Negotiating Tenor: Enacting Affiliation In Dialogue And Monologue (Yaegan Doran)

Negotiating tenor: Enacting affiliation in dialogue and monologue

Yaegan Doran

Australian Catholic University

Growing work in SFL has illustrated a wide range of strategies that people use to affiliate with each other and build community. To this point, however, these strategies have yet to be systematised into an integrated model. 

This talk presents one component of a model that aims to bring together these strategies into one system, as an evolving model of tenor (developed with Michele Zappavigna and J. R. Martin). 

Much work on affiliation, building on Knight (2010), has highlighted the regular use of both dialogue and evaluation in establishing and negotiating bonds: what we can analyse discourse semantically through NEGOTIATION and ATTITUDE (e.g. Zappavigna 2018). 

Similarly, descriptive work on interpersonal grammar across languages has highlighted the nuanced interactions that often occur between NEGOTIATION and the positioning of voices through ENGAGEMENT (e.g. Zhang 2020, Muntigl 2009, Martin et al. 2021). And work by White (2020), among others, has emphasised the crucial role of alignment in monologic discourse, highlighting the parallels between dialogic resources of NEGOTIATION and monologic resources of ENGAGEMENT. 

This talk aims to synthesise these interactions and parallels into a systemic model of tenor (being prepared as Doran, Martin and Zappavigna in prep.). The model developed views tenor as a set of resources for enacting social relations. 

The talk first explores the unfolding of dialogue, in terms of how people tender meanings to be reacted to, as well as how they can render these meanings in terms of support or reject. 

From this starting point, it then builds a more fleshed out description, that allows for the nuancing of meanings in terms of who has control or purview, the means by which propositions and proposals can be negotiated and ways in which each of these resources can be organised in both dialogue and monologue. 

Together, these sets of choices offer nuanced possibilities for negotiating people’s social relations in ways that complement a perspective on social relations in terms of status and contact.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this work simply confuses social relations (context plane) with the means of enacting social relations (language plane). That is, it misconstrues interpersonal language as interpersonal context (tenor). (And this is true even in terms of Martin's stratification, since although tenor is misunderstood as register, it is nevertheless understood as context.)

Halliday (1989: 12) describes tenor as follows:

TENOR — the role structure: 'who is taking part'

refers to who is taking part, to the nature of the participants, their statuses and roles: what kinds of role relationship obtain among the participants, including permanent and temporary relationships of one kind or another, both the types of speech role that they are taking on in the dialogue and the whole cluster of socially significant relationships in which they are involved.

The 'strategies that people use to enact social relations', on the other hand, are the interpersonal systems of language (and other parallel semiotic systems). 

In a previous seminar on tenor, Doran similarly presented systems of exchange structure (interpersonal semantics) as systems of tenor (interpersonal context).

This basic confusion between different levels of symbolic abstraction invalidates the proposed model of tenor.