In systemic functional linguistics, the term tenor refers to the participants in a discourse, their relationships to each other, and their purposes.
In examining how context affects language use, linguists refer to the context-specific variety of language as a register. The three aspects of the context are known as field, tenor and mode. Field refers the subject matter or content being discussed. Mode refers to the channel (such as writing, or video-conference) of the communication. By understanding these three variables, the kind of language likely to be used in a particular setting can be predicted — and, Michael Halliday suggests, this is exactly what we do, unconsciously, as language users.
In analysing the parts of a metaphor, "tenor" has another meaning, unrelated to the meaning above. According to I. A. Richards, the two parts of a metaphor are the tenor and vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the subject from which the attributes are derived.
Discourse is a term used in semantics as in discourse analysis, but it also refers to a social conception of discourse, often linked with the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Jürgen Habermas The Theory of Communicative Action (1985). ... A variety of a language is a form that differs from other forms of the language systematically and coherently. ... In linguistics, a register is a subset of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. ... Mode has several meanings: In statistics, the mode is the value that has the largest number of observations, namely the most frequent value or values. ... Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (born 1925) is a linguist who developed an internationally influential grammar model, the systemic functional grammar (which also goes by the name of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). ... In language, a metaphor (from the Greek: metapherin) is a rhetorical trope defined as a direct comparison between two seemingly unrelated subjects. ... Ivor Armstrong Richards (February 26, 1893-1979) was an influential literary critic and rhetorician. ...
The Aztec themselves, according to definite tribal tradition, reached the valley of Mexico from the far North, and linguistic evidence established their connection with the great Shoshonian linguistic stock whose tribes extend almost continuously along the backbone of the continent from the Columbia River to the Isthmus of Panama.
In the same way the Apache and Navajo of the Mexico border are known to have emigrated from the frozen shores of the Yukon and Mackenzie.
The only apparent exceptions to the general rule of decay are the Iroquois, Sioux, and Navaho, the first two of whom have kept up their number by wholesale adoptions, while the Navaho have been preserved by their isolation.
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