When Integration Collapses Distinction

 Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 166):

As significant work on affiliation in SFL has emphasised in recent years (e.g., Logi and Zappavigna 2022), interpersonal meaning (in our case tenor) does not occur on its own. We do not just support or reject in general, but support or reject specific things. To develop a full understanding of how texts manage to build their meaning, it is important that we come to grips with the interaction between tenor, field and mode.

ChatGPT Comments:

At first glance, the passage simply acknowledges the obvious: tenor, field, and mode interrelate in meaning-making. But the phrasing — “interpersonal meaning (in our case tenor)” and “tenor, field and mode interact” — subtly collapses the relation between strata and the relation among variables within a stratum.

1. Conflation of metafunction and context variable
   By equating interpersonal meaning directly with tenor, the authors fuse metafunction (a semantic dimension of language) with context (a stratal level above language). In Halliday’s model, tenor is the contextual correlate of interpersonal semantics — not the same thing. To say “interpersonal meaning (in our case tenor)” erases the symbolic abstraction that defines stratification: the step between semantics (meaning in language) and context (meaning realised by language).

2. Misuse of “interaction” among variables
   When they call for understanding “the interaction between tenor, field and mode,” they invoke a modular metaphor again — one of variables acting upon one another. But in Hallidayan terms, these are complementary dimensions of context that jointly configure situation type. They don’t “interact” like mechanical systems; they co-instantiate through their realisation in semantics.

3. Affiliation as further slippage
   The citation to “affiliation” (Logi & Zappavigna 2022) reinforces this drift: affiliation is treated as an interpersonal process that somehow requires tenor’s “interaction” with field. Yet affiliation, properly theorised, concerns social alignment and value-sharing at a different order of abstraction — it is not evidence that context variables blend, but that their semiotic realisations co-pattern in discourse.

---

Summary

The paragraph exemplifies a pattern that has run throughout the book: what begins as a call for “integration” of meaning dimensions ends up erasing the very differentiation that makes integration possible. The interdependence of field, tenor, and mode is not the problem; the problem is treating that interdependence as if it were interaction between modules rather than realisation across strata.