ABSTRACT
Tenor expresses the roles and statuses of the participants in this scene. Their linguistic roles are not created in language; rather they are created in the external, real-world environment. Tenor can express the degree of formality of the relationship—the personal tenor of that relationship—or it may reflect the role that language is playing in the situation—the functional tenor of the relationship. The relationship of tenor to idiolect poses special problems for the second-language learner. A student of another language brings to his learning task all of the habits, knowledge and attitudes of his mother tongue and his culture. Functional and personal tenors may be independent of one another. This is seen typically with certain functional tenors that can hit any point on the formality/familiarity scale. Tenor reflects how the addresser interacts with the addressee in an addressee relationship. The addressee relationship is the situational category, the extra-linguistic reality which is shown through the contextual category of tenor.
