The Resource Illusion: When Tenor Pretends to Realise Genre

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 166):

Another way that this can be done is by looking from ‘above’ – in terms of how tenor, field and mode resources realise genres. It is to this we turn in the next section.

In the previous section, we saw that tenor resources work to build meaning within biographical recounts, and that the prosodies of feeling involved can parallel those found in story genres. This has been a recurring theme throughout the book – namely the role of tenor resources in realising different genres.

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By confusing tenor with language throughout this book, the authors are able to say a stratum of genre is realised by tenor, thereby ignoring the meaning of tenor as social relations — which would make the absurdity of the claim more obvious.

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This passage exposes the full consequence of the “resource” approach: the erasure of stratification itself.

By treating tenor as a bundle of resources, rather than as a contextual variable that construes the social relations of a situation, the authors position it as if it were a linguistic system. Once that slippage occurs, it becomes grammatically possible — though theoretically incoherent — to claim that “tenor resources realise genres.”

In Halliday’s canonical model, however, genre is not realised by tenor. Genre is the organisation of discourse as a text type, register, which realises context type (field, tenor, and mode). Each stratum functions as a distinct order of abstraction linked by realisation — not by resemblance or adjacency.

The moment we redefine tenor as a set of “language resources,” we collapse this architecture. The realisation hierarchy is replaced by a recursive “stack” of resources — where everything realises everything else in a vague upward drift. The theoretical precision that once distinguished SFL’s stratified model of language and context is dissolved into a fuzzy continuum of “resources” doing unspecified “realising.”

In short, this is not merely an imprecise formulation; it is a category error. By confusing tenor with language, the authors create an illusion in which a stratum of context appears to realise a stratum of text type. What has been lost is the relational integrity of the system itself — the very thing that made SFL’s theory of stratification both powerful and coherent.