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. 

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. 

Misapplying The Trinocular Perspective: 'From Above'

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 58, 59, 60):

Looking from ‘above’, proposals and propositions also allow us to distinguish different types of genre. Looking at persuasive texts, for example, analytical expositions such as Text 3.1 argue for a stance of some sort – in this case that the world’s best animal is a butterfly. That is, analytical expositions argue for a proposition. … 

By contrast, hortatory expositions argue for action … . Hortatory expositions therefore argue for a proposal. … 

Texts in the political sphere in particular often tender multiple proposals. … 

Moving beyond persuasive texts, the distinction between proposition and proposal allows us to distinguish different types of factual text as well. Procedures, for example, put forward series of activities as proposals, in order to step through how to do something. … 

By contrast, explanations present activities as sets of interconnected propositions …

Reviewer Comments:

To be clear, 'looking at a given stratum from above means treating it as the expression of some content' (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 504). So looking at the semantic stratum from above means treating proposals and propositions as the expression of field, tenor and mode, the systems of the stratum above the semantic stratum. The authors' however, skip this stratum and treat proposals and propositions as the expression of genre. In their model, it is field, tenor and mode, not proposals and propositions, that are the expression of genre.

In Halliday's original stratification, however, what the authors model as a genre stratum is modelled as rhetorical mode, the textual dimension of context. Viewed this way, looking at proposals and propositions from above means looking at them, coherently, as the expressions of mode.

Cf. Halliday (1994: 363):