The Resource Fallacy — When Realisations Become Resources

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152-3):

Through this book, we have illustrated a broad range of resources that different choices in tenor can draw upon to realise their meanings. In this section we will bring these together to focus on the amount of interpersonal work that goes on in everyday chat. For this, we will explore a brief excerpt from a conversation between mothers of children with disabilities; they are discussing their experiences and, at times, the guilt that is pervasive in motherhood discourse. We will see that in this face-to-face conversation, the mothers draw on a full multimodal suite of resources to realise their interpersonal meanings – they use language across discourse semantic, lexicogrammatical and intonational resources. And they use paralanguage – bringing facial expressions, bodily movements and gestures, as well as their voice quality into the picture. The result is a rich and integrated negotiation of their social relations with the others in the conversation, as well as with those being talked about and the play of voices that are presumed in every instance of language.

ChatGPT Comments:

This section exemplifies the core confusion in the book’s “resource approach to tenor.” The authors describe “resources that different choices in tenor can draw upon to realise their meanings,” implying that tenor functions as a semiotic chooser rather than a contextual variable.

1. The Slippage of Realisation into Resource:

In SFL, tenor is a dimension of context that is realised by interpersonal meaning in language and other semiotic systems. The authors, however, frame the resources that realise tenor (intonation, gesture, voice quality, etc.) as resources of tenor itself.

Such phrasing collapses the hierarchy of symbolic abstraction. It turns the contextual into a linguistic+ stratum and blurs the distinction between realisation (across strata) and instantiation (within strata). The result is a flattening of Halliday’s model under a vaguely modular “resource” logic.

2. The Multimodal Mirage:

The invocation of a “full multimodal suite” implies a harmonious integration of linguistic and paralinguistic modes. Yet by treating these as equivalent “resources” of tenor, the authors dissolve the semiotic boundaries that give each its own realisation plane. What Halliday treats as distinct systems of expression are here rhetorically fused into a single multimodal continuum, producing an illusion of theoretical inclusivity at the cost of stratificational clarity.

3. Repetition of the Empiricist Fallacy:

The appeal to “everyday chat” and “mothers of children with disabilities” functions as a moral warrant for theoretical claims — a familiar rhetorical move in socially oriented linguistics. But the instance here is presented as demonstrative rather than exemplificatory: it is used to confirm a model that already presumes what it claims to reveal. The empirical example is not analytically mobilised to test the theoretical apparatus; it is merely invoked to illustrate its presumed coherence.

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Summary:

The passage’s notion of “tenor drawing on resources” transforms realisations into resources, converting a symbolic dependency into a semiotic capacity. This inversion gives tenor a quasi-agentive status and undermines the hierarchical coherence of the SFL model.