Misunderstanding Context-Metafunction Resonance

 Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 180):

This division of labour distributes the wide range of phenomena a model of social context must conceptualise if it is to engage closely with language across four context variables instead of three, and helps ensure that each component of field, tenor, and mode is not doing so much work that it no longer matches up with the internal metafunctional organisation of language.²

² Matthiessen et al. (2022: Figure 7.9) make this lack of resonance in their modelling clear in a diagram linking what they consider to be different fields of activity with different areas of grammar “at risk” – implicating ideational, interpersonal, and textual systems, not just ideational ones.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] To be clear, the fourth variable is Martin's genre, which, unlike his register, is not organised according to the three metafunctions. This reflects the fact that genre is a misunderstanding of one metafunction, the textual, as projected onto context as mode.

[2] This misunderstands the metaphor of 'resonance' in the hypothesis of 'contextual-metafunction resonance' (Hasan 2014: 8). As previously explained, the hypothesis is simply that the contextual parameters of field, tenor and mode are identifiable by the ideational, interpersonal and textual choices, respectively, in language (and vice versa).

The authors, on the other hand, misunderstand 'contextual-metafunction resonance' as requiring that the three parameters of context exclusively "match up wth" their respective metafunction of language. This is their second major misunderstanding of theory, and the one that motivates the second half of this paper.