Tendering Nuance, Flattening Complexity: Innovation or Illusion in Interpersonal Meaning?

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 82):

Whenever we talk to each other, we negotiate our social relations. We put forward meanings and we react to those that have been put forward. We present meanings in a way that suggests they may or may not be shared and we engage with them in more or less sympathetic ways. In Chapters 2 and 3 we have presented a model of resources for how we put forward and react to these meanings. We first stepped through the system of rendering to show the different ways we can engage with meanings that have been tendered or implicated in a text. Then in this chapter, we explored how people can put forward meanings in nuanced ways that acknowledge the positions of those around them. Together these resources allow for the intricate negotiation of social relations that all of us engage in everyday.

ChatGPT Comments:

1. Conflation of negotiation with all talk

The opening claim — “Whenever we talk to each other, we negotiate our social relations” — generalises negotiation to all instances of dialogue. While interpersonal meanings are indeed always at stake in interaction, negotiation (in the Hallidayan sense) is a specific semantic process of exchanging roles and values. By universalising negotiation, the authors risk blurring the crucial distinction between the omnipresence of interpersonal meaning and the specific resources by which exchange and alignment are enacted.

2. The “put forward / react” binary

The model is framed around a reductive dyad: putting forward vs reacting. This foregrounds a mechanical push-and-pull exchange structure, reminiscent of speech function theory, but ignores the range of simultaneous interpersonal meanings realised in dialogue: stance, alignment, modality, affect, judgement, graduation, etc. By collapsing all interpersonal work into this binary, the model oversimplifies the semiotic resources available for interpersonal meaning-making.

3. Rendering as engagement with tendered meanings

The authors describe “rendering” as the set of resources for engaging with meanings that have been tendered or implicated in a text. This creates two theoretical difficulties:

• Circularity: “rendering” is defined only in relation to “tendering,” which itself is not clearly theorised beyond “putting forward.”

• Conflation of strata: “implicated meanings” reach into discourse semantics and intertextual inference, yet are folded into a system as context. This risks treating distinct phenomena as one, without specifying the systemic relations that differentiate them.

4. Affective alignment disguised as nuance

The claim that people put forward meanings in nuanced ways that acknowledge the positions of those around them conflates evaluative stance with exchange roles. In SFL, such “acknowledgement” is modelled through appraisal resources (e.g. heteroglossic engagement, attribution, concession) rather than through speech functions. By folding evaluative alignment into a tendering system, the model displaces appraisal from its place in the semantic architecture and risks duplicating it under new terminology.

5. Overstating integration

The authors conclude that together these resources allow for the intricate negotiation of social relations that all of us engage in everyday. This overstates the explanatory scope of the proposed “rendering/tendering” framework. The canonical SFL model already accounts for this through mood, modality, appraisal, and speech function. The new terminology does not so much integrate resources as re-package them, producing an illusion of explanatory novelty without clarifying their interrelations.