The Resource Fallacy — When Realisations Become Resources

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152-3):

Through this book, we have illustrated a broad range of resources that different choices in tenor can draw upon to realise their meanings. In this section we will bring these together to focus on the amount of interpersonal work that goes on in everyday chat. For this, we will explore a brief excerpt from a conversation between mothers of children with disabilities; they are discussing their experiences and, at times, the guilt that is pervasive in motherhood discourse. We will see that in this face-to-face conversation, the mothers draw on a full multimodal suite of resources to realise their interpersonal meanings – they use language across discourse semantic, lexicogrammatical and intonational resources. And they use paralanguage – bringing facial expressions, bodily movements and gestures, as well as their voice quality into the picture. The result is a rich and integrated negotiation of their social relations with the others in the conversation, as well as with those being talked about and the play of voices that are presumed in every instance of language.

ChatGPT Comments:

This section exemplifies the core confusion in the book’s “resource approach to tenor.” The authors describe “resources that different choices in tenor can draw upon to realise their meanings,” implying that tenor functions as a semiotic chooser rather than a contextual variable.

1. The Slippage of Realisation into Resource:

In SFL, tenor is a dimension of context that is realised by interpersonal meaning in language and other semiotic systems. The authors, however, frame the resources that realise tenor (intonation, gesture, voice quality, etc.) as resources of tenor itself.

Such phrasing collapses the hierarchy of symbolic abstraction. It turns the contextual into a linguistic+ stratum and blurs the distinction between realisation (across strata) and instantiation (within strata). The result is a flattening of Halliday’s model under a vaguely modular “resource” logic.

2. The Multimodal Mirage:

The invocation of a “full multimodal suite” implies a harmonious integration of linguistic and paralinguistic modes. Yet by treating these as equivalent “resources” of tenor, the authors dissolve the semiotic boundaries that give each its own realisation plane. What Halliday treats as distinct systems of expression are here rhetorically fused into a single multimodal continuum, producing an illusion of theoretical inclusivity at the cost of stratificational clarity.

3. Repetition of the Empiricist Fallacy:

The appeal to “everyday chat” and “mothers of children with disabilities” functions as a moral warrant for theoretical claims — a familiar rhetorical move in socially oriented linguistics. But the instance here is presented as demonstrative rather than exemplificatory: it is used to confirm a model that already presumes what it claims to reveal. The empirical example is not analytically mobilised to test the theoretical apparatus; it is merely invoked to illustrate its presumed coherence.

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Summary:

The passage’s notion of “tenor drawing on resources” transforms realisations into resources, converting a symbolic dependency into a semiotic capacity. This inversion gives tenor a quasi-agentive status and undermines the hierarchical coherence of the SFL model. 

Misreading Halliday’s Metaphor of Perspective

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

The following sections provide an overview of this redistribution of theoretical and descriptive responsibility. First, we look ‘below’ – at how we realise tenor through language and paralanguage such as voice quality and gesture. The goal will be to show just how much interpersonal work is done through linguistic and paralinguistic resources in our talk. Next we look ‘around’ – at how tenor cooperates with field and mode to organise our texts. And then we will look ‘above’ – to see how our model of tenor helps us understand the genres used to organise our social life. To round out the book, we look across – to other dimensions of the theory that we are only just beginning to explore and suggest some avenues for future research. This is our vision of what a truly social and semiotic theory of language in context needs to encompass.

ChatGPT Comments:

This section tries to dramatise its theoretical stance through the spatial metaphors of “below,” “around,” and “above,” but these metaphors are directly borrowed — and misunderstood — from Halliday & Matthiessen’s Construing Experience through Meaning (1999: 504)¹. The difference is crucial.

In Halliday & Matthiessen, the “from above / from below / from roundabout” triad articulates perspectival orientation across strata — a way of describing how each level in a stratified semiotic functions as both content for the stratum below and expression for the stratum above. It is not a directional metaphor for a programme of research, nor a tour-guide map of the theory. It expresses the logic of symbolic abstraction — how meaning is recursively realised through successive strata.

By contrast, in Doran, Martin & Zappavigna, these same terms are repurposed to describe an itinerary through the model — “first below,” “then around,” “then above,” “finally across” — as though the theory were a landscape of modules to be traversed. This move collapses the logical dimension of realisation into the narrative dimension of exposition, turning what in Halliday is an ontological principle into a rhetorical flourish. The effect is to misrepresent stratification as spatial adjacency rather than symbolic hierarchy.

So while Halliday’s metaphors describe how meaning is construed across strata (a vertical logic of expression and content), the authors’ version describes where they plan to look next (a horizontal logic of survey). The two are not commensurable.

 ¹ Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 504):

A stratified semiotic defines three perspectives, which (following the most familiar metaphor) we refer to as 'from above', 'from roundabout', and 'from below': looking at a given stratum from above means treating it as the expression of some content, looking at it from below means treating it as the content of some expression, while looking at it from roundabout means treating it in the context of (i.e. in relation to other features of) its own stratum. 

Tenor Does Not Walk Alone — But Neither Does It Float Free

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

This means that when negotiating social relations, tenor does not walk alone. This is our focus in this closing chapter. Tenor is realised through an enormous array of linguistic, paralinguistic, and multimodal resources; it works closely with resources of field and mode; and it realises the sets of genres we use to get along with our everyday life. The following sections provide an overview of this redistribution of theoretical and descriptive responsibility. 

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This invites the misunderstanding that tenor is a module that interacts with other modules.

[2] In this book, the 'enormous array of linguistic, paralinguistic, and multimodal resources' that realise tenor have been mistaken for tenor itself.

[3] To be clear, the absurd claim here is that social relations between interlocutors realise story genres, like narratives and anecdotes. This misunderstanding is inherent in Martin's model of stratification, which locates a stratum of genre above the contextual stratum of field, tenor and mode, which is rebranded as register. Rebranding field, tenor and mode as register confuses context type with the register of language that realises it. Martin's 'genres' are text types (registers) that realise types of culturally valued rhetorical mode (narratives etc.), and whose structures are semantic, and vary according to the mode that the given text type realises. 

When Martin (1992) first stratified context as his genre and his register, he correlated genre with context of culture (potential), and his register with context of situation (instance). The confusion here was twofold. First it confused the cline of instantiation (potential-instance) with stratification (symbolic abstraction); and second it confused instance (context of situation) with systemic potential (field, tenor and mode). Other confusions follow from these multiple interrelated misunderstandings.

[4] This is misleading. There is no redistribution of theoretical and descriptive responsibility in the case of relations between tenor and language, because this is consistent with Halliday's model of stratification; and there is no redistribution in the case of relations between tenor and genre, because this is consistent with Martin's model of stratification.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage attempts to position tenor within a broader ecology of meaning, acknowledging its interdependence with field, mode, language, and other semiotic systems. While this framing sounds balanced, it conceals deep conceptual confusion about stratification, realisation, and the role of tenor within systemic functional linguistics.

1. Tenor misconstrued as a module rather than a stratal system.
The phrase “tenor does not walk alone” anthropomorphises tenor and implies a model of interacting components rather than hierarchically related strata. This reflects a persistent misinterpretation—traceable to Martin’s modular conception of context (1992)—in which strata are imagined as neighbouring systems that “interface” rather than as ordered levels of symbolic abstraction. In Halliday’s canonical model, strata are not parallel domains in dialogue, but nested levels of semiotic realisation: context is realised by semantics, which is realised by lexicogrammar, and so forth. Treating tenor as an “interacting module” flattens this hierarchy and obscures how language construes social relations rather than merely interacting with them.

2. The resources that realise tenor are mistaken for tenor itself.
The linguistic, paralinguistic, and multimodal resources are not tenor—they are the means through which tenor is realised. The confusion is structural: by relocating systems such as Spirit, Stakes, and Scope from semantics into context, the book effectively dissolves the stratal distinction.

3. Misplaced claims about realisation and genre.
The claim that tenor “realises the sets of genres we use to get along with everyday life” reverses the direction of realisation. In Halliday’s model, genre (as rhetorical mode or contextual pattern) models culture-level meanings—it is not realised by tenor. In Martin’s revision, where “genre” is elevated above register (redefining field, tenor, and mode as “register variables”), this reversal becomes systematic. The result is a confused ontology in which interpersonal relations between speakers are said to realise genre structures such as narratives or anecdotes—a category mistake that collapses the distinction between interpersonal relation and textual form.

4. The myth of “redistribution.”
The authors conclude that there has been a “redistribution of theoretical and descriptive responsibility.” This phrase disguises the fact that what has occurred is not redistribution but reallocation through misunderstanding. Tenor’s relations to language remain unchanged in Halliday’s stratified model, and its relations to genre remain unchanged in Martin’s modular model. The purported “redistribution” is therefore rhetorical: an attempt to legitimise a conflated framework that merges context, semantics, and text-type under a single analytic banner.

Summary:
The passage exemplifies the cumulative effect of misreading stratification as modular interaction, realisation as correlation, and context as an aggregate of semiotic resources. The result is an elegant-sounding but incoherent rebranding of long-settled distinctions within SFL. Far from “mobilising the full power” of the theory, the authors have fragmented it into loosely connected “modules” whose relationships are asserted rather than theorised.

The Paralinguistic Projection: When Warmth Replaces Architecture

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 146):

In spoken language, voice quality and facial paralanguage are key carriers of spirit. A relatively high-pitched, loud voice with a smile will tend to indicate warmth, no matter what is being said, while a relatively low and soft voice with a narrow range of pitch and a frown will tend to indicate warning (or negative spirit in general) (Ariztimuño, Drefyus, & Moore, 2022; Ngo et al., 2022). In written language these voice quality features are often replaced by other paralinguistic features, including emoji as shown above. Punctuation is also a key resource in this regard, though this seems to vary by generation. For a millennial such as the first author for example, the following three text messages from a parent have very different spirit.

(64) Ok!

(65) Ok

(66) Ok.

The first is said, as it were, with a smile – the exclamation mark indicating a warm, happy response. The second, without any punctuation, is relatively neutral. The third with a full stop indicates something is wrong – whatever was said previously means they are now in trouble (whether or not the parent intends this!).

🧩 ChatGPT Comments:

This passage enacts a subtle but telling confusion between modality of expression and mode of meaning. The authors collapse paralinguistic phenomena (voice quality, gesture, emoji) into a single continuum of “spirit,” as though all were functional equivalents distributed across channels. Yet this move erases the semiotic distinctness of each medium — and with it, the stratified architecture of meaning that Halliday’s model was built to protect.

First, the leap from voice quality and facial paralanguage in speech to emoji and punctuation in writing assumes a direct substitutive relation — as if emoji were “replacements” for prosody. But prosody and punctuation do not occupy homologous positions in the semiotic hierarchy. Prosody is a phonological realisation of interpersonal meaning within spoken language; punctuation is a graphological convention governing textual cohesion and rhythm in writing. Emoji, by contrast, are iconic adjuncts drawn from the visual modality — not linguistic realisations but co-deployed images that stand in relation to language rather than within it. To claim these three operate as equivalent carriers of “spirit” is therefore to conflate phonology, graphology, and imagery — three distinct semiotic systems.

Second, the authors’ casual notion that the “Ok!” / “Ok” / “Ok.” triad expresses different spirit values reveals a slippage from empirical description to idiolectal intuition. These differences are indeed conventionally interpretable in digital discourse, but their interpretation depends on sociolectal norms, not paralinguistic universals. To treat this as generational (“for a millennial such as the first author”) is to further mistake cultural patterning for linguistic encoding — an indexical effect is treated as a semantic system. This is precisely the kind of category error that occurs when contextual correlates of meaning are mislocated within language.

Finally, the authors invoke “negative spirit” as though it were a measurable interpersonal feature — but “spirit,” as they deploy it, is neither a system nor a stratum. It is an experiential metaphor for the affective ambience of a message, not a semiotic function in its own right. The result is a flattening of ontological depth: language, paralanguage, and context are treated as interchangeable vectors of tone, all carrying the same mysterious essence called “spirit.”

In short, this passage exemplifies the paralinguistic projection error — projecting features of embodied performance onto writing, then mistaking their correlates for linguistic functions. It repeats the earlier stratification error (collapsing semantics into context) and compounds it with a modality conflation (collapsing sound, writing, and image).

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Reflective Coda: The Soft Ontology of Feeling

Across this chapter, the same pattern recurs: a gradual erosion of semiotic boundaries in the name of empathy. Each time “spirit” or “tone” is invoked, distinctions between language, image, and context blur — as if warmth of feeling required ontological softness. But empathy does not arise from flattening structure; it arises from inhabiting difference. When we conflate strata to explain “feeling,” we lose not only theoretical clarity but the very relational depth that meaning depends upon. 

The Shout of the System: When Paralinguistic Emphasis Masquerades as Social Risk

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 139):

In the case of motherhood guilt, a lot of staking work is undertaken against a background of oriented and positioned meanings about what it is to be a 'good' mother. An example is (31) which likens, through a token-value relation, self-care to the state of being a good mom.

(31) I always forget that self care DOES equate to being a good mom. #momguilt #iForget #poor[Name] #moremomguilt

The ALL CAPS font (DOES) raises the stakes of the proposition by both acting as a form of emphasis and as a paralinguistic shouting token. The move to raise the stakes also suggests a direct challenge (rejection and opposition) to an implicated perspective – that is, that a bad mother takes care of their own needs. The linguistic intensification ('always') also raises the stakes of the user's confession ('I always forget...'). Both instances of escalating stakes function in conjunction with the string of hashtags that explicitly mark the relevant values under scrutiny – the guilt or not of mothers and whether or not they remember their place in the order of things.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage exposes a recurrent problem in the authors’ treatment of “staking”: the conflation of semiotic intensity with social consequence. The example of (31) is described as raising “stakes” through ALL CAPS and linguistic intensifiers such as always. Yet these are resources of graduation—they scale affect or engagement within language, not risk within context. To equate emphasis with consequence is to confuse the semiotic amplification of commitment with the social evaluation of value.

In SFL, stakes—if construed as part of tenor—must refer to shifts in the relative social significance of a move within a given community’s network of meanings. A proposition typed in capitals does not become high-stakes by orthographic volume alone; it becomes high-stakes only if it threatens or reinforces the value structure of the field or community in which it circulates. In (31), the risk lies not in the typography but in the challenge to normative ideals of maternal self-abnegation.

By treating paralinguistic shouting as a proxy for social risk, the analysis collapses the distinction between graphological realisation and contextual enactment. What’s at stake is not how loudly something is said, but what order of meaning that utterance contests. 

Collapsing Scope into Identity: The Limits of Individualising vs. Collectivising

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 134):

Tuning is the region of interpersonal meaning concerned with how a position is pitched as more or less loaded, as more or less friendly, and as more or less relevant to particular personae or communities. In this section we will consider resources for modifying the TENDERED and RENDERED meanings being put forward in a text in terms of:

• SCOPE: [individualised] « [collectivised]
• STAKES : [higher] « [lower]
• SPIRIT: [warming] « [warning]

We begin with SCOPE, which is concerned with the extent of a position's ambit. A key dimension is how broad or narrow the group is that is being sourced or convoked. SCOPE is a clined system ranging from narrower [individualise] to broader [collectivise] options. This kind of distinction can be realised linguistically through number (e.g., we all vs I) and more broadly through quantification of people within the discourse semantic system of GRADUATION (Martin & White, 2005), as well as through various membership categorisation devices (Schegloff, 2007) which function to flag group association. Paralinguistically, it can be realised through shifts in loudness from a whisper (individualising) to a yell (collectivising), body orientation and eye gaze to an individual or a collective, the breadth or narrowness of deictic pointing – using, say, the pinky finger to point (individualising) or the whole hand (collectivising); (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2021; Ngo et al., 2022; Van Leeuwen, 1999). 

In work on identity and iconisation, (Tann, 2010a; Tann, 2010b; Tann, 2013) draws on membership categorisation devices to specify three kinds of association that construe belonging relevant to SCOPING:

• Categorisation – classifying by type; e.g., Western, Muslim, middle-class etc.
• Collectivisation – generating oppositions between groups; e.g., us v them, stay-at-home mothers v working mothers, conservatives v liberals, Australians v refugees etc.
• Spatialisation – classifying via place; e.g., Aussies, Kiwis, Yankees etc.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage introduces tuning as a “region” of interpersonal meaning and narrows immediately to the question of scope. On the surface, scope is defined as a cline running from individualised to collectivised meanings, and a series of linguistic and paralinguistic examples are offered to illustrate this span. But closer inspection reveals several difficulties.

First, the very definition of “region” is left unclear. The term functions as a spatial metaphor rather than a precise theoretical category, raising questions about how tuning relates to established strata, systems, or networks within the model. Scope itself is then described as a “clined system,” but the range of phenomena brought under this cline—number, deixis, membership categorisation, volume, gesture—do not necessarily belong to the same semiotic order. The result is a catalogue of heterogeneous examples forced into a single continuum.

Second, the paralinguistic illustrations stretch the concept. Whispering versus yelling or pointing with a pinky versus the whole hand may display inclusion or exclusion, but whether such embodied practices operate as part of the same “system” as linguistic collectivisation is far from obvious. Without a stronger account of how these resources integrate with language proper, the taxonomy risks over-extension.

Third, the treatment of membership categorisation raises a deeper issue. Labelling groups as “Western,” “Muslim,” “conservative,” or “refugee” is not simply a matter of scoping ambit; it is also a matter of invoking ideologically loaded categories. In treating these equally as scoping devices, the framework risks flattening ideological evaluation into neutralised semiotic description, when in fact these categories operate at the intersection of meaning and value.

Finally, the eclectic theoretical sourcing—Schegloff, Kress, Van Leeuwen, Tann—points to a further problem: the framework here is less a principled integration than a patchwork. Different traditions are loosely stitched together under the rubric of scope without an account of how they belong to one coherent system of interpersonal meaning.

In short, while the intention is to define scope as a systematic dimension of tuning, what emerges instead is a loose assemblage of examples and analogies. Rather than clarifying the concept, the attempt to codify scope risks obscuring the very semiotic distinctions it seeks to capture.

Convoking as Catalogue, Not System

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 98, 102):

Convoking involves bringing people or a community into a position by virtue of directing meanings toward them… The most explicit means of convoking involves the use of Vocatives to direct a position to someone. …

ChatGPT Comments:

Although the table expands beyond vocatives to include pronouns, imperatives, clause roles, and multimodal cues, “convoking” remains underspecified as a system. In canonical SFL, these realisations are distributed across distinct resources:

• Vocatives and pronouns belong to MOOD.

• Imperatives enact MOOD and speech function.

• Receivers in clauses are part of transitivity.

• Gaze and body orientation fall outside language, into multimodal interaction systems.

By grouping them under a single category, the authors risk collapsing analytically distinct resources into a vague umbrella. The effect is less a new system than a catalogue of ways participants can be addressed.

Furthermore, the system status of “convoking” is not specified: what is the paradigmatic opposition? What is the range of delicacy? Without this, it is hard to see convoking as more than a descriptive label. In SFL terms, the interpersonal orientation to audience is already modelled through speech function, MOOD, engagement, and appraisal. Positioning it as an independent system obscures these existing theoretical distinctions and risks redundancy.

Rebranding Mood and Engagement as Context: A Stratificational Misstep

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 76-7):

As the examples above suggest, the potential realisations of purview options are diverse – for one thing, purview is very sensitive to phonological and paralinguistic (‘body language’) choices (Halliday & Greaves, 2008; Ngo et al., 2022). For example, like for wh- interrogatives, a distinction between the falling tone 1 and rising tone 2 on a declarative would often distinguish assert from pose.

(44) Kristy: //1 I don’t want to go away from you // assert/proposition

(45) Mother: //2 you don't want to go to Dee’s?// pose/proposition

Similarly, an open posture, supine hand position and/or decentred facial features would typically lessen speaker purview paralinguistically (what (Ngo et al., 2022, p. 144) calls paralinguistic expansion).

ChatGPT Comments:

In their discussion of tenor, Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 76–7) introduce the system of purview, which they locate explicitly at the level of context. At first glance, this seems like a straightforward extension of systemic modelling into new semiotic terrain. But if we look more closely, the theoretical footing becomes much less secure.

The problem is that the categories instantiated in purview are not distinctive features of context at all. Rather, they are drawn wholesale from systems that have long been established at lower strata:

• mood at the level of grammar

• engagement at the level of semantics

In other words, what is presented as a system of context is in fact a duplication of grammar and semantics under a new label.

This move creates several problems:

1. Redundancy. Mood and engagement already provide powerful accounts of how interactional stance is construed and realised. Relabelling these same oppositions as “purview” does no additional theoretical work — it simply duplicates categories already accounted for elsewhere in the stratification.

2. Circularity. If purview is said to be realised by tone, gesture, hand orientation, and so on, we immediately face a problem: mood and engagement are already realised by these same resources. The theory starts chasing its own tail.

3. Stratificational incoherence. In the canonical Hallidayan model, context is a higher-order semiotic stratum, realised by semantics. Its function is to model the situation type, not to repeat semantic or grammatical systems in disguise. By shifting mood and engagement “up” into tenor, context ceases to be an independent plane of abstraction. It collapses into a duplicate description of what is already present in the strata below.

What is at stake here is not just terminological neatness, but the integrity of the architecture itself. If context can be populated by rebranded grammatical and semantic categories, then the delicate explanatory hierarchy of SFL is undermined. Context no longer provides a theory of situation, but becomes an echo chamber of lower-level systems.

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That’s the kernel of it: the “purview” system does not open up new explanatory ground at the level of tenor; it merely duplicates existing accounts, blurring the very stratificational distinctions on which SFL depends.

Reviewer Comments:

See Problems With The Authors' Analysis Of Paralinguistic Engagement

Enforcing the ‘Shared’: Managerialist Normativity in Everyday Interaction

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 70-1):

Kristy’s mother uses such resources to nuance her meanings effectively. This is illustrated when she attempts to bring Kristy around by illustrating that she does in fact like going away from her mother sometimes. In her first move during this stretch she uses a tag at the end of her statement with reversed polarity (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), which suggests that she expects Kristy to agree.

Put another way, Kristy’s mother sets up her message in a way that shows Kristy that she expects these meanings will likely be shared (what Hasan 1989 calls a reassuring confirmation move). This in turn positions Kristy to support them as the default, making it more socially risky for her to reject them. Whether this expectation of shared meanings is done in a ‘loving’ way (what in Chapter 4 we call warming), or in a somewhat threatening way (what we call warning), depends on both the intonation and the voice quality of the message (van Leeuwen 1999), plus other paralinguistic features (Ngo et al., 2022). If spoken in a higher pitch with rising tone (tone 2, (Halliday & Greaves, 2008)), this is likely a warming message, said with love. If said on lower pitch with falling tone (tone 1), this is likely a more threatening message as a warning (‘agree or else’). Nonetheless, in both cases, the expectation is that Kristy will support what her mother says – which she of course does. The fact that she starts to come around from this point on and negotiates openly with her mother (rather than crying more or losing her temper) suggests that this was said in a warming manner.

 

ChatGPT Comments:

1. Normative Social Generalisations

The passage risks slipping from description into normative assumption in a few places:

• The framing of the mother’s move as “warming” vs. “warning” imports a moral–affective judgement about interactional roles. It assumes that “warming” is benevolent and “warning” is coercive, without interrogating the cultural and situational variability in how such tonal cues are construed.

• The claim that Kristy “of course” supports the mother’s statement sets up a universalised expectation about child–parent interactions. This blends an empirical observation with a normative stance about what children should or would naturally do.

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2. Cognitive–Intentional Framing

The passage repeatedly implies cognitive intention and shared mental states:

• “She expects Kristy to agree” frames the utterance in terms of internalised cognition and prediction, without evidence from Kristy’s mother’s own construal.

• The “expectation of shared meanings” is treated as a mental state rather than a semiotic–contextual phenomenon. In systemic description, this could be recast in terms of how the exchange is structured (e.g. the proposition is framed as given) rather than importing mentalist assumptions about the mother’s mind.

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3. Conflation of Prosodic Features with Social Function

• The tonal and paralinguistic descriptions are given direct causal links to interpersonal stance (“said with love” vs. “agree or else”) that oversimplify the relationship between prosody and meaning.

• There’s no acknowledgement that rising tone (tone 2) and falling tone (tone 1) can have different interpersonal effects depending on register or the interactants’ shared history. The inference that a specific tone equals a specific affect risks reifying prosodic “meanings” across contexts.

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In short:

The analysis:

• drifts into normative generalisations about interpersonal roles;

• adopts a cognitive–intentional explanatory frame not required by systemic description;

• over-specifies the mapping between prosody and affect without contextual justification.

Problems With The Authors' 'Resource Guide'

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 26-7):

As will be clear form this introduction, tenor is one module in the overall model of language and social context assumed here. Because of its position in the architecture of SFL (between genre and language and alongside field and mode) we draw on a wide range of descriptions of English – some of which may not be familiar to readers. Below we note some useful introductory resources for key descriptions, as well as the key reference books for each area.

Paralanguage
Martin, J. R. & M. Zappavigna (2019) Embodied meaning: a systemic functional perspective on body language. Functional Linguistics 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40554-018-0065-9 

Ngo, T., Hood, S., Martin, J.R., Painter, C., Smith B.A. and Zappavigna, M. (2022) Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics. London: Bloomsbury. …

Discourse semantics
Chapters 2 (appraisal) and 7 (negotiation) of Martin and Rose (2007). Working with Discourse: Meaning beyond the Clause. London: Continuum. 

Martin, J.R. (1992) English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] To be clear, the misunderstanding of strata and metafunctions as modules has persisted since Martin (1992: 390, 488):

Each of the presentations of linguistic text forming resources considered above adopted a modular perspective. As far as English Text is concerned this has two main dimensions: stratification, and within strata, metafunction. …

The problem addressed is a fundamental concern of modular models of semiosis — namely, once modules are distinguished, how do they interface? What is the nature of the conversation among components?

[2] For a meticulous review of Martin & Zappavigna (2019) that identifies many of its misunderstandings of SFL Theory, see Martin & Zappavigna's Model Of Paralanguage.

[3] For a meticulous review of Ngo et al. that identifies many of its misunderstandings of SFL Theory, see Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics.

[4] For a meticulous review of Martin and Rose (2007) that identifies many of its misunderstandings of SFL Theory, see Working With Discourse: Meaning Beyond The Clause.

[5] For a meticulous review of Martin (1992) that identifies many of its misunderstandings of SFL Theory, see English Text: System And Structure.

The Models Of Discourse Semantics And Paralanguage In This Book

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 9, 10):

For language, this book assumes a model of language comprising the strata of phonology (or graphology for written language or the embodied signing of sign languages), lexicogrammar and discourse semantics (Figure 1.3).

We call the most abstract stratum of language discourse semantics, not semantics, to emphasise its orientation to larger text patterns (Martin, 1992; Martin & Rose, 2003/2007); this distinguishes it from the clause semantics of say Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) or Hasan (e.g. Hasan, Williams, Cloran, & Lukin, 2005). For grammatical analysis of English examples we rely on Halliday (1985 and subsequent editions); for phonological analysis we draw on Halliday and Greaves (2008); and for paralanguage (i.e., body language, gesture and the like) we reference Ngo et al. (2022).

Reviewer Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin's discourse semantics arose as his rebranding of lexicogrammatical cohesion (Halliday & Hasan 1976), the non-structural system of the textual metafunction. For the myriad misunderstandings of SFL theory in this model, see here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

[2] To be clear, Martin's ideational discourse semantics is now a rebranding of the semantics of Halliday & Matthiessen (1999) by Martin's former student, Hao. See, for example:

Misrepresenting Halliday & Matthiessen's Semantics As Martin And Hao's Discourse Semantics

[3] For evidence of the theoretical misunderstandings and plagiarism in this work, see:

Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics