Tenor refers to the roles of the participants in an interaction. Tenor answers the question: "Who are participating and what is their relative status or power?"
The tenor of a text tells you:
• What kind of person the author is, or is presenting himself/herself to be.
• What kind of people the expected audience are.
• What the relationship between them is, or what relationship the author is presenting it as.
Tenor is easiest to analyze in spoken conversations when all speakers are present and participating. Tenor is more difficult to analyze in written texts when the author is anonymous and when the recipients are not present.
Tenor is a component of the interpersonal metafunction of a text.
Map of tenor
In interactive texts (typically spoken), we typically analyze tenor into:
• Relative status (equality, inequality), for example we look the terms of address used, who gets to choose the topic of conversation, who gets to choose who speaks, and so on.
• Social distance (familiarity, friendliness), expressed for example by the presence of formal or informal vocabulary, slang, etc.
In non-interactive texts (typically written), we analyze tenor into:
• Personalization (how much attention is drawn to the writer or to the reader) and also the related technique of deliberate impersonalization.
• Standing, or how much the author comes across as possessing expertise and authority on the subject.
• Stance, or how much the author allows the reader to disagree with the content. Stance breaks down further into:
o Attitude, revealing whether the meanings communicated come across as negative or positive. Also the topic of agency and affectedness is mentioned here as a technique used to trigger attitudes.
o Modality, which breaks down into:
Epistemic modality (how much the content comes across as being true).
ƒ Deontic modality (how much obligation to do something the text seems to put on the reader).
Tenor in interactive texts
Interactive texts are usually spoken and include a face-to-face conversation, a telephone conversation, but not a prepared lecture. Some written texts are also interactive, for example a real-time Internet chat. To a lesser extent, written texts directed at a single participant known to the writer (as opposed to those directed at the public) are also interactive.
Relative status (equality, inequality)
When analyzing an interactive text for its tenor, you will be interested in the status of the participants to each other. Are they equal, or is there some amount of equality between them? This will typically be reflected in the choices the speakers make while speaking.
Speech acts
We recognize the following speech acts:
Information | Goods and Services | |
Offer | Statement: (offer of information), prototypically realized by a declarative clause. Ex. Sally made this coffee. | Offer (of goods and services), usually realized by an interrogative clause. Ex. Would you like me to make coffee? |
Request/ Demand | Question (request for information), prototypically realized by an interrogative clause. Who made this coffee? | Command (request for goods and services), prototypically realized by an imperative clause. Make coffee. |
You will want to find out who has access to what type of speech acts.
• Those who mostly ask questions come across as needing or lacking information. They are also causing those the questions are directed at to come across as having the information.
• Those who mostly provide statements come across as possessing information worth communicating. They are also making others come across as needing or lacking the information.
• Those who mostly give orders (sentences in the imperative) are making themselves come across as seeking to or being able to control the behaviour of others. They are also making others appear as providers of the actions or services required.
In each of the above cases, the way a participant comes across may be:
• Determined by the context. For example, an exchange between a customer and a shop assistant pre-positions the customer as giving orders and the assistant as provider of service.
• Deliberate. For example a shop assistant may want to resist the pre-positioning by deliberately speaking to the customer in the imperative, attempting to reverse the equality/inequality aspect of the relationship.
Turn management
Those who control who speaks and when come across as more powerful than others.
Terms of address
What terms of address are present and who uses them?
For example, if person A addresses person as “Mister so-and-so” and person B addresses person A with their first name, then the tenor of the conversation is such that person B is superior to person A.
This may be a reflection of the actual relative status of the participants (for example a teacher and a student), or it may be a deliberate attempt to overcome the actual status.
For example a teacher and a student each titling themselves “Mister” may be a deliberate attempt to pretend equality and mutual respect. A Practical Guide for
Evaluation, assessment
Those who pass judgements or make assessments come across as superior in their ability or competence to judge or assess.
Topic choice
Those who choose or change the topic of the conversation come across as superior to the other participants.
Social distance (familiarity, friendliness)
The degree of distance between participants can usually be detected from the presence or absence of informal language. For example:
• Use of colloquial vocabulary: “I’ve got a lump” (colloquial) instead of “I’ve developed a lump” (formal).
• Use of a dialect: “We’ve had us jabs for flu” (dialect) instead of “We’ve had jabs for flu” (standard).
• Use of terms of address: given names, nicknames, pet names indicate closeness, formal names indicate distance.
• Presence of contractions: “I’ll” (informal) instead of “I will” (formal).
• Presence of ellipsis: deliberately failing to mention something out of shared knowledge means presuming that both parties know it. People who are close have shared knowledge (shared experiences in the past, etc.).
These features may be an indication of actual social distance or closeness between theparticipants, or they may be deliberate attempts to make the writer appear closer to his/her intended readers, perhaps to persuade them for something. This is a common technique in tabloid journalism where it is known as synthetic personalization.
Tenor in non-interactive texts
Non-interactive texts are (usually) written texts directed at the public, as opposed to texts directed at a single person known to the author. Some spoken texts are also noninteractive, such as lectures and rehearsed speeches. When analyzing a non-interactive text for its tenor, you want to find out how the personality of the author (or of the institution the author belongs to) is projected in the text. This projection is called a persona.
Personalization
Personalization of a text refers to whether the speaker is revealed in the text and drawn attention to, such as by the use of the personal pronoun “I”, or whether he/she is obscured and underplayed. Personalization also refers to whether the audience is referred to and drawn attention to, such as by the use of the personal pronoun “you”. Finally, the personal pronoun “we” is also an example of personalization, referring to both the author and the audience.
Personalization is usually achieved with these techniques:
• Personal pronouns.
• Directives (“Click here to…”, “Don’t panic”)
• Rhetorical questions (“What’s a girl to do?”)
• Questions seemingly coming from the reader or from another, imagined participant.
Personalization can be used for many purposes:
• To position the audience as agreeing, thereby making it difficult for them to disagree.
Example: “Surely you of all people see that Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot explain human nature.”
• To create a feeling of solidarity between the author and the audience (“we”).
• To create a feeling of intimacy.
• To create an impression of the interactivity of a one-to-one conversation (“pseudointeractivity”)
• To make the reader feel like they are physically present in a situation. This is often achieved in literature by referring to an assumed shared context, such as “here” or “this year” to draw the reader in.
Impersonalization
The opposite of personalization is impersonalization. Strongly impersonalized texts are meant to create a feeling of objectivity, of being free of personal biases. This is a common technique in scientific texts an can often be detected by the presence of the “anticipatory it”:
“It is disappointing that…” (instead of “I’m disappointed that…”)
“It is necessary that you …” (instead of “You should…”)
Standing
Standing tells you how much of a claim the author lays to expertise and authority. To evaluate the standing of a text, you will be interested to answer these questions:
• Does the author refer to external, (seemingly) respectable, sources?
“According to the majority of Nobel prize winners” is an example of the author constructing a strong standing, “only a few experts agree” is an example of the author constructing a weak standing.
• Does the writer come across as possessing expertise?
Writers achieve this by demonstrating their expertise, in other words by providing information of a factual nature in the text. This is common in journalistic reporting where it is to be expected because of the situation. In other situations it may be also be an attempt by the writer to present themselves as possessing expertise when they don’t actually possess any.
• Does the writer come across as being in a position to criticise or give praise?
Writers achieve this by actually doing it (criticising or giving praise), and this can be detected by the presence of evaluative expressions. Evaluative expressions are such expressions which go beyond describing undisputable facts and express an opinion on facts.
For example:
o Sometimes, when describing an existing state of affairs, there is a choice between a neutral expression (e.g. “feature”) and an evaluative one (e.g. “weakness”).
o An adjective may be inserted into an otherwise neutral expression to make it evaluative, for example “the fragile bond of trust with the mainland” instead of just “the bond of trust with the mainland”.
Criticism and praise my be given in less obvious ways as well and when that happens, it is an example of the tenor being manipulated deliberately.
• Does the writer come across as being in a position to tell other people what to do?
Writers achieve this position by doing it (telling or recommending people what to do). This can be detected by the presence of imperative sentences (very obvious) and the presence of meanings involving obligation and necessity (less obvious), for example “will have to”, “can no longer afford”, “should”, “must”.
Note that instructions can be given in less obvious ways as well. When people do that, they deliberately manipulate the tenor of their writing to appear less “bossy”.
Stance
Stance refers to the space the author seemingly allows you to argue with the experiential content, to agree or disagree. The stance encoded in a text also expresses the author’s commitment to the experiential content: how certain (they want us to believe) they are that what they are saying is true.
Stance is further subdivided into Attitude and Modality.
Attitude
The attitude of a text tells you whether positive, negative or neutral meanings are expressed. Attitude is typically realized in text by:
• Lexical choices. For example “peril”, “lost” and “feared” carry negative meanings for most people, the author knows this, and is using them to construct a negative attitude in the text.
• Evaluative expressions, that is expressions which go beyond describing undisputable facts and express an opinion on facts.
For example:
o Sometimes, when describing an existing state of affairs, there is a choice between a neutral expression (e.g. “feature”) and an evaluative one (e.g. “weakness”).
o An adjective may be inserted into an otherwise neutral expression to make it evaluative, for example “the fragile bond of trust with the mainland” instead of just “the bond of trust with the mainland”.
Attitude can be more or less explicit, and therefore more or less easy to detect:
• Asserted attitudes are attitudes which are mentioned quite openly, a typical reader is aware of them and is free to disagree with them: “The government’s behaviour was disgraceful.”
• Assumed attitudes are attitudes which are mentioned as if they were truths accepted by everyone on which another argument can be built: “After nine years of the government’s betrayal, …” (Main argument follows.) A typical reader will feel less free to disagree with assumed attitudes.
• Triggered attitudes aren’t mentioned at all, but a typical reader will imply them.
Example: “Even though Fred’s father is very old, Fred only visits him once a year”.
This triggers a negative attitude to Fred. Even though the facts that Fred’s father is old and that Fred visits him once a year are objective facts, the syntax employed (“even though … only”) encourages a typical reader to imply from the facts a negative attitude to Fred.
One way of triggering attitudes is the manipulation of agency and affectednessin a text: wording material processes in such a way that certain entities appear as actors (and therefore come across as responsible for what happened) while others appear as goals (and therefore come across as more or less victims of what happened).
Agency and affectedness
When analyzing a text for agency and affectedness, we typically only look at the material processes in the text, disregarding other process types, because material processes have the most impact on the world.
The main idea of agency and affectedness analysis is that if a certain event is constructed with a certain attitude by a text, then the participants who have the most agency in the event also tend to be viewed with the same attitude by a typical reader. In other words, the attitude of a process “rubs off” onto the agent.
• Those entities which often appear as transactional actors (= actors who have a goal at the other end of the process) have the most agency.
For example in “demonstrators were shot at by the police”, “the police” have agency.
• Those entities which appear as non-transactional actors (= actors who do not have a goal at the other end of the process) have less agency because they are constructed as not influencing anybody. For example in “shots were fired by the police”, “the police” have some agency but not as much as in the previous example.
• Entities who do not appear as actors are not constructed by the text as having agency at all.
The agency of a participant can be further manipulated in a text by:
• Shot passives, e.g. “shots were fired” (as opposed to “shots were fired by the police”).
• Nominalizations, e.g. “the 1970s saw several factory closures” (as opposed to “in the 1970s, the company management closed several factories”).
• Ergatives, e.g. “several mines closed” (as opposed to “several mines were closed”). Of secondary importance to the issue of agency is the issue of affectedness.
Entities who are often presented as affected in material processes can potentially be constructed as victims and attract sympathy. However, it has been observed that attitudes “rub off” onto the affected less easily then they do onto the agent.
Modality
The modality of a text is an aggregate of various meanings relating to permission, ability, obligation, necessity, volition, and prediction. Modality is usually expressed by:
• Modal verbs. There are nine of these in English: “can”, “could”, “may”, “might”, “shall”, “should”, “will”, “would”, “must”.
• Semi-modals, for example “had better”, “have (got) to”, “ought to”, “be supposed to”, “be going to”.
• Various lexical word classes expressing modality, for example the verbs “need to”, “be obliged to”, the adjectives “definite”, “possible” and the nouns “certainty”, “likelihood”.
There are two kinds of modality: epistemic and deontic.
Epistemic modality
Epistemic modality of a text tells you the likelihood that the experiential content is (believed by the author to be) true. Typical indicators of epistemic modality are:
• Modal verbs:
1. “will” = certainty (strong epistemic modality)
2. “would” = probability based on a hypothetical condition
3. “must” = deduced to be fairly certain
4. “may”, “might”, “could” = possibility (weak epistemic modality)
• Modal adverbs (“definitely” = strong epistemic modality, “possibly” = weak epistemic modality)
• Modal adjectives, often used in the pattern “It is definite/possible that…”.
Writers who say their message with a high epistemic modality may appear as dogmatic, while authors who give their experiential content low epistemic modality may appear as open to negotiation or even uncertain.
Deontic modality
The deontic modality of a text tells you the amount of obligation, permission or necessity conveyed by the text. Typical indicators of deontic modality are modal verbs, and other expressions conveying meanings of obligation, permission or necessity:
1. “have to”, “must”, “had better” = strong obligation
2. “ought to”, “should” = obligation
3. “need to” = necessity
4. “be supposed to” = weaker obligation
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