The Misunderstanding Behind 'Coordination'

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 206):

From a textual perspective, we are concerned with what we will generalise as coordination – involving taken for granted understandings smoothing the flow of discourse based on the experience of ‘kith and kin’ spending time together, and the relative control over the textual organisation of a text. Homophoric reference is a strong marker of taken-for-granted understandings of association since it identifies entities that are not necessarily accessible from the co-text or material context of an utterance. Familiar examples from domestic situations would be presuming reference such as the fridge, the car, the bathroom, the yard, and so on (where it would be ridiculous to say there’s a fridge in the kitchen; grab some beer from it, unless there were another fridge elsewhere that might be confused with it). As far as proliferation is concerned, the more that can be presumed, the closer the relationship.

Reviewer Comments:

For the authors, 'coordination' is interpersonal meaning viewed from a textual perspective. That is, 'coordination' is 'enacting social relations' viewed from the perspective of 'creating information flow'. For SFL Theory, on the other hand, 'coordination' is simply the textual creation of information flow, misunderstood as tenor. The textual perspective taken here is on language itself, not on ideational meaning.