & Rose (2007) here.

[3] Hao's 'semiotic entity' is her rebranding of Halliday's 'discrete semiotic abstraction' (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 193-4). Hao was Martin's student and learnt her theorising from him.

[4] To be clear, this example of the authors' "tenor" is their rebranding of the grammatical relation between post-Deictic and Thing in nominal group structure: