Tenor Unmoored: Conceptual Drift in the Realisation Hierarchy

 Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

The upshot of this is that room has been made for the aspects of language and society that have often been encapsulated within tenor to be conceptualised elsewhere – through other dimensions of the theory. For example the parameters of status and contact (Poynton, 1990a) can be further developed as principles of co-selection and arrangement within instantiation. Social roles, interpersonal relationships and community values can be explored as arenas of cooperation and struggle within individuation – where there is considerable potential for SFL to build upon sociological work by Maton (e.g. 2014), Bernstein (e.g. 1996/2000) and Bourdieu (e.g. 1993)). In addition the temporary speech roles that occur in dialogue, people’s feelings and the play of voices can be investigated through discourse semantics (e.g. Berry, 1981a; Martin & White, 2005). And the range of verbal action that we participate in all the time (such as instructing, planning, narrating etc. (Hasan, 1999)) can be researched through genre. This is of course an enormous program of work – one that cannot be detailed in a single book. But we have aimed to make explicit what we can do with tenor in the realisation hierarchy, and use that, along with field, mode and rich descriptions of language and other semiotic systems, as the basis for exploring all the rest.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage signals the authors’ ambition to broaden the analytical scope of SFL by relocating aspects traditionally handled within tenor to other theoretical dimensions, including instantiation, individuation, discourse semantics, and genre. While this is framed as opening up new avenues for research, several conceptual issues emerge.

1. Displacement vs. clarification:
   The authors propose that parameters such as status, contact, and social roles can now be explored outside tenor. However, this effectively relocates interpersonal phenomena from context without sufficiently justifying the move. Tenor was originally designed to capture these relational aspects precisely because they are instantiated in interpersonal meaning. By “offloading” them to instantiation or individuation, the authors risk obscuring rather than clarifying the mechanisms by which language realises social relations.

2. Misunderstanding of the realisation hierarchy:
   The claim that tenor can now serve as a “basis for exploring all the rest” suggests a flattening of the stratification model. The realisation hierarchy is not a set of interchangeable modules; strata interact through symbolic abstraction. Treating tenor as a jumping-off point for instantiation, individuation, discourse semantics, and genre conflates levels of analysis and undermines the formal distinction between semantics and context.

3. Analytic overreach without operationalisation:
   The passage gestures toward a massive program of work — co-selection, arenas of cooperation and struggle, temporary speech roles, and verbal actions — yet provides no concrete methodology for how these phenomena would be rigorously instantiated or measured. Without operational clarity, the program risks remaining a conceptual sketch rather than an actionable research framework.

4. Implicit rebranding of established work:
   By framing status, social roles, and community values as “now available” for exploration via instantiation and individuation, the authors implicitly present longstanding sociological and SFL insights as new avenues for their framework. This rebranding risks obscuring the continuity of prior theory while overstating novelty.

Summary:

While the excerpt ambitiously attempts to expand the reach of SFL, it exhibits a drift of tenor from its well-established semiotic grounding. By relocating interpersonal phenomena across strata without fully addressing realisation relations, the authors blur the analytic boundaries that give SFL its explanatory power. The result is a conceptual flattening: rich phenomena of social relations are conceptually available everywhere, yet rigorously instantiated nowhere.

Overstated Ambition and Stratification Missteps

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 151):

This focus and diversity of approaches to tenor emphasises the rich and multifaceted nature of language in relation to society – something we need to grasp in all its complexity if we wish to build a truly social semiotic theory (Halliday, 1978; Hodge & Kress, 1988). While this complexity has long been recognised and descriptions formulated, SFL theory itself has not always kept pace. Stemming at least from the early work of Hasan (e.g. 1973) and advanced through its long interaction with social theory (e.g. Bernstein, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1990; Bernstein, 1996/2000), there has been a recognition of the need of an increasingly expansive theory to account for the role of language in society. With the development of dimensions of instantiation (Halliday, 1991a; Matthiessen, 1993), which conceptualises the relation between the systemic potential of language and the instance of text, and individuation (Martin, 2010), which conceptualises the relation between the reservoir of meaning in a language community and the repertoire of an individual (c.f. Bernstein, 1996/2000), we are now in a stronger position to move toward a richer understanding of the interconnection between language and society. We embarked on this book project because we felt that SFL had not yet reached its potential in this regard.

ChatGPT Comments:

The excerpt foregrounds the authors’ ambition to extend SFL toward a richer social semiotic, situating this ambition in terms of “dimensions of instantiation” and “individuation.” While presented as an innovative move, several critical issues arise:

1. Overstatement of novelty
   The authors suggest that prior SFL “has not always kept pace” with the complexity of social relations and that their framework addresses a theoretical gap. Yet much of what they claim as new—particularly the relation of systemic potential to text (instantiation) and the community–individual nexus (individuation)—is already thoroughly theorised in canonical SFL work. Framing it as a corrective overstates novelty and risks implying that Halliday, Hasan, and others were inattentive to social complexity, which is misleading.

2. Misplaced theoretical apparatus
   Although instantiation and individuation are invoked, they are largely absent in the analytic work itself. Instead, the authors operate through a lens of stratification—but here, even this is muddled. Established semantic systems (e.g., Appraisal, Graduation, Engagement) are mislocated from their proper stratum into context as purported “tenor systems”. This conflates strata: patterns of interpersonal meaning within language are treated as features of social context. The result is a conceptual flattening that collapses semantic, contextual, and interpersonal distinctions.

3. Implicit epistemic claim
   The statement “we are now in a stronger position to move toward a richer understanding of the interconnection between language and society” functions as an epistemic assertion about the book’s contribution. While aspirational, it should be tempered: SFL’s existing machinery already addresses links between language, society, and individual construal. The claimed contribution lies more in deployment and emphasis than in a radical conceptual advance.

Summary

This excerpt exemplifies a common rhetorical strategy in theoretical expansions: foregrounding ambition and framing existing constructs as insufficient to justify a new lens. In this case, the ambition is overstated, existing SFL resources are mislocated and renamed, and the promised integration of instantiation and individuation is largely unrealised. Readers should recognise that the novelty is less about conceptual revolution and more about the reconfiguration of established SFL machinery under a new nomenclature.

The Confusion That Invalidates The Hierarchy Of Individuation

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 21-2):

Looking further afield this puts SFL in a stronger position to develop its third hierarchy, individuation (Martin, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2012; Zappavigna & Martin, 2018a, 2018b). A rough outline of the communion at stake is presented in Figure 1.11 as a scale of belonging.

This time round we are looking at the relation of a culture to the personae which member it – in terms of the way semiotic resources are allocated to personae and the way they use these resources to affiliate along a cline ranging through smaller coterie of shared values and on to large ones engendered by bonds associated with what we think of as class, generation, gender, and ethnicity. 

Here we can consider how choices in the realisation hierarchy and principles of instantiation are distributed across different communities, social fields of practice and channels of communication, as well as how they are used to create, maintain, collaborate within and struggle over these communities, social fields of practice and channels of communication.

Reviewer Comments:

To be clear, individuation is the differentiation of the meaning potential of a community ('reservoir') into the meaning potential of individuals ('repertoires'). As such, it is the elaboration of different types of meaning potential.

However, the hierarchy of individuation in Figure 1.11 confuses this elaboration of meaning potential with an extension ('affiliation') of meaners ('personae which member'); for 'association' as a type of extension, see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 146).

ChatGPT Comments:

Thank you, Chris — this is a precise and necessary critique. The passage from Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025) does indeed conflate the individuation of meaning potential with the affiliation of persons, resulting in a significant theoretical muddle. Your clarification — that individuation is an elaboration of potential, not an extension of personae — is exactly right. Below is a developed version of the critique that builds on yours and expands it in line with SFL theory:

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Review Critique: Misrepresenting the Hierarchy of Individuation

The authors here mischaracterise individuation by confusing two distinct semiotic logics: (1) the elaboration of meaning potential, and (2) the extension of social belonging. Individuation, properly understood within the SFL tradition (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999; Matthiessen, 2007), refers to the differentiation of the meaning potential of a community (a reservoir) into the more specific meaning potential of individuals (their repertoires). That is, it concerns the cline from collective to personal meaning potential — a relation of elaboration, not extension.

By contrast, the model offered here (and especially in Figure 1.11) reframes individuation as a matter of “personae which member [a culture]” and the “coteries of shared values” they affiliate with. This redefinition shifts the focus from semiotic potential to social identification, effectively substituting a theory of affiliation (in the sense of social alignment) for a theory of individualisation (in the sense of potential specification). The result is a conceptual slippage between:

• individuation as a semiotic process operating on meaning potential, and

• social extension or association as a process operating on personae.

This conflation overlooks a crucial distinction in SFL between:

• elaboration (where an element adds specificity within a semiotic system), and

• extension or association (where an element expands the boundaries of the system or links it to others).

As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 146) make clear, association — including affiliative belonging — is a kind of extension, not elaboration. When this logic is misapplied to individuation, the model shifts from describing the emergence of differentiated repertoires to describing the structuring of social groups, which is better accounted for under field, tenor, or affiliation and ideology, not individuation.

Moreover, by construing individuation as something that happens to personae who "member" a culture, rather than as a perspectival cline from collective to individual meaning potential, the model risks treating individuals as participants in social categories rather than as semiotic systems-in-development. This conflates the semiotic and the sociological — again blurring levels of abstraction and undermining the integrity of the stratified model.

In short: the authors substitute a theory of semiotic individuation with a theory of social bonding, which, while related in application, operates on a different semiotic axis. The result is a theoretically confused hierarchy that disorganises the role of individuation in the SFL architecture, and misleads the reader as to the nature of meaning potential itself.