Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 151):
Tenor, the interpersonal dimension of context, has been one of the key means through which we conceptualise the maintenance of our social relations in SFL. But as we noted in Chapter 1, the centrality of the social in our semiotic life has meant that throughout the history of SFL, tenor has been made to do many at times incommensurate things (Doran, Martin & Herrington, 2024). It has been used for example to classify different interpersonal contexts (e.g., Halliday 1978); it has been used to described the people involved and their social relationships, whether stable or temporary roles (e.g. Gregory, 1967; Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Hasan, 2016a, 2016b), it has been used to understand the general dimensions upon which people can relate, including their statuses and affective involvement (e.g., (Eggins & Slade, 1997; Martin, 1992; Poynton, 1990a), Martin 1992, Hasan 2016); and it has been considered in terms of the underlying social values that are imbued in some domain (e.g., (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). In addition, though typically not in writing, tenor is in fact often used as a conversational short-hand in SFL circles for social relations in general.
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The final chapter begins with an apparently modest admission: that tenor has been made to do “many incommensurate things” throughout the history of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The authors catalogue its shifting uses — as the interpersonal dimension of context, as a taxonomy of social relationships, as an index of status and affective involvement, as a shorthand for social relations more broadly. The list is offered as evidence of richness, even vitality. Tenor, we are told, has proven versatile enough to adapt to diverse theoretical and analytic purposes.
But this supposed elasticity is less a sign of theoretical fertility than of cumulative slippage. What the authors describe as a history of adaptation is, in fact, a genealogy of unresolved conflations — above all, the repeated collapse of stratal distinction between context and semantics. Halliday originally introduced tenor as a contextual variable realised by semantics: one dimension of the contextual configuration (alongside field and mode) that language enacts. Yet over time, the term has been stretched to cover interpersonal relations themselves, social values, even affective tone. What began as an abstract variable in a stratified model of semiosis has drifted into the realm of social ontology.
By acknowledging this drift without problematising it, the text converts a theoretical symptom into a rhetorical virtue. “Tenor has been made to do many things,” they say — but the real question is why it was allowed to do so. Each redefinition, from Poynton to Martin to Hasan, quietly relocated tenor within a different ontological register: sometimes as a parameter of context, sometimes as an aspect of discourse semantics, sometimes as a shorthand for social life itself. These recontextualisations are not simply alternative descriptions; they are mutually incompatible construals of the relation between system, instance, and social process.
By smoothing this history into a seamless continuum, the chapter naturalises contradiction as if it were theoretical pluralism. The result is a kind of conceptual amnesty: the reader is invited to accept tenor’s multiplicity as a matter of interpretive flexibility rather than analytic incoherence. But theoretical consistency matters — not for pedantry’s sake, but because without it, we lose the capacity to locate where social meaning is being made. If tenor is sometimes context, sometimes semantics, sometimes society, then the very distinction between semiotic and social dissolves into metaphor.
The irony is that the authors’ own project depends on precisely this looseness. The systems of tuning and spirit rely on tenor functioning as an elastic membrane between linguistic description and social interpretation. That elasticity is not a feature of Halliday’s model — it’s the condition that makes their reinterpretation possible. The cost is that tenor ceases to be a theoretically stable construct and becomes instead a discursive lubricant: the category that makes slippage feel smooth.
In celebrating tenor’s versatility, then, the authors inadvertently complete its conceptual unmooring. What was once a contextual variable has become a floating signifier for the interpersonal itself — a word that gestures toward social texture without naming the stratal work by which it is semiotically realised. Theoretical generosity becomes, in this sense, a form of evasion: the refusal to decide where meaning lives.
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