Tenor as the Dumping Ground of Metaphor

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 66):

In terms of repositioning, the Convenor is repositioning a proposition as a proposal.

(18)

Convenor: Tell me what happened when mum found out what you did.

proposition: open repositioned as proposal: complete

One function of such repositioning in this case is to nuance the status relations being established (Doran, Martin & Herrington, 2024; Poynton, 1990a). Ideationally speaking, the Young Person is the one who has control over telling what happened at this stage of the conference. And here they have much more scope to step through the requisite activities and people involved than the Convenor (though the Convenor does in fact know in detail what happened). From the perspective of tenor, this is indicated by the Convenor through the open proposition (what happened…). But the Convenor’s repositioning of this proposition as a proposal reasserts their status in interpersonal terms. It makes explicit the wider range of interpersonal choices that are available to the Convenor but are not available to the Young Person (e.g., commanding).

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage again presents a conflation of strata. The authors claim that a proposition is repositioned as a proposal—but in Systemic Functional Linguistics, such shifts are modelled as grammatical metaphor within the semantics and lexicogrammar, not the context. What is being described is a shift in speech function, realised through mood metaphor (cf. tell me what happened... functioning both as a proposal and a demand for information). Yet the authors relocate this semantic construal into tenor, as if repositioning were a contextual operation rather than a semantic one.

Further, the statement that “the repositioning reasserts the Convenor’s status in interpersonal terms” continues a pattern of misattributing grammatical resources to contextual variables. It is true that commands (especially metaphorical ones) may enact or index asymmetries in status—but to then redescribe this enaction as an operation within tenor reverses the direction of realisation in SFL. The relation between status and command is top-down: status as a contextual variable constrains the use of speech functions—not the other way around.

Once again, this approach treats grammatical metaphor as if it were a contextual manoeuvre rather than a semantic abstraction realised grammatically. As such, it undermines the stratified model of SFL and mislocates the locus of variation.