Tenor Unmoored: Conceptual Drift in the Realisation Hierarchy

 Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

The upshot of this is that room has been made for the aspects of language and society that have often been encapsulated within tenor to be conceptualised elsewhere – through other dimensions of the theory. For example the parameters of status and contact (Poynton, 1990a) can be further developed as principles of co-selection and arrangement within instantiation. Social roles, interpersonal relationships and community values can be explored as arenas of cooperation and struggle within individuation – where there is considerable potential for SFL to build upon sociological work by Maton (e.g. 2014), Bernstein (e.g. 1996/2000) and Bourdieu (e.g. 1993)). In addition the temporary speech roles that occur in dialogue, people’s feelings and the play of voices can be investigated through discourse semantics (e.g. Berry, 1981a; Martin & White, 2005). And the range of verbal action that we participate in all the time (such as instructing, planning, narrating etc. (Hasan, 1999)) can be researched through genre. This is of course an enormous program of work – one that cannot be detailed in a single book. But we have aimed to make explicit what we can do with tenor in the realisation hierarchy, and use that, along with field, mode and rich descriptions of language and other semiotic systems, as the basis for exploring all the rest.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage signals the authors’ ambition to broaden the analytical scope of SFL by relocating aspects traditionally handled within tenor to other theoretical dimensions, including instantiation, individuation, discourse semantics, and genre. While this is framed as opening up new avenues for research, several conceptual issues emerge.

1. Displacement vs. clarification:
   The authors propose that parameters such as status, contact, and social roles can now be explored outside tenor. However, this effectively relocates interpersonal phenomena from context without sufficiently justifying the move. Tenor was originally designed to capture these relational aspects precisely because they are instantiated in interpersonal meaning. By “offloading” them to instantiation or individuation, the authors risk obscuring rather than clarifying the mechanisms by which language realises social relations.

2. Misunderstanding of the realisation hierarchy:
   The claim that tenor can now serve as a “basis for exploring all the rest” suggests a flattening of the stratification model. The realisation hierarchy is not a set of interchangeable modules; strata interact through symbolic abstraction. Treating tenor as a jumping-off point for instantiation, individuation, discourse semantics, and genre conflates levels of analysis and undermines the formal distinction between semantics and context.

3. Analytic overreach without operationalisation:
   The passage gestures toward a massive program of work — co-selection, arenas of cooperation and struggle, temporary speech roles, and verbal actions — yet provides no concrete methodology for how these phenomena would be rigorously instantiated or measured. Without operational clarity, the program risks remaining a conceptual sketch rather than an actionable research framework.

4. Implicit rebranding of established work:
   By framing status, social roles, and community values as “now available” for exploration via instantiation and individuation, the authors implicitly present longstanding sociological and SFL insights as new avenues for their framework. This rebranding risks obscuring the continuity of prior theory while overstating novelty.

Summary:

While the excerpt ambitiously attempts to expand the reach of SFL, it exhibits a drift of tenor from its well-established semiotic grounding. By relocating interpersonal phenomena across strata without fully addressing realisation relations, the authors blur the analytic boundaries that give SFL its explanatory power. The result is a conceptual flattening: rich phenomena of social relations are conceptually available everywhere, yet rigorously instantiated nowhere.