Negotiating Social Relations
Tenor Resources in English
Y.J. Doran [+–]
University of Sydney
Y.J. Doran Doran is Senior Lecturer in the National School of Education at the Australian Catholic University.
J.R. Martin [+–]
University of Sydney
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics.
Michele Zappavigna [+–]
University of New South Wales
View Website
Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. As a linguist, her primary focus is on exploring the language of microblogging and social media. Her research in this area investigates discursive patterns in social media texts and corpora.
Every day we negotiate our social relations. This may involve small, seemingly inconsequential chats with friends, families and colleagues that perform our relationships. Or they may involve large, communal events that bring us together or tear us apart. In all cases, we negotiate these social relations through the language, paralanguage and related systems of meaning that we use. This book introduces a new model for analysing how people negotiate social relations through the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It focuses on SFL’s conception of social context and in particular on the interpersonal component of context known as tenor. Drawing on decades of SFL research, tenor is reworked as a resource for meaning – with the aim of describing in some detail how we go about building and maintaining sociality.
The book begins by considering how language varies in relation to social context and the different perspectives we can take to explore this variation. It then introduces our model of tenor as a resource for negotiating social relations. The model comprises three main systems. POSITIONING considers how people put forward meanings, react to them and position each other when we talk. ORIENTING looks at the nature of the meanings we negotiate, attending to the vast background of shared values that underpin our talk, help us build communities and hold them together. TUNING deals with how we raise or lower the stakes of what is being said, how we broaden or narrow the scope of what it applies to, and how we vary the spirit in which the meanings are being put forward. Taken together these systems provide us with resources for enacting social relations as we align and disalign with people and communities of various kinds. Examples focus in particular on a range of meanings associated with motherhood, including language and paralanguage (both gesture and emoji) in spoken, written and social media texts.
Table of Contents
Preface
University of Sydney
Y.J. Doran Doran is Senior Lecturer in the National School of Education at the Australian Catholic University.
University of Sydney
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics.
University of New South Wales
Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. As a linguist, her primary focus is on exploring the language of microblogging and social media. Her research in this area investigates discursive patterns in social media texts and corpora.
Chapter 1
University of Sydney
Y.J. Doran Doran is Senior Lecturer in the National School of Education at the Australian Catholic University.
University of Sydney
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics.
University of New South Wales
Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. As a linguist, her primary focus is on exploring the language of microblogging and social media. Her research in this area investigates discursive patterns in social media texts and corpora.
This book is concerned with how we build and negotiate our social relations. From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the key concept for analysing this is called tenor. This chapter introduces tenor as a means of understanding register variation and considers fundamental work in SFL that has expanded our understandings of tenor – such as approaches that focus on classifying different social relations and approaches that consider tenor as a set of parameters for describing the relative status and contact between people. To complement these approaches, this chapter introduces a new view of tenor as a set of resources for negotiating social relations. This view of tenor builds on recent developments in our understanding of context which also consider other register variables as resources: i.e., field as a resource for construing phenomena and mode as a resource for organising information. This shift in perspective is presented as a means of establishing a clearer link between tenor and the interpersonal metafunction in language, so that our understanding of contextual meaning can be fundamentally linked to our understanding of meaning making through language. The chapter concludes by presenting an overview of the set of resources introduced in this book – those of POSITIONING (for putting forward and reacting to meanings); those of ORIENTING (for arranging meanings into interconnected constellations of feelings and values); and those of TUNING (for adjusting meanings in terms of their scope, their stakes and the spirit in which they are meant). Throughout this book we show that these resources work across dialogue and monologue, that they are fundamental to realising different genres, and that they bring together language with other semiotic resources from paralinguistic body language and emoji.
Chapter 2
University of Sydney
Y.J. Doran Doran is Senior Lecturer in the National School of Education at the Australian Catholic University.
University of Sydney
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics.
University of New South Wales
Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. As a linguist, her primary focus is on exploring the language of microblogging and social media. Her research in this area investigates discursive patterns in social media texts and corpora.
This chapter introduces the system of POSITIONING: how people put forward meanings (described in terms of ‘tendering’ meanings) and how they react to meanings (described as ‘rendering’ meanings). It shows that by making some basic distinctions in how we put forward and react to meanings, we can develop a model of conversation that can engage with ongoing dialogue in which what people say regularly works to both react to things previously said and put forward something else to react to. The chapter deals in particular with resources for rendering. It illustrates that in English there are a wide range of interpersonal resources for reacting to meanings, including the evaluative meanings of attitude, the heteroglossic meanings of engagement, the dialogic meanings of exchange and a range of lexicogrammatical resources within these. It also shows that these resources can be used in relatively similar ways across monologue and dialogue such that we can see parallels across modes as far as the the interpersonal metafunction is concerned – as we position ourselves in our communities in relation to one another.
Chapter 3
University of Sydney
Y.J. Doran Doran is Senior Lecturer in the National School of Education at the Australian Catholic University.
University of Sydney
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics.
University of New South Wales
Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. As a linguist, her primary focus is on exploring the language of microblogging and social media. Her research in this area investigates discursive patterns in social media texts and corpora.
This chapter deals in particular with POSITIONING resources associated with tendering meanings. It shows that when we speak and write, we are not just putting forward our own feelings and positions, we are also positioning others to respond in particular ways. As we do for rendering, we explore a wide range of interpersonal resources – from the discourse semantic resources of exchange, through the lexicogrammatical resources of mood, tagging and polarity, and on through phonological resources of tone. The chapter illustrates how different types of expected responses underpin different genres we use everyday, and how they offer a range of ways for doing nuanced social positioning in both the to and fro of dialogue and the streaming of monologue. The chapter also introduces resources of the subsystems of PURVIEW, which deals with how we manage responsibility for meanings: is there shared responsibility whereby it’s expected that everyone is on the same page? Are meanings being positioned in a way that one person is asserting them regardless of the others’ views? Is responsibility being handed over to listeners to determine their own positions? Or are meanings being put out there with no expectation that anyone will necessarily be tied to them? We will see that by bring together the resources of PURVIEW with the resources of RENDERING and TENDERING we are able to see a multiplicity of interpersonal meanings that are made at all times when we speak and write, and that there is a nuanced negotiation of social relations that bubble away through all our interactions.
Chapter 4
University of Sydney
Y.J. Doran Doran is Senior Lecturer in the National School of Education at the Australian Catholic University.
University of Sydney
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics.
University of New South Wales
Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. As a linguist, her primary focus is on exploring the language of microblogging and social media. Her research in this area investigates discursive patterns in social media texts and corpora.
This chapter considers what we are negotiating when we speak and write. In particular, it considers how we can understand the vast background of shared values that underpin our talk, help us build communities and hold them together. It will explore this by introducing the resources of ORIENTING – how we connect and arrange meanings into intricate and coherent constellations of feelings and values. It will describe five main resources in this regard: sourcing (where meanings are positioned as being from a particular perspective); convoking (where meanings are directed toward someone in ways that bring them into the text); opposing (where meanings are oriented as being against each other); likening (where meanings are positioned as in some way similar to each other); and encapsulating (where sets of meanings are synthesised as being within other meanings). This chapter will show how these resources work together to build interconnected constellations of meaning that underpin the texts we produce and the feelings that we negotiate, and that this helps us achieve our social goals and establish the communities that we affiliate with.
Chapter 5
University of Sydney
Y.J. Doran Doran is Senior Lecturer in the National School of Education at the Australian Catholic University.
University of Sydney
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics.
University of New South Wales
Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. As a linguist, her primary focus is on exploring the language of microblogging and social media. Her research in this area investigates discursive patterns in social media texts and corpora.
This chapter introduces the final set of resources within the proposed model of tenor, namely TUNING. The resources of TUNING concern how we nuance the meanings we put forward – how we raise or lower the stakes of what is being said, how we broaden or narrow the scope of what they apply to, and how we vary the spirit in which the meanings are being put forward. This chapter will show that finessing meanings along these dimensions underpins much of the dynamics of conversation and of broader text. It will illustrate that these resources help maintain communality (if this is what speakers wish for) or disrupt it (if this is what is needed). The chapter in particular shows how these resources are drawn on in both face-to-face dialogue and online multilogue where people affiliate together ambiently, engaging with whoever comes along at any time.
Chapter 6
University of Sydney
Y.J. Doran Doran is Senior Lecturer in the National School of Education at the Australian Catholic University.
University of Sydney
J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics.
University of New South Wales
Michele Zappavigna is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. As a linguist, her primary focus is on exploring the language of microblogging and social media. Her research in this area investigates discursive patterns in social media texts and corpora.
This final chapter rounds out the new model of tenor introduced in this book. It does so first by looking ‘below’ – by considering the range of linguistic and paralinguistic resources that realise tenor and by focusing in particular on the interconnection of interpersonal meanings in play whenever we are enacting our sociality. This is illustrated primarily through the role body language plays in face-to-face conversation as far as bringing together all of the meanings described in this book are concerned. It then looks ‘around’, by considering how resources of tenor work together with resources of field (concerned with construing phenomena) and resources of mode (concerned with organising information). It shows how these three regions of meaning work not in isolation, but interact with one another in order to build coherent text. It then looks ‘above’ to see how tenor helps different genres achieve their social purpose. After considering the range of genres often used in schooling, it focuses in particular on conversation and how the model of tenor proposed in this book helps account for the unfolding conversation. Finally, the chapter looks ‘across’ to complementary perspectives on tenor – those that consider different types of social relation and those that consider different parameters upon which our social relations vary.
ISBN-13 (Hardback)
9781800505940
Price (Hardback)
£75.00 / $100.00
ISBN-13 (Paperback)
9781800505957
Price (Paperback)
£24.95 / $32.00
ISBN (eBook)
9781800505964
Price (eBook)
Individual
£20.00 / $27.00
Institutional
£70.00 / $90.00
£20.00 / $27.00
Institutional
£70.00 / $90.00
Publication
01/06/2025
Pages
200
Size
254 x 178mm
Readership
students and scholars
Illustration
24 figures
