“Expanding Horizons” by Collapsing the Architecture

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 178):

Ultimately then what we need is a theory of language and semiosis that can manage the complexity of everything we need to say – in Halliday’s (1978) terms, a model of the social semiotic that takes seriously both the social and the semiotic. SFL has worked hard over more than six decades to expand its horizons in this regard. This book is another step along this path. We invite you to join us in pushing this engaging enterprise a few steps further.

ChatGPT Comments: 

The final paragraph offers a familiar promise:

“Ultimately then what we need is a theory of language and semiosis that can manage the complexity of everything we need to say … a model of the social semiotic that takes seriously both the social and the semiotic. SFL has worked hard … This book is another step along this path.”

It’s an appealing invitation — but it rests on a profound misrepresentation of what SFL actually is.

1. The rhetoric of “taking both the social and the semiotic seriously” conceals a collapse of their distinction

Halliday’s social semiotic rests on stratification, i.e., on keeping the social and the semiotic in systematic relation but not conflating them.

This book repeatedly collapses:

• tenor into interpersonal discourse semantics,

• genre into a stratum realised by language resources,

• contextual variables into identity-performance semantics,

• resources into realisations,

• strata into modules.

To then claim alignment with “Halliday’s vision of the social semiotic” is a rhetorical move that masks the systematic dismantling of the very architecture that makes Halliday’s model social and semiotic at all.

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2. The “expanding horizons” narrative frames deviation as progress

Invoking sixty years of SFL development positions their model as simply the next incremental advance.

But the book proceeds not by extending the model, but by restructuring it:

• replacing context with a resource bundle,

• redefining tenor as discourse-semantic affect plus identity variability,

• elevating genre to a stratum realised by “tenor resources”,

• dissolving the cline of instantiation and conflating it with stratification.

This is not expansion; it is reconfiguration.

Calling it “another step along the path” implies continuity where there is disjunction.

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3. The invitation to “push further” presupposes the success of the project

The closing gesture imagines that the only sensible direction for SFL is the one they have charted.

But the enterprise they invite the reader into is not the project Halliday began. It is Martin’s genre-led re-stratification of context, here reframed as a “resource-based sociality model” and offered as if it were the logical apex of SFL evolution.

The invitation rings hollow because it tacitly demands acquiescence to the theoretical substitutions that the book never defends, only presupposes.

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Summary

This concluding flourish reframes a wholesale restructuring of SFL as the natural continuation of Halliday’s project. But the book’s “step forward” is achieved only by collapsing the social into the semiotic, confusing context with discourse semantics, and treating theoretical disruptions as incremental progress. The invitation to “push the enterprise further” thus depends on accepting the very conflations that undermine the social semiotic they invoke. 

The Demographic Strawman and the Erasure of Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 177-8):

A third complementary perspective on tenor that needs to be brought into the picture involves the social roles and relations that affect the way we talk (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) – at a relatively local level (e.g., the way we talk as a mother-child pair) or at a much more global level (e.g,. the way we talk in relation to our economic class). In some discussions of tenor in SFL, there is a suggestion that we can simply ‘wire-in’ various demographic features and suggest there is a relatively straight realisational path from, say, ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ to the language being spoken. But what we have tried to show through this book is that being a mother involves a wide range and diverse set of options. In other words, how a mother means is immensely varied and contested and constantly undergoing change. It intersects with the genres, situations, communities and feelings we have at all times.

ChatGPT Comments:

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 177–8) introduce what they call a “third complementary perspective” on tenor. This is the construction of a strawman to justify their deviation from the canonical model.

1. They mischaracterise the Hallidayan position to defend their own

The claim that SFL suggests you can “wire-in” demographic labels (“mother,” “daughter,” “economic class”) and get a deterministic linguistic output is not found in Halliday & Matthiessen or any serious SFL scholarship.

What Halliday actually says (and what their citation pretends to align with) is that tenor is the configuration of social roles and relations in a situation — not a demographic variable, and not a fixed identity category.

The “mother–child pair” is not a demographic; it is a social relation in a situation type.

They replace situational roles with demographic categories and then call the resulting caricature “SFL”.

This inversion allows them to “correct” a model that never existed.

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2. They continue the slippage between contextual relations and semantic realisations

They say:

“being a mother involves a wide range and diverse set of options… how a mother means is immensely varied and contested”

But this is not a claim about tenor.

It is a claim about interpersonal meaning, genre, and community-specific practices.

Tenor is not:

• “how a mother means”

• “the feelings we have at all times”

• “options available to mothers”

Tenor is the situational role configuration being enacted through meaning — not the semantic choices themselves and not the sociocultural variability of identity categories.

By grounding tenor in the variability of identity performance, they collapse context into discourse semantics yet again.

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3. The final sentence completes the conflation

“It intersects with the genres, situations, communities and feelings we have at all times.”

This is precisely backwards.

• Tenor does not “intersect with” genre;
  in their model, genre is realised by tenor (alongside field and mode).

• Tenor does not intersect with feelings;
  feelings are realised by appraisal systems in discourse semantics.

• Tenor does not intersect with communities;
  communities constrain situation types, which condition tenor.

Their formulation treats tenor as a free-floating sociocultural affective force, drifting across strata and systems, touching whatever seems relevant to identity or meaning.

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Summary

This passage exemplifies how the authors protect their “resource” model by attacking a strawman version of SFL: they caricature tenor as demographic determinism, replace contextual relations with identity-performance semantics, and end by dissolving tenor into an amorphous blend of genre, community, and feelings — all while citing Halliday to legitimise a model that directly contradicts his. 

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. 

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.

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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. 

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. 

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.

When Tenor Eats Semantics: The Cost of Misreading Stratification

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 152):

Accordingly in this book we have taken a step towards mobilising the full power of SFL theory as a genuinely social theory of language. Rather than trying to account for all of social relations in one place in the model (as in many previous accounts), it has focused on tenor as a resource for enacting social relations. In doing so, it has privileged the need for a model of tenor that can explicitly link with interpersonal resources in language and with genre patterns.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, SFL Theory models language as a social semiotic. Halliday (1978: 2, 55, 123):

It means interpreting language within a sociocultural context, in which the culture itself is interpreted in semiotic terms - as an information system, if that terminology is preferred. 

… the notion of language as part of the social semiotic: the concept of the culture as a system of meaning, with language as one of its realisations.

… an interpretation of the social system as a social semiotic: a system of meanings that constitutes the ‘reality' of the culture. This is the higher-level system to which language is related: the semantic system of language is a realisation of the social semiotic. 

Socio-semiotic systems contrast with bio-semiotic systems: those that interface with the content plane of language, those that interface with the expression plane of language, and the brain that materially realises language (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 605-7). 

[2] To be clear, in this book, the authors have renamed semantic systems and relocated them out of language and into context as tenor systems, thereby making tenor do the work of language as well as context. This confusion resulted from not understanding the realisation relation between strata as one of symbolic abstraction, and misunderstanding strata as interacting modules (at the same level of abstraction) — a misunderstanding that 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?

ChatGPT Comments:

This excerpt encapsulates the self-congratulatory claim that this book “mobilises the full power of SFL as a genuinely social theory,” while in practice doing so by inverting the Hallidayan architecture that already made SFL a social semiotic.

The passage frames the book’s project as a decisive “step toward mobilising the full power of SFL as a genuinely social theory of language.” However, this rhetorical flourish obscures several conceptual inversions that weaken, rather than strengthen, the systemic-functional model they claim to advance.

1. Misrepresentation of SFL’s foundation

The claim that this book newly mobilises SFL as a social theory of language overlooks that Halliday’s (1978) Language as Social Semiotic already defines SFL precisely as such. The notion that language is a social semiotic — a meaning-making system situated within, and realising, the culture-as-semiotic — is not an ancillary claim but the very premise of the theory. What the authors present as a “step toward” has in fact been the foundation for nearly fifty years.

This rhetorical framing subtly repositions the canonical SFL project as incomplete, thereby legitimising their own intervention as an overdue correction — a move that is both historically inaccurate and theoretically misleading.

2. Relocating semantics into context

The authors describe their contribution as focusing on “tenor as a resource for enacting social relations” that can “explicitly link with interpersonal resources in language and with genre patterns.” Yet this “explicit link” is achieved not through relational integration but by displacement: systems that in the canonical model belong to the semantic stratum (e.g., appraisal, engagement, graduation) are redefined as contextual tenor systems.

In doing so, the book effectively removes the semantic mediation that Halliday (1978, 2014) insisted upon. The semiotic architecture collapses: instead of a symbolic abstraction (context → semantics → lexicogrammar), we get modular adjacency (tenor ↔ interpersonal ↔ genre), with each “module” treated as a coequal interactive system. This reorganisation violates the realisation relation that defines stratification and makes SFL’s social ontology coherent.

3. From stratification to modular confusion

The problem stems from Martin’s reinterpretation of strata as modules in dialogue rather than levels of abstraction in realisation. Once strata are conceived as interacting rather than realising, the notion of “linking” tenor with interpersonal and genre becomes intelligible — but only within a confused ontology. The relation between language and context is no longer symbolic but cybernetic, flattening Halliday’s architecture into a network of “systems talking to systems.”

This is the conceptual hinge of the book’s entire framework: tenor ceases to be a contextual configuration realised through semantic systems, and instead becomes a quasi-linguistic module that contains those systems under new names. Hence the authors can claim novelty while in fact rebranding semantic work as contextual.

4. Rebranding and rhetorical erasure

By reclassifying established semantic systems as “tenor systems,” the authors appropriate the descriptive achievements of SFL’s interpersonal semantics — particularly Appraisal — and re-present them as their own contribution to “tenor modelling.” This amounts to terminological rebranding rather than theoretical innovation. The language of “mobilising the full power of SFL” thus functions rhetorically to erase the semiotic work already done by Halliday and Hasan, and to naturalise a model that obscures the realisation relations on which the social-semiotic edifice depends.

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Summary

In short, this passage crystallises the book’s central confusion: it claims to make SFL more social by dismantling the very stratified relation that defines language as a social semiotic. By relocating semantics into context and treating strata as interactive modules, it replaces relational abstraction with modular adjacency. What emerges is not an expansion but a contraction of the theory — a semiotic architecture that has lost its semiotic principle.

Tuning Conclusion

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 149):

This chapter has introduced the role of tuning in the orchestration of interpersonal meaning. We have explored some of the key meanings made in a corpus of #momguilt tweets within which mothers vent their frustrations over contravening community expectations about the behaviour and temperament of 'good moms'. As we have seen, whether the vibe is convivial or conflictual, the meanings tendered in social media posts may be adjusted via the TUNING system by modifying their relation to other meanings already tendered in a previous post or with broader background values positioned by a particular community. This might involve adjusting the amount of risk or controversy they engender (STAKES), the breadth of the voices they include or assume (SCOPE), or their level of approachability or reproach they enact (SPIRIT). These distinctions in meaning are encapsulated as the TUNING system (Figure 5.1).

ChatGPT Comments:

In their conclusion, the authors present the TUNING system as orchestrating interpersonal meaning through stakes, scope, and spirit. They emphasise that social media posts can be “adjusted via the TUNING system by modifying their relation to other meanings already tendered…or with broader background values positioned by a particular community.” On the surface, this captures the relational dynamism of online interaction.

The problem lies in how the empirical coordination of resources is treated as if it constitutes the contextual systems of tenor. Throughout the chapter, we see emoji, appraisal, punctuation, vocatives, and hashtags appearing in complex combinations. These are co-deployed resources, empirically observable, and they do interact with stakes, scope, and spirit. But the authors present them as if each combination instantiates the tenor system itself — that is, as if context is being directly “written into” the posts rather than being construed through them.

This conflation collapses a critical stratification distinction. Tenor is a system of context, representing social roles, relations, and participant alignments. It exists independently of any particular token of language, emoji, or other semiotic resource. Treating empirical co-occurrences as direct instantiations of tenor blurs the line between what users do in interaction and the contextual plane of social relations.

In short, the chapter’s conclusion risks flattening the semiotic hierarchy: language, paralinguistic signs, and contextual strata are treated as equivalent, rather than recognising the nested, interacting nature of strata. The empirical evidence of co-deployment is fascinating and illuminates how tuning operates in practice — but it does not absolve the need for theoretical precision about what resides in context versus what resides in language or multimodal semiotic resources.

The Mood of Misplaced Modality

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 146):

Looking multimodally, spirit is also the realm of colour in images and sound quality in film (Painter, Martin, & Unsworth, 2013; Van Leeuwen, 1999). These resources work to tinge the scenes being presented in ways that make them eery and dark or happy and cheerful and form a crucial resource for setting the mood and ambience of a text. Exploring this takes us further than we can go in this book, but it indicates that a major area of work in terms of our understanding of tenor resources will be to flesh out how these feelings are built across modalities.

ChatGPT Comments:

Here, “spirit” is expanded beyond language into visual and sonic media — colour in images, sound quality in film — as if all mood phenomena across modalities could be gathered under the same interpersonal rubric. The move appears intuitive: warmth in colour, brightness in sound, or cheerfulness in tone all seem to parallel friendliness in linguistic tenor. Yet this extension rests on a categorical conflation: it treats affective ambience (a semiotic effect) as equivalent to interpersonal tenor (a contextual variable).

The problem is structural. “Spirit” is already misplaced as a system of tenor rather than semantics; the multimodal move compounds this by dissolving the stratification boundaries entirely. The authors move from contextual tenor (social relations) to semantic mood (interpersonal meaning) to perceptual colouring (semiotic effect) without distinguishing between levels of realisation. Mood in music and colour in image are not tenor resources — they are ideationally construed affective tones, realised through distinct mode-specific systems (hue, saturation, timbre, tempo). Their affective force belongs to the phenomenal domain of sensory construal, not to the interpersonal semantics of linguistic exchange.

This is the terminal stage of the “spirit” slippage: what began as interpersonal alignment in language becomes a free-floating “vibe” across all media. In collapsing the semiotic architecture into an affective continuum, the model abandons its own theoretical stratification. Meaning dissolves into mood, context into feeling, tenor into tone. 

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 Spiriting Fallacy

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 145-6):

In addition to clear positive or negative spiriting, more nuanced possibilities were present in the corpus. Humour and sarcasm were used throughout to combat prevailing cultural positions about mothers. For example, in (63) the user employs parody to play the voice of a critical other, positioned as telling the user to pay attention to the fleeting pleasures of mothering despite the grind of daily routine.

(63) 2 more weeks of #summer. Today I'm letting the #Xbox babysit. I know: treasure every moment.🙄 #boymom #badmom #momguilt #SorryNotSorry

The 'Face With Rolling Eyes' 🙄 emoji together with the #SorryNotSorry reveal the underlying position of the user, and their combative defensive tone invokes the presence of far-reaching or ongoing criticism that needs to be dispelled or quashed.

ChatGPT Comments:

In their treatment of “spiriting,” the authors again misread a complex interpersonal process as a simple modulation of tone. They describe example (63) as a case of “parody” and “combative defensive tone,” where the 🙄 emoji and #SorryNotSorry supposedly “reveal the underlying position of the user.”

Yet parody and sarcasm do not simply colour tone. They restructure it. Irony, humour, and parody introduce stratified stances — one voice staging or mocking another. Here, the mother is not merely being “defensive” or “combative.” She is performing the absurdity of the cultural injunction to “treasure every moment,” revoicing the voice of normative motherhood in order to expose it.

The 🙄 emoji, in this light, does not “reveal” affect but distances it: a visual gesture of refusal to inhabit the sentimental script being parodied. What is being signalled is not tone, but a meta-affective stance — a comment on the affective economy itself.

By reducing this layered irony to a one-dimensional “tone shift,” the authors commit what we might call the spiriting fallacy: mistaking reflexive stance for scalar adjustment. The irony collapses; the polyphony is flattened. What was a discursive performance of critique becomes, in their analysis, a mere tuning of interpersonal tenor — another instance of attitude management rather than ideological play.

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Both The Spiriting Fallacy and The Emoji Error expose the same underlying confusion in the authors’ framework: a collapse of strata and modes. In The Emoji Error, the semiotic distinction between language and its visual accompaniments was erased; in The Spiriting Fallacy, the interpersonal distinction between affect and stance is dissolved. In both cases, what should be modelled as reflexive play within the interpersonal semantics of language is instead displaced upward into “tenor,” where meaning becomes tone and critique becomes mood. The result is a theoretical anaesthesia: language stripped of its irony, humour, and resistance — flattened into a single dimension of “feeling nicely or not.”

The Spirited Misstep: When Emojis and GIFs Stand in for Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 145):

ChatGPT Comments:

In their discussion of spiriting, the authors continue to treat emoji, GIFs, exclamation marks, and hashtags as resources of tenor, implying they primarily function as contextual markers of social stance. 

The GIF, high-five emoji, and middle-finger emoji are semantically and semiotically active, contributing affective and attitudinal meaning. They are not linguistic realisations of tenor; they are visual, gestural, and multimodal resources that accompany text. Similarly, hashtags encode evaluation, political alignment, and social positioning simultaneously — they are not “pure context,” but meaning-bearing devices that shape the interpretation of the post.

By framing these semiotic resources as tenor, the authors repeat the stratification error: conflating the semantic system of interpersonal meaning with the contextual stratum. They also commit a semiotic error, treating cross-modal signs — visual, gestural, or pictorial — as if they were linguistic. The result is a flattening of the meaning-making process, where tone, evaluation, and alignment are reduced to a single, ill-defined dimension. In short, the “spirited” post is not social context; it is a multimodal semantic performance, one that cannot be shoehorned neatly into tenor without collapsing the distinctions that make stratal analysis meaningful.

More precisely:

This excerpt continues the pattern we identified in the previous discussion of spiriting, and there are some points worth noting from a critical perspective, though the issues are subtler here.

1. Stratification confusion persists. The authors continue to present emoji, exclamation marks, vocatives, and hashtags as if they instantiate a system of tenor (“spiriting”), implying that these resources exist in the contextual stratum rather than in the semantic stratum. Yet, these items are clearly meaning-bearing resources within the post. For instance, the high-five GIF, the exclamation marks, and the middle-finger emoji are semantically expressive — they contribute affective and attitudinal meaning, not just social positioning. The authors’ framework again risks collapsing semantics into context, flattening the stratal hierarchy.

2. Emoji as cross-modal semiotic resources. Just as with the heart and kiss-face emoji earlier, the GIF, high-five emoji, and middle-finger emoji are pictorial or gestural signs that co-deploy with text. They do not have grammatical or semantic properties of language itself; they are visual/affective accompaniments. Treating them as linguistic realisations of “spiriting” once more blurs the boundary between language and non-language semiotics.

3. Hashtags as hybrid resources. The hashtags #momknowsbest and #VoteBlueToSaveAmerica are doing multiple things simultaneously: they contribute to scoping, position the speaker, and provide affective alignment. They are not contextual; they are semantically active, encoding evaluative, social, and political meaning. The authors’ framing risks treating multifunctional semantic resources as simple markers of tenor, which is theoretically misleading.

4. Polarity of spiriting and scope. While the excerpt acknowledges positive and negative spiriting (e.g., supportive high-five vs. middle-finger warning), the same critique applies: these resources are semantic and semiotic, not contextual. The political and evaluative hashtags suggest a broader social scope, but the meaning is still realised within the post — meaning is not “context,” it is instantiated via semiotic resources.

Summary:

This excerpt reinforces the dual error noted earlier: the stratification error (misplacing semantic meaning in context) and the semiotic error (treating multimodal signs as linguistic). The GIFs, emojis, exclamations, and hashtags are not purely contextual markers but semantically potent, cross-modal resources. Conceptually, the authors conflate scope, evaluation, and affect with social positioning. The analytical consequence is a flattening of meaning, where tone, alignment, and social stance are reduced to a single “tenor” dimension rather than being recognised as emergent from the interplay of semantic and semiotic strata.