“Expanding Horizons” by Collapsing the Architecture

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 178):

Ultimately then what we need is a theory of language and semiosis that can manage the complexity of everything we need to say – in Halliday’s (1978) terms, a model of the social semiotic that takes seriously both the social and the semiotic. SFL has worked hard over more than six decades to expand its horizons in this regard. This book is another step along this path. We invite you to join us in pushing this engaging enterprise a few steps further.

ChatGPT Comments: 

The final paragraph offers a familiar promise:

“Ultimately then what we need is a theory of language and semiosis that can manage the complexity of everything we need to say … a model of the social semiotic that takes seriously both the social and the semiotic. SFL has worked hard … This book is another step along this path.”

It’s an appealing invitation — but it rests on a profound misrepresentation of what SFL actually is.

1. The rhetoric of “taking both the social and the semiotic seriously” conceals a collapse of their distinction

Halliday’s social semiotic rests on stratification, i.e., on keeping the social and the semiotic in systematic relation but not conflating them.

This book repeatedly collapses:

• tenor into interpersonal discourse semantics,

• genre into a stratum realised by language resources,

• contextual variables into identity-performance semantics,

• resources into realisations,

• strata into modules.

To then claim alignment with “Halliday’s vision of the social semiotic” is a rhetorical move that masks the systematic dismantling of the very architecture that makes Halliday’s model social and semiotic at all.

---

2. The “expanding horizons” narrative frames deviation as progress

Invoking sixty years of SFL development positions their model as simply the next incremental advance.

But the book proceeds not by extending the model, but by restructuring it:

• replacing context with a resource bundle,

• redefining tenor as discourse-semantic affect plus identity variability,

• elevating genre to a stratum realised by “tenor resources”,

• dissolving the cline of instantiation and conflating it with stratification.

This is not expansion; it is reconfiguration.

Calling it “another step along the path” implies continuity where there is disjunction.

---

3. The invitation to “push further” presupposes the success of the project

The closing gesture imagines that the only sensible direction for SFL is the one they have charted.

But the enterprise they invite the reader into is not the project Halliday began. It is Martin’s genre-led re-stratification of context, here reframed as a “resource-based sociality model” and offered as if it were the logical apex of SFL evolution.

The invitation rings hollow because it tacitly demands acquiescence to the theoretical substitutions that the book never defends, only presupposes.

---

Summary

This concluding flourish reframes a wholesale restructuring of SFL as the natural continuation of Halliday’s project. But the book’s “step forward” is achieved only by collapsing the social into the semiotic, confusing context with discourse semantics, and treating theoretical disruptions as incremental progress. The invitation to “push the enterprise further” thus depends on accepting the very conflations that undermine the social semiotic they invoke.