The Fundamental Misunderstanding Of Tenor In This Book

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 26):

This book focuses on the resources we use to enact our social relations. It explores how we put meanings forward and react to them; it maps how we build vast networks of values that help us align or disalign with things and people; and it describes how we adjust all of these meaning so as to make clear how we feel about them all. In short, it describes how we engage with the world interpersonally, and offers tools for being able to see this. …

While ours is a new approach to tenor, our sincere hope is that is can be read as a respectful one – making room across hierarchies for development of all the work on social relations that has been done. So thanks to our mentors; and our very best wishes to researchers building on the framework proposed here.

Reviewer Comments:

To be clear, in SFL Theory, the resources we use to enact our social relations as meaning are the systems of the interpersonal metafunction of language. The authors, however, confuse these resources with tenor, the interpersonal dimension of context: the culture as a semiotic system.