The Metafunctional And Stratal Misunderstandings Behind 'Presence'

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 208-9):

… we have revisited work on context dependency in SFL to include ideational and interpersonal perspectives alongside the more traditional textual ones. As noted above, taken together, the contributions from the different metafunctions are referred to as presence …. This problematises concerns in SFL for the cline between action and reflection …, and monologue versus dialogue, acknowledging that they do not simply impinge upon textual meanings, but meanings across all metafunctions.

Reviewer Comments:

The authors' argument here is as follows: 

Premiss 1: The mode of a context is realised by ideational and interpersonal language as well as textual language.

Premiss 2: This is a problem for context-metafunction resonance.

Conclusion: The solution is to propose that there are ideational, interpersonal and textual components of textual language, and to locate the resultant ensemble, 'presence', in mode at the level of context.

The problem with Premiss 2 is that it is false, because it misunderstands context-metafunction resonance as requiring that mode only have implications for textual meaning. The problem with the conclusion is that it misunderstands both stratification and metafunction. As previously explained for the authors' frameworks of 'mass', and 'association,' the authors' framework of 'presence' confuses the level of context (mode) with the level of language (textual meaning), and misunderstands one metafunction, the textual, to include all three metafunctions.