When Tenor is Reframed as an Affective Toolkit

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 176):

The way we engage with the wider world is heavily dependent on the emotionally charged and values-based ways of thinking that we carry with us at all times and the interactions we have every day. In this book we have aimed to develop a model of tenor as a resource for enacting sociality – i.e., resources for putting forward meanings and reacting to them, resources for connecting meanings into larger complexes of values, and resources for modifying and augmenting the centrality, scope and spirit of these meanings. As we noted in the first chapter, these resources are not the only perspective on tenor afforded by different aspects of SFL.

ChatGPT Comments:

This paragraph crystallises the authors' entire misalignment with the Hallidayan architecture.

1. Tenor is redescribed as affective cognition, not contextual relations

They begin by tying “engagement with the wider world” to “emotionally charged and values-based ways of thinking.”

That is already a departure from the Hallidayan definition:

Tenor is not psychological, affective, or cognitive.

It is the structuring of social roles and relationships in a situation — not how we feel, not our “values-based ways of thinking,” and not our “emotional charge.”

This framing smuggles in interpersonal stance as if it were tenor, collapsing interpersonal semantics (appraisal, attitude, engagement) into the contextual variable itself.

This is the first collapse.

2. They redefine tenor as “a resource for enacting sociality”

This is the core fallacy. Once tenor becomes a resource — that is, a set of linguistic options — they have silently replaced:

• tenor (context)
  with

• interpersonal meaning (semantics)
  or

• even specific grammatical resources (lexicogrammar).

This conflation is not a minor infelicity; it annihilates the very stratum tenor belongs to.

In a stratified model:

• Context is not a resource system.

• Semantics is not a configuration of social relations.

Equating them is a category error masquerading as theoretical innovation.

3. The “resources” they list are not tenor — they are interpersonal semantics

They specify:

• “resources for putting forward meanings and reacting to them”

• “resources for connecting meanings into larger complexes of values”

• “resources for modifying and augmenting the centrality, scope and spirit of these meanings”

These are, transparently:

• discourse semantics of appraisal

• discourse semantics of interpersonal alignment

• lexicogrammatical mood and modality

• textual alignment resources

None of these are tenor.

They are realisations of tenor through interpersonal meaning.

But by calling these “resources of tenor,” they invert the realisation relation. Semantics and lexicogrammar suddenly become tenor, and tenor becomes an interpersonal meaning system.

This is the second collapse.

4. The final sentence gestures at plural perspectives — which only highlights the confusion

“As we noted in the first chapter, these resources are not the only perspective on tenor afforded by different aspects of SFL.”

This is an attempt to soften the theoretical overreach — but instead it reveals it.

If tenor is being construed as:

• affect

• value

• appraisal

• interpersonal semantics

• grammatical systems

• and context all at once

then the only “perspective” left is conceptual fog. What they call “different perspectives” are in fact different strata, and the theory depends on their separation.

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Summary

This passage exemplifies the total internal collapse produced by the “resource” approach: tenor is redefined as an affective-semantic toolkit, semantics is mistaken for context, and the Hallidayan stratification system is quietly inverted under the weight of its own theoretical imprecision.