The Demographic Strawman and the Erasure of Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 177-8):

A third complementary perspective on tenor that needs to be brought into the picture involves the social roles and relations that affect the way we talk (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) – at a relatively local level (e.g., the way we talk as a mother-child pair) or at a much more global level (e.g,. the way we talk in relation to our economic class). In some discussions of tenor in SFL, there is a suggestion that we can simply ‘wire-in’ various demographic features and suggest there is a relatively straight realisational path from, say, ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ to the language being spoken. But what we have tried to show through this book is that being a mother involves a wide range and diverse set of options. In other words, how a mother means is immensely varied and contested and constantly undergoing change. It intersects with the genres, situations, communities and feelings we have at all times.

ChatGPT Comments:

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 177–8) introduce what they call a “third complementary perspective” on tenor. This is the construction of a strawman to justify their deviation from the canonical model.

1. They mischaracterise the Hallidayan position to defend their own

The claim that SFL suggests you can “wire-in” demographic labels (“mother,” “daughter,” “economic class”) and get a deterministic linguistic output is not found in Halliday & Matthiessen or any serious SFL scholarship.

What Halliday actually says (and what their citation pretends to align with) is that tenor is the configuration of social roles and relations in a situation — not a demographic variable, and not a fixed identity category.

The “mother–child pair” is not a demographic; it is a social relation in a situation type.

They replace situational roles with demographic categories and then call the resulting caricature “SFL”.

This inversion allows them to “correct” a model that never existed.

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2. They continue the slippage between contextual relations and semantic realisations

They say:

“being a mother involves a wide range and diverse set of options… how a mother means is immensely varied and contested”

But this is not a claim about tenor.

It is a claim about interpersonal meaning, genre, and community-specific practices.

Tenor is not:

• “how a mother means”

• “the feelings we have at all times”

• “options available to mothers”

Tenor is the situational role configuration being enacted through meaning — not the semantic choices themselves and not the sociocultural variability of identity categories.

By grounding tenor in the variability of identity performance, they collapse context into discourse semantics yet again.

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3. The final sentence completes the conflation

“It intersects with the genres, situations, communities and feelings we have at all times.”

This is precisely backwards.

• Tenor does not “intersect with” genre;
  in their model, genre is realised by tenor (alongside field and mode).

• Tenor does not intersect with feelings;
  feelings are realised by appraisal systems in discourse semantics.

• Tenor does not intersect with communities;
  communities constrain situation types, which condition tenor.

Their formulation treats tenor as a free-floating sociocultural affective force, drifting across strata and systems, touching whatever seems relevant to identity or meaning.

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Summary

This passage exemplifies how the authors protect their “resource” model by attacking a strawman version of SFL: they caricature tenor as demographic determinism, replace contextual relations with identity-performance semantics, and end by dissolving tenor into an amorphous blend of genre, community, and feelings — all while citing Halliday to legitimise a model that directly contradicts his.