When Context Variables Become Regions of Linguistic Meaning

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 161):

In the next section we will look ‘around’ – in terms of how tenor engages with adjacent meanings, focusing in particular on another register variable field. This allows us to see that it is not just our social meanings that are being negotiated at all times, but also the ways we construe phenomena (alongside of course the ways we organise our information).

Tenor is not of course the only region of meaning that we draw upon in our lives. It gives value to things and negotiates our social world; but it does this in conjunction with other resources. These include resources for organising our experiential world (which we describe in SFL in terms of field) and resources for organising text itself (which we describe in terms of mode). In this section, we consider the interplay of tenor and field as values are invested in events and things.

ChatGPT Comments:

1. Misconstrual of context variables as “regions of meaning”
   The claim that “tenor is not … the only region of meaning that we draw upon” reifies contextual variables (field, tenor, mode) as if they were semantic regions — as though “tenor” and “field” were domains of meaning within the semantic system. But in canonical SFL, these are variables of context, not regions of meaning itself:

   • Field refers to the social activity or what’s going on.

   • Tenor refers to the social relations among participants.

   • Mode refers to the role of language in the situation.

   These are dimensions of contextual configuration, which is realised by the semantic system — not “regions” of meaning that interact within language. By treating field, tenor, and mode as internal to the meaning plane, the authors blur the critical boundary between context and semantics, thereby collapsing the realisation hierarchy that gives SFL its explanatory depth.

2. Reduction of realisation to “interplay”
   The phrase “interplay of tenor and field as values are invested in events and things” again recasts symbolic abstraction (realisation) as a kind of interaction or cooperation between “resources.” This makes contextual variables appear to be actors operating at the same level as the semantics they condition. In proper systemic terms, there is no “interplay” between field and tenor as variables — rather, there is a contextual configuration that jointly constrains semantic selection.

3. Confusion between context and semantics in evaluative construal
   The idea that “tenor gives value to things” is doubly confused.

   • First, tenor does not give value; it is the contextual configuration of social relations that conditions how interpersonal systems (such as appraisal) assign value.

   • Second, the excerpt slides between evaluation (a semantic process) and social value (a contextual condition). This semantic–contextual slippage reappears throughout the book: “values” are alternately treated as meanings made in discourse and as social valuations that pre-exist discourse. The lack of clear stratified anchoring leads to equivocation between symbolic and sociological sense.

4. Residual modular framing
   Despite claiming to move “beyond modularity,” the authors retain the modular logic: tenor, field, and mode are treated as interacting “regions” with distinct responsibilities. This is the very problem Martin introduced when he reframed context as a register stratum; the same confusion persists here under the rhetoric of “interplay” and “engagement.”

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Summary

This passage extends the earlier slippage by turning context variables into quasi-semantic modules that “give value,” “organise text,” and “interplay” as if they were systems within language. The result is a hybrid model where context both produces meaning and draws on it — an impossible bidirectionality that erases the asymmetry of symbolic realisation.

In short: the excerpt demonstrates not the “interplay” of field and tenor, but the collapse of their theoretical distinction.