League Table Of Visitors

Overstated Ambition and Stratification Missteps

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 151):

This focus and diversity of approaches to tenor emphasises the rich and multifaceted nature of language in relation to society – something we need to grasp in all its complexity if we wish to build a truly social semiotic theory (Halliday, 1978; Hodge & Kress, 1988). While this complexity has long been recognised and descriptions formulated, SFL theory itself has not always kept pace. Stemming at least from the early work of Hasan (e.g. 1973) and advanced through its long interaction with social theory (e.g. Bernstein, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1990; Bernstein, 1996/2000), there has been a recognition of the need of an increasingly expansive theory to account for the role of language in society. With the development of dimensions of instantiation (Halliday, 1991a; Matthiessen, 1993), which conceptualises the relation between the systemic potential of language and the instance of text, and individuation (Martin, 2010), which conceptualises the relation between the reservoir of meaning in a language community and the repertoire of an individual (c.f. Bernstein, 1996/2000), we are now in a stronger position to move toward a richer understanding of the interconnection between language and society. We embarked on this book project because we felt that SFL had not yet reached its potential in this regard.

ChatGPT Comments:

The excerpt foregrounds the authors’ ambition to extend SFL toward a richer social semiotic, situating this ambition in terms of “dimensions of instantiation” and “individuation.” While presented as an innovative move, several critical issues arise:

1. Overstatement of novelty
   The authors suggest that prior SFL “has not always kept pace” with the complexity of social relations and that their framework addresses a theoretical gap. Yet much of what they claim as new—particularly the relation of systemic potential to text (instantiation) and the community–individual nexus (individuation)—is already thoroughly theorised in canonical SFL work. Framing it as a corrective overstates novelty and risks implying that Halliday, Hasan, and others were inattentive to social complexity, which is misleading.

2. Misplaced theoretical apparatus
   Although instantiation and individuation are invoked, they are largely absent in the analytic work itself. Instead, the authors operate through a lens of stratification—but here, even this is muddled. Established semantic systems (e.g., Appraisal, Graduation, Engagement) are mislocated from their proper stratum into context as purported “tenor systems”. This conflates strata: patterns of interpersonal meaning within language are treated as features of social context. The result is a conceptual flattening that collapses semantic, contextual, and interpersonal distinctions.

3. Implicit epistemic claim
   The statement “we are now in a stronger position to move toward a richer understanding of the interconnection between language and society” functions as an epistemic assertion about the book’s contribution. While aspirational, it should be tempered: SFL’s existing machinery already addresses links between language, society, and individual construal. The claimed contribution lies more in deployment and emphasis than in a radical conceptual advance.

Summary

This excerpt exemplifies a common rhetorical strategy in theoretical expansions: foregrounding ambition and framing existing constructs as insufficient to justify a new lens. In this case, the ambition is overstated, existing SFL resources are mislocated and renamed, and the promised integration of instantiation and individuation is largely unrealised. Readers should recognise that the novelty is less about conceptual revolution and more about the reconfiguration of established SFL machinery under a new nomenclature.

Tenor’s Elasticity: When Conceptual Generosity Becomes Theoretical Evasion

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 151):

Tenor, the interpersonal dimension of context, has been one of the key means through which we conceptualise the maintenance of our social relations in SFL. But as we noted in Chapter 1, the centrality of the social in our semiotic life has meant that throughout the history of SFL, tenor has been made to do many at times incommensurate things (Doran, Martin & Herrington, 2024). It has been used for example to classify different interpersonal contexts (e.g., Halliday 1978); it has been used to described the people involved and their social relationships, whether stable or temporary roles (e.g. Gregory, 1967; Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Hasan, 2016a, 2016b), it has been used to understand the general dimensions upon which people can relate, including their statuses and affective involvement (e.g., (Eggins & Slade, 1997; Martin, 1992; Poynton, 1990a), Martin 1992, Hasan 2016); and it has been considered in terms of the underlying social values that are imbued in some domain (e.g., (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). In addition, though typically not in writing, tenor is in fact often used as a conversational short-hand in SFL circles for social relations in general.

ChatGPT Comments:

The final chapter begins with an apparently modest admission: that tenor has been made to do “many incommensurate things” throughout the history of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The authors catalogue its shifting uses — as the interpersonal dimension of context, as a taxonomy of social relationships, as an index of status and affective involvement, as a shorthand for social relations more broadly. The list is offered as evidence of richness, even vitality. Tenor, we are told, has proven versatile enough to adapt to diverse theoretical and analytic purposes.

But this supposed elasticity is less a sign of theoretical fertility than of cumulative slippage. What the authors describe as a history of adaptation is, in fact, a genealogy of unresolved conflations — above all, the repeated collapse of stratal distinction between context and semantics. Halliday originally introduced tenor as a contextual variable realised by semantics: one dimension of the contextual configuration (alongside field and mode) that language enacts. Yet over time, the term has been stretched to cover interpersonal relations themselves, social values, even affective tone. What began as an abstract variable in a stratified model of semiosis has drifted into the realm of social ontology.

By acknowledging this drift without problematising it, the text converts a theoretical symptom into a rhetorical virtue. “Tenor has been made to do many things,” they say — but the real question is why it was allowed to do so. Each redefinition, from Poynton to Martin to Hasan, quietly relocated tenor within a different ontological register: sometimes as a parameter of context, sometimes as an aspect of discourse semantics, sometimes as a shorthand for social life itself. These recontextualisations are not simply alternative descriptions; they are mutually incompatible construals of the relation between system, instance, and social process.

By smoothing this history into a seamless continuum, the chapter naturalises contradiction as if it were theoretical pluralism. The result is a kind of conceptual amnesty: the reader is invited to accept tenor’s multiplicity as a matter of interpretive flexibility rather than analytic incoherence. But theoretical consistency matters — not for pedantry’s sake, but because without it, we lose the capacity to locate where social meaning is being made. If tenor is sometimes context, sometimes semantics, sometimes society, then the very distinction between semiotic and social dissolves into metaphor.

The irony is that the authors’ own project depends on precisely this looseness. The systems of tuning and spirit rely on tenor functioning as an elastic membrane between linguistic description and social interpretation. That elasticity is not a feature of Halliday’s model — it’s the condition that makes their reinterpretation possible. The cost is that tenor ceases to be a theoretically stable construct and becomes instead a discursive lubricant: the category that makes slippage feel smooth.

In celebrating tenor’s versatility, then, the authors inadvertently complete its conceptual unmooring. What was once a contextual variable has become a floating signifier for the interpersonal itself — a word that gestures toward social texture without naming the stratal work by which it is semiotically realised. Theoretical generosity becomes, in this sense, a form of evasion: the refusal to decide where meaning lives.

Summary: Chapter 5 – Tuning

Chapter 5 presents Tuning as a new system for adjusting interpersonal meaning, structured around three clinal dimensions: Scope (breadth of address), Stakes (degree of risk), and Spirit (affective tone). The chapter positions Tuning as a discrete system that complements Positioning and Orienting, offering additional ways to calibrate how meanings are “tendered” in discourse. However, a close reading reveals several critical issues in its conceptualisation and analytic necessity.

1. Redundancy with existing SFL resources

Each of Tuning’s dimensions overlaps heavily with established systemic-functional categories:

• Scope parallels Engagement and Graduation, as well as reference and membership categorisation devices, capturing inclusivity/exclusivity and group alignment.

• Stakes is largely a repackaging of Graduation (force/focus) and Engagement (proclaim vs entertain), with its “risk” defined relationally by background values rather than independently observable linguistic features.

• Spirit mirrors Attitude (Affect, Judgement, Appreciation) and interacts with Graduation and Engagement to produce “tone,” yet is presented as a separate dimension labelled with a metaphorical “vibe.”

Across all three dimensions, Tuning risks terminological inflation — taking familiar linguistic and discourse-semantic resources, giving them new labels, and promoting them as a distinct system.

2. Slippage between linguistic description and social interpretation

Tuning repeatedly blurs the boundary between:

• Observable linguistic patterns (pronouns, vocatives, quantifiers, hashtags, emojis, commands), and

• Inferred social consequences (disruption of community values, high-stakes positions, warmth or hostility in social bonds).

For instance, the notion of “stakes” relies on an analyst’s projection of social significance within a community, rather than on measurable linguistic features. Similarly, “spirit” uses impressionistic affective labels (warm/warn) that risk turning description into subjective commentary. These slippages undermine the claim that Tuning is a discrete linguistic system.

3. Circularity and dataset constraints

The chapter sometimes embeds Tuning in the corpus design itself (e.g., #momguilt posts), producing circular validation: scope appears everywhere because the dataset was selected to foreground a particular community, which then reinforces the impression that scope is a systematic resource.

4. Meta-system framing

Ultimately, Tuning functions more as a meta-functional overlay, a way of describing how existing resources (Appraisal, Engagement, Graduation, reference devices) can be “adjusted” across a continuum, rather than as a system with independent analytic status. Its conceptual appeal lies in metaphorical clarity (scope, stakes, spirit), but the theoretical necessity is weak.

Conclusion

While Tuning offers an engaging and accessible metaphor for how interpersonal meaning can be adjusted, it largely repackages established SFL categories, blurs analytic strata, and imports social interpretation into linguistic description. Its main contribution may be pedagogical — helping readers think about alignment, risk, and tone — rather than extending the theoretical apparatus of SFL. Readers should approach Tuning with an appreciation of its rhetorical and descriptive value, but with caution regarding its analytic independence.

Tuning Conclusion

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 149):

This chapter has introduced the role of tuning in the orchestration of interpersonal meaning. We have explored some of the key meanings made in a corpus of #momguilt tweets within which mothers vent their frustrations over contravening community expectations about the behaviour and temperament of 'good moms'. As we have seen, whether the vibe is convivial or conflictual, the meanings tendered in social media posts may be adjusted via the TUNING system by modifying their relation to other meanings already tendered in a previous post or with broader background values positioned by a particular community. This might involve adjusting the amount of risk or controversy they engender (STAKES), the breadth of the voices they include or assume (SCOPE), or their level of approachability or reproach they enact (SPIRIT). These distinctions in meaning are encapsulated as the TUNING system (Figure 5.1).

ChatGPT Comments:

In their conclusion, the authors present the TUNING system as orchestrating interpersonal meaning through stakes, scope, and spirit. They emphasise that social media posts can be “adjusted via the TUNING system by modifying their relation to other meanings already tendered…or with broader background values positioned by a particular community.” On the surface, this captures the relational dynamism of online interaction.

The problem lies in how the empirical coordination of resources is treated as if it constitutes the contextual systems of tenor. Throughout the chapter, we see emoji, appraisal, punctuation, vocatives, and hashtags appearing in complex combinations. These are co-deployed resources, empirically observable, and they do interact with stakes, scope, and spirit. But the authors present them as if each combination instantiates the tenor system itself — that is, as if context is being directly “written into” the posts rather than being construed through them.

This conflation collapses a critical stratification distinction. Tenor is a system of context, representing social roles, relations, and participant alignments. It exists independently of any particular token of language, emoji, or other semiotic resource. Treating empirical co-occurrences as direct instantiations of tenor blurs the line between what users do in interaction and the contextual plane of social relations.

In short, the chapter’s conclusion risks flattening the semiotic hierarchy: language, paralinguistic signs, and contextual strata are treated as equivalent, rather than recognising the nested, interacting nature of strata. The empirical evidence of co-deployment is fascinating and illuminates how tuning operates in practice — but it does not absolve the need for theoretical precision about what resides in context versus what resides in language or multimodal semiotic resources.

The Mood of Misplaced Modality

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 146):

Looking multimodally, spirit is also the realm of colour in images and sound quality in film (Painter, Martin, & Unsworth, 2013; Van Leeuwen, 1999). These resources work to tinge the scenes being presented in ways that make them eery and dark or happy and cheerful and form a crucial resource for setting the mood and ambience of a text. Exploring this takes us further than we can go in this book, but it indicates that a major area of work in terms of our understanding of tenor resources will be to flesh out how these feelings are built across modalities.

ChatGPT Comments:

Here, “spirit” is expanded beyond language into visual and sonic media — colour in images, sound quality in film — as if all mood phenomena across modalities could be gathered under the same interpersonal rubric. The move appears intuitive: warmth in colour, brightness in sound, or cheerfulness in tone all seem to parallel friendliness in linguistic tenor. Yet this extension rests on a categorical conflation: it treats affective ambience (a semiotic effect) as equivalent to interpersonal tenor (a contextual variable).

The problem is structural. “Spirit” is already misplaced as a system of tenor rather than semantics; the multimodal move compounds this by dissolving the stratification boundaries entirely. The authors move from contextual tenor (social relations) to semantic mood (interpersonal meaning) to perceptual colouring (semiotic effect) without distinguishing between levels of realisation. Mood in music and colour in image are not tenor resources — they are ideationally construed affective tones, realised through distinct mode-specific systems (hue, saturation, timbre, tempo). Their affective force belongs to the phenomenal domain of sensory construal, not to the interpersonal semantics of linguistic exchange.

This is the terminal stage of the “spirit” slippage: what began as interpersonal alignment in language becomes a free-floating “vibe” across all media. In collapsing the semiotic architecture into an affective continuum, the model abandons its own theoretical stratification. Meaning dissolves into mood, context into feeling, tenor into tone. 

The Diminutive Fallacy

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 146):

As we have seen above, another regular resource for spirit involves naming. When Kristy tries to explain to her mother that she doesn’t want to go out, she used the Vocative mummy – which, when contrasted with mum or the markedly formal mother – makes clear that although she is rejecting her mother’s attempts at getting her to leave the house, she is saying these rejections with love (Poynton 1990).

(67) Kristy Mummy… I don’t want to go away from you.

As Poynton notes, naming in this regard offers a highly nuanced set of gradations of warming and warning. Crudely speaking, this means we can order names of people in terms of the degree to which they show warmth – from full names to shortened personal names to nicknames to nicknames with iterated suffixes. To return to Chapter 1 and take the names of the first author that his mother uses for him as an example, we can arrange the names from least warmth to most: Yaegan John Doran, Yaegan John, Yaegan, Yaeg, Yaegy, Yaegy-J, Yaegy-JJ, Yaegy-JJJ, Yaegy-JJJJJ.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage exposes most clearly the slippage that sustains “spirit” as a pseudo-system: the conflation of cultural folk models of warmth with semiotic organisation. The authors propose that naming “offers a highly nuanced set of gradations of warming and warning,” citing Poynton (1990) — but what they take from Poynton is not a systemic account of tenor, but a commonsense psychology of affection reinterpreted through a Hallidayan idiom.

1. The regression to folk affect

The notion that “Yaegan John Doran” is “less warm” than “Yaegy-JJJJJ” is not an observation about semiotic potential, but a retrospective reading of interpersonal intimacy within a particular sociocultural setting (Anglo middle-class family discourse). It mistakes a local affective convention for a universal semiotic gradient, presenting social familiarity as if it were a parametric axis of meaning. In doing so, it transforms registerial variation into mood ornamentation — a drift from systemic potential to the micropsychology of personal tone.

2. From tenor to temperament

Crucially, the authors again misplace the system. Naming belongs to the lexicogrammar as a realisation of tenor (context), not as a manifestation of a separate “system of spirit.” Tenor variables (status, contact, affect) are realised through the lexicogrammatical resources available — including vocatives — which means there is no additional stratum in which these are recombined as “spirit.” To treat “Mummy” or “Yaegy-JJJJJ” as evidence of a separate semiotic system of warmth is to reify affective interpretation as if it were systemic structure.

3. The iterative joke and the semiotic cut

The “Yaegy-JJJJJ” example, intended humorously, inadvertently demonstrates the absurdity of this model. The playful iteration of suffixes is not a continuous scaling of warmth; it is a metapragmatic parody of intimacy — a reflexive construal of how naming indexes closeness. That is, the example itself makes visible the distinction between sign and meta-sign, between interpersonal meaning and its commentary. Yet the authors conflate these layers, treating the parody as a natural extension of affective warmth.

4. The anthropological blind spot

Underlying this whole reasoning is an unexamined anthropological assumption: that “warmth” is a universally legible social-affective dimension. This presupposes a monosemic affective space, erasing the cultural and interpersonal specificity of naming practices. In many languages, morphological elaboration or diminutives do not correspond to affective warmth at all, but to irony, mitigation, or even insult. The model thus projects a local cultural intuition as if it were a general systemic law.

5. Semiotic misplacement: spirit as epiphenomenon

Naming patterns are not carriers of spirit; they are one among many resources through which tenor is construed. The warmth or warning that Doran, Martin, and Zappavigna attribute to these vocatives does not pre-exist as a distinct stratum — it is an interpretative effect arising from tenor relations. “Spirit” therefore functions not as a theoretical system but as a label for folk affective interpretation, positioned above the lexicogrammar but below context, without any systemic justification for its existence. 

The Paralinguistic Projection: When Warmth Replaces Architecture

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 146):

In spoken language, voice quality and facial paralanguage are key carriers of spirit. A relatively high-pitched, loud voice with a smile will tend to indicate warmth, no matter what is being said, while a relatively low and soft voice with a narrow range of pitch and a frown will tend to indicate warning (or negative spirit in general) (Ariztimuño, Drefyus, & Moore, 2022; Ngo et al., 2022). In written language these voice quality features are often replaced by other paralinguistic features, including emoji as shown above. Punctuation is also a key resource in this regard, though this seems to vary by generation. For a millennial such as the first author for example, the following three text messages from a parent have very different spirit.

(64) Ok!

(65) Ok

(66) Ok.

The first is said, as it were, with a smile – the exclamation mark indicating a warm, happy response. The second, without any punctuation, is relatively neutral. The third with a full stop indicates something is wrong – whatever was said previously means they are now in trouble (whether or not the parent intends this!).

🧩 ChatGPT Comments:

This passage enacts a subtle but telling confusion between modality of expression and mode of meaning. The authors collapse paralinguistic phenomena (voice quality, gesture, emoji) into a single continuum of “spirit,” as though all were functional equivalents distributed across channels. Yet this move erases the semiotic distinctness of each medium — and with it, the stratified architecture of meaning that Halliday’s model was built to protect.

First, the leap from voice quality and facial paralanguage in speech to emoji and punctuation in writing assumes a direct substitutive relation — as if emoji were “replacements” for prosody. But prosody and punctuation do not occupy homologous positions in the semiotic hierarchy. Prosody is a phonological realisation of interpersonal meaning within spoken language; punctuation is a graphological convention governing textual cohesion and rhythm in writing. Emoji, by contrast, are iconic adjuncts drawn from the visual modality — not linguistic realisations but co-deployed images that stand in relation to language rather than within it. To claim these three operate as equivalent carriers of “spirit” is therefore to conflate phonology, graphology, and imagery — three distinct semiotic systems.

Second, the authors’ casual notion that the “Ok!” / “Ok” / “Ok.” triad expresses different spirit values reveals a slippage from empirical description to idiolectal intuition. These differences are indeed conventionally interpretable in digital discourse, but their interpretation depends on sociolectal norms, not paralinguistic universals. To treat this as generational (“for a millennial such as the first author”) is to further mistake cultural patterning for linguistic encoding — an indexical effect is treated as a semantic system. This is precisely the kind of category error that occurs when contextual correlates of meaning are mislocated within language.

Finally, the authors invoke “negative spirit” as though it were a measurable interpersonal feature — but “spirit,” as they deploy it, is neither a system nor a stratum. It is an experiential metaphor for the affective ambience of a message, not a semiotic function in its own right. The result is a flattening of ontological depth: language, paralanguage, and context are treated as interchangeable vectors of tone, all carrying the same mysterious essence called “spirit.”

In short, this passage exemplifies the paralinguistic projection error — projecting features of embodied performance onto writing, then mistaking their correlates for linguistic functions. It repeats the earlier stratification error (collapsing semantics into context) and compounds it with a modality conflation (collapsing sound, writing, and image).

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Reflective Coda: The Soft Ontology of Feeling

Across this chapter, the same pattern recurs: a gradual erosion of semiotic boundaries in the name of empathy. Each time “spirit” or “tone” is invoked, distinctions between language, image, and context blur — as if warmth of feeling required ontological softness. But empathy does not arise from flattening structure; it arises from inhabiting difference. When we conflate strata to explain “feeling,” we lose not only theoretical clarity but the very relational depth that meaning depends upon. 

The Spiriting Fallacy

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 145-6):

In addition to clear positive or negative spiriting, more nuanced possibilities were present in the corpus. Humour and sarcasm were used throughout to combat prevailing cultural positions about mothers. For example, in (63) the user employs parody to play the voice of a critical other, positioned as telling the user to pay attention to the fleeting pleasures of mothering despite the grind of daily routine.

(63) 2 more weeks of #summer. Today I'm letting the #Xbox babysit. I know: treasure every moment.🙄 #boymom #badmom #momguilt #SorryNotSorry

The 'Face With Rolling Eyes' 🙄 emoji together with the #SorryNotSorry reveal the underlying position of the user, and their combative defensive tone invokes the presence of far-reaching or ongoing criticism that needs to be dispelled or quashed.

ChatGPT Comments:

In their treatment of “spiriting,” the authors again misread a complex interpersonal process as a simple modulation of tone. They describe example (63) as a case of “parody” and “combative defensive tone,” where the 🙄 emoji and #SorryNotSorry supposedly “reveal the underlying position of the user.”

Yet parody and sarcasm do not simply colour tone. They restructure it. Irony, humour, and parody introduce stratified stances — one voice staging or mocking another. Here, the mother is not merely being “defensive” or “combative.” She is performing the absurdity of the cultural injunction to “treasure every moment,” revoicing the voice of normative motherhood in order to expose it.

The 🙄 emoji, in this light, does not “reveal” affect but distances it: a visual gesture of refusal to inhabit the sentimental script being parodied. What is being signalled is not tone, but a meta-affective stance — a comment on the affective economy itself.

By reducing this layered irony to a one-dimensional “tone shift,” the authors commit what we might call the spiriting fallacy: mistaking reflexive stance for scalar adjustment. The irony collapses; the polyphony is flattened. What was a discursive performance of critique becomes, in their analysis, a mere tuning of interpersonal tenor — another instance of attitude management rather than ideological play.

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Both The Spiriting Fallacy and The Emoji Error expose the same underlying confusion in the authors’ framework: a collapse of strata and modes. In The Emoji Error, the semiotic distinction between language and its visual accompaniments was erased; in The Spiriting Fallacy, the interpersonal distinction between affect and stance is dissolved. In both cases, what should be modelled as reflexive play within the interpersonal semantics of language is instead displaced upward into “tenor,” where meaning becomes tone and critique becomes mood. The result is a theoretical anaesthesia: language stripped of its irony, humour, and resistance — flattened into a single dimension of “feeling nicely or not.”

The Spirited Misstep: When Emojis and GIFs Stand in for Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 145):

ChatGPT Comments:

In their discussion of spiriting, the authors continue to treat emoji, GIFs, exclamation marks, and hashtags as resources of tenor, implying they primarily function as contextual markers of social stance. 

The GIF, high-five emoji, and middle-finger emoji are semantically and semiotically active, contributing affective and attitudinal meaning. They are not linguistic realisations of tenor; they are visual, gestural, and multimodal resources that accompany text. Similarly, hashtags encode evaluation, political alignment, and social positioning simultaneously — they are not “pure context,” but meaning-bearing devices that shape the interpretation of the post.

By framing these semiotic resources as tenor, the authors repeat the stratification error: conflating the semantic system of interpersonal meaning with the contextual stratum. They also commit a semiotic error, treating cross-modal signs — visual, gestural, or pictorial — as if they were linguistic. The result is a flattening of the meaning-making process, where tone, evaluation, and alignment are reduced to a single, ill-defined dimension. In short, the “spirited” post is not social context; it is a multimodal semantic performance, one that cannot be shoehorned neatly into tenor without collapsing the distinctions that make stratal analysis meaningful.

More precisely:

This excerpt continues the pattern we identified in the previous discussion of spiriting, and there are some points worth noting from a critical perspective, though the issues are subtler here.

1. Stratification confusion persists. The authors continue to present emoji, exclamation marks, vocatives, and hashtags as if they instantiate a system of tenor (“spiriting”), implying that these resources exist in the contextual stratum rather than in the semantic stratum. Yet, these items are clearly meaning-bearing resources within the post. For instance, the high-five GIF, the exclamation marks, and the middle-finger emoji are semantically expressive — they contribute affective and attitudinal meaning, not just social positioning. The authors’ framework again risks collapsing semantics into context, flattening the stratal hierarchy.

2. Emoji as cross-modal semiotic resources. Just as with the heart and kiss-face emoji earlier, the GIF, high-five emoji, and middle-finger emoji are pictorial or gestural signs that co-deploy with text. They do not have grammatical or semantic properties of language itself; they are visual/affective accompaniments. Treating them as linguistic realisations of “spiriting” once more blurs the boundary between language and non-language semiotics.

3. Hashtags as hybrid resources. The hashtags #momknowsbest and #VoteBlueToSaveAmerica are doing multiple things simultaneously: they contribute to scoping, position the speaker, and provide affective alignment. They are not contextual; they are semantically active, encoding evaluative, social, and political meaning. The authors’ framing risks treating multifunctional semantic resources as simple markers of tenor, which is theoretically misleading.

4. Polarity of spiriting and scope. While the excerpt acknowledges positive and negative spiriting (e.g., supportive high-five vs. middle-finger warning), the same critique applies: these resources are semantic and semiotic, not contextual. The political and evaluative hashtags suggest a broader social scope, but the meaning is still realised within the post — meaning is not “context,” it is instantiated via semiotic resources.

Summary:

This excerpt reinforces the dual error noted earlier: the stratification error (misplacing semantic meaning in context) and the semiotic error (treating multimodal signs as linguistic). The GIFs, emojis, exclamations, and hashtags are not purely contextual markers but semantically potent, cross-modal resources. Conceptually, the authors conflate scope, evaluation, and affect with social positioning. The analytical consequence is a flattening of meaning, where tone, alignment, and social stance are reduced to a single “tenor” dimension rather than being recognised as emergent from the interplay of semantic and semiotic strata.

The Emoji Error

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 145):

ChatGPT Comments:

In their discussion of spiriting, the authors introduce a category that purports to “shift the tone” of a message — for instance, through vocatives or emoji that make a post appear more positive or negative in tenor. Their example reads:

@User That's a hard thing to remember these days, the #momguilt is real! Thx for saying so! ❤️😘

They argue that the heart and kiss-face emoji “colour the position overall in positive feelings,” while emphasising that, unlike rendering, these do not target anything in particular. 

The problem is that spiriting is situated in the wrong stratum. The authors treat it as a system of tenor — and thus of context — when it is clearly a resource of semantics. If something modulates tone, feeling, or interpersonal alignment, it operates within the interpersonal semantic system, not above it. To locate spiriting in tenor is to confuse the semiotic realisation of feeling with the contextual variable that construes social relations. This is a classic instance of the stratification error: mistaking the patterns of meaning within language for the conditions around it.

Compounding this confusion is a semiotic misstep: the authors treat emoji as if they were linguistic. Yet emoji are not language; they are pictorial accompaniments that co-deploy with language to evoke or supplement its meaning. The heart emoji, for instance, represents an image of positive affect, while the kiss-face represents body language. Both are cross-modal signs, drawing on the visual and affective resources of image and gesture rather than the grammatical and semantic resources of language. To treat them as linguistic realisations of “tone” is to blur the semiotic boundary between language and its paralinguistic co-instantiations.

In short, the emoji error is twofold: the stratification error (misplacing a semantic system in context) and the semiotic error (treating a multimodal accompaniment as linguistic realisation). The result is an ontological flattening — language, image, and gesture are conflated; semantics and context are collapsed. The “spirit” of discourse is lost not in tone but in translation — between modes, strata, and the very orders of meaning themselves.

Lowering the Stakes of Theory: How ‘Modality Metaphor’ Became Emotional Tone

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 144):

Modality metaphor can also be used to lower the stakes of a proposition in terms of its certainty:

(56) I guess that’s me off the hook for the kids dinner 🍕#NationalPizzaDay #MomGuilt

This occurs during Kristy and her mother’s discussion, where her mother tentatively puts forward an initial suggestion of why Kristy is upset, using I don’t think and I think:

(57) I don’t think you’re really upset about me going, I think you’re upset because the TV wasn’t working.

Kristy and her mother’s conversation is filled with lowered stakes in this regard. In the following stretch from later in the conversation, for instance, Kristy wants to give her baby sister Ruth a cuddle. To do this, Kristy draws on interpersonal grammatical metaphor (specifically mood metaphor) to lower the stakes of her requests using can I questions, to realise proposals (in bold). Despite this, however, her mother rejects her requests. But she does this rejection while also lowering the stakes – first by tendering another position rather than outright rejection and second through modality metaphor 'I think' (in italics), in addition to other resources underlined. Nonetheless, her mother’s rejection sends Kristy back into her high-takes crying.

(58) Kristy can I give her a cuddle?

Mother I don’t think she wants her cuddle just now.

Kristy: She doesn’t like me (CRIES)

Mother: No come on, sometimes you don’t want to be cuddled either.

Kristy: … could you umm put her on my lap like a little possum?

Mother: (TO RUTH) Do you want to sit on Kristy’s lap? (RUTH REFUSES)

No?

(TO KRISTY) I think she’d like to stay here for the moment

Kristy: No (CRIES)

Interpersonal metaphors are regular resources for lowering the stakes, but they can also raise the stakes of a proposition.

(59) It's raining so I'm sure he won't go outside. Still #momguilt. - [name]

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage exemplifies the slippage that occurs when interpersonal resources are read psychologically rather than semiotically. Doran, Martin & Zappavigna treat modality — whether metaphorical or congruent — as a scalar of emotional certainty rather than as a system for negotiating validity or obligation within a semiotic exchange. The analytic gaze here never rises above the interpersonal plane: “lowering the stakes” is reduced to “sounding softer” or “feeling less sure.”

But modality does not merely express affect; it enacts alignment. A clause like “I think she’d like to stay here for the moment” doesn’t lower emotional intensity — it reconfigures the speech function by shifting commitment to a proposition through metaphorical mood. The authors’ reading translates this into a psychologised drama of reassurance and rejection, collapsing systemic delicacy into conversational empathy.

In short: modality is not therapy, and grammatical metaphor does not “soothe” propositions. By conflating interpersonal modulation with emotional mitigation, the analysis once again psychologises semiosis — mistaking the calibration of commitment for the calibration of comfort.

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Or if you prefer…

In this section, Doran, Martin, and Zappavigna treat modality metaphor as a mechanism for “lowering the stakes” of interpersonal exchange, aligning grammatical choice with affective tact rather than with the construal of epistemic stance. Their examples—from “I guess that’s me off the hook” to Kristy’s child-mother dialogue—show how interpersonal metaphor is reinterpreted as a kind of emotional cushioning device.

In Hallidayan terms, interpersonal grammatical metaphor involves the instantiation of a semantic selection in a lexicogrammatical form that enacts that meaning incongruently. The theoretical point of this incongruence is not politeness, but perspective: the metafunctional organisation of meaning allows the speaker to construe the same stance through alternate structural realisations. In other words, modality metaphor is a meaning-technical phenomenon, not an emotional strategy.

By contrast, Doran et al. interpret the use of I think and I don’t think as instances of “lowered stakes” in an interpersonal exchange, as if modality operated to regulate social temperature. The result is a theoretical inversion: the example is made to demonstrate empathy, while the system that enables such construals of stance disappears from view.

The irony is that, in translating modality into tact, they themselves lower the theoretical stakes. The shift from systemic-functional description to pragmatic psychology re-metaphorises the semiotic system it purports to analyse: I think no longer realises modality, it performs sensitivity. The framework that once mapped the semiotic potentials of interpersonal meaning is reduced to an interpretive shorthand for “gentler speech.”

In the end, what is presented as a case study in stake-management becomes a case study in theoretical drift: modality metaphor, once a principle of systemic meaning variation, is redescribed as the modulation of social comfort. The stakes lowered, indeed.