Misreading Halliday’s Metaphor of Perspective

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

The following sections provide an overview of this redistribution of theoretical and descriptive responsibility. First, we look ‘below’ – at how we realise tenor through language and paralanguage such as voice quality and gesture. The goal will be to show just how much interpersonal work is done through linguistic and paralinguistic resources in our talk. Next we look ‘around’ – at how tenor cooperates with field and mode to organise our texts. And then we will look ‘above’ – to see how our model of tenor helps us understand the genres used to organise our social life. To round out the book, we look across – to other dimensions of the theory that we are only just beginning to explore and suggest some avenues for future research. This is our vision of what a truly social and semiotic theory of language in context needs to encompass.

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This section tries to dramatise its theoretical stance through the spatial metaphors of “below,” “around,” and “above,” but these metaphors are directly borrowed — and misunderstood — from Halliday & Matthiessen’s Construing Experience through Meaning (1999: 504)¹. The difference is crucial.

In Halliday & Matthiessen, the “from above / from below / from roundabout” triad articulates perspectival orientation across strata — a way of describing how each level in a stratified semiotic functions as both content for the stratum below and expression for the stratum above. It is not a directional metaphor for a programme of research, nor a tour-guide map of the theory. It expresses the logic of symbolic abstraction — how meaning is recursively realised through successive strata.

By contrast, in Doran, Martin & Zappavigna, these same terms are repurposed to describe an itinerary through the model — “first below,” “then around,” “then above,” “finally across” — as though the theory were a landscape of modules to be traversed. This move collapses the logical dimension of realisation into the narrative dimension of exposition, turning what in Halliday is an ontological principle into a rhetorical flourish. The effect is to misrepresent stratification as spatial adjacency rather than symbolic hierarchy.

So while Halliday’s metaphors describe how meaning is construed across strata (a vertical logic of expression and content), the authors’ version describes where they plan to look next (a horizontal logic of survey). The two are not commensurable.

 ¹ Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 504):

A stratified semiotic defines three perspectives, which (following the most familiar metaphor) we refer to as 'from above', 'from roundabout', and 'from below': looking at a given stratum from above means treating it as the expression of some content, looking at it from below means treating it as the content of some expression, while looking at it from roundabout means treating it in the context of (i.e. in relation to other features of) its own stratum.