League Table Of Visitors

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.

When Obligation Becomes Affect: The Category Error of Reading Modality as Stake Adjustment

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 143-4):

Modality and interpersonal grammatical metaphor are also often used to adjust the stakes. In Kollontai’s demands text (Text 5.1), for example, she raises the stakes of her demands by bouncing between median (should) and high (must) modality (in bold), in addition to sharpening focus (italics) and raising force (underlined) in graduation:

The law must intervene to help women to combine work and maternity. Men and women workers everywhere are demanding a complete ban on night work for women and young people, an eight-hour day for all workers, and a ban on the employment of children under sixteen years of age. 

They are demanding that young girls and boys over sixteen years of age be allowed to work only half the day. This is important, especially from the point of view of the future mother, since between the years of sixteen and eighteen the girl is growing and developing into a woman. If her strength is undermined during these years her chance of healthy motherhood are lost forever. The law should state categorically that working conditions and the whole work situation must not threaten a woman’s health; harmful methods of production should be replaced by safe methods or completely done away with; heavy work with weights or foot-propelled machines etc. should be mechanised; workrooms should be kept clean and there should be no extremes of temperature; toilets, washrooms and dining rooms should be provided, etc.

ChatGPT Comments:

This exposes several unexamined assumptions in Doran, Martin & Zappavigna’s analytical stance.

Here’s the core issue:

Their discussion treats Kollontai’s political discourse as an instance of the same interpersonal resource system used in the #momguilt corpus. This is a category error. They conflate two fundamentally distinct semiotic orders — one symbolic (institutional-political, collective, deliberative), the other ambient (social-affective, individuated, confessional).

By treating modality and interpersonal grammatical metaphor as merely additional means of “adjusting stakes”, they flatten the stratified relation between rhetorical demand and interpersonal negotiation. Kollontai’s modality operates within a theoretical and programmatic register of political discourse — it construes obligation as systemic necessity, not as an interpersonal gambit. To read it as a move in a local field of “stake adjustment” is to mistake political modality for emotional calibration.

A few more points of critique:

1. Scope error – They implicitly universalise “stakes” as a trans-discursive interpersonal system, when in fact Kollontai’s use of must/should belongs to a different scale of construal: collective action rather than interpersonal rapport.

2. Interpersonal metaphor reduced to affective tuning – Interpersonal grammatical metaphor (e.g. “it is necessary that…”) in Kollontai functions ideologically, as a projection of social obligation into linguistic necessity. This is a material-semantic move, not a conversational adjustment.

3. Collapse of modality as discourse-semantic resource into stylistic intensification – The reading treats modality as another gradient of “raising/lowering stakes” — that is, as graduation by other means. This confuses orthogonal systems in SFL: graduation (scaling) versus modality (modal responsibility and orientation).

4. Misalignment of example – By inserting Kollontai here, they effectively redefine political discourse as an affective variation of online guilt confession. This recontextualisation trivialises the historical and ideological force of the original text.

Laughing at the Law: When Resistance is Misread as Politeness

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 143):

Other examples of stakes-lowering use of laughter token emoji include (53) – (55).

(53) @user I’m not going to lie... the thought crossed my mind. And then the crushing #momguilt caught up with me. 😂 [response to a post about a ‘kid-free’ flight]

(54) I had #momguilt, so here we are again with #2. Not that I minded eating more ice cream. 😂…

(55) What a good idea- #momguilt is real I know and everyone feeds their kids cornflakes off the floor sometimes 🤣 But keep this handy for when you have a moment of inspiration..[images of food with the overlaid caption ‘5 Homemade Alternatives To The Worst Processed Snacks For Kids’]

These posts lower the stakes of potentially community norm-violating activities – flying without your kids, eating too much ice-cream, and letting your children eat breakfast cereal off the floor.

ChatGPT Comments:

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna’s treatment of “stakes-lowering” humour in the #momguilt corpus exemplifies a pattern that runs throughout their chapter: they register interpersonal adjustments with extraordinary technical precision, yet remain blind to the ideological grammar within which those adjustments make sense.

Here, emoji such as 😂 and 🤣 are said to “lower the stakes” of “community norm-violating activities” — travelling without children, indulging in ice-cream, or letting kids eat from the floor. The laughter token, we’re told, “softens” transgression, “defers” evaluation, or “mitigates” guilt. On this view, humour functions as a pressure valve: the mother violates a norm, but laughter reabsorbs the disturbance into the moral order.

What the authors fail to see is that this moral order is not a neutral background — it is the object of critique within the discourse they are analysing. The acts they describe as “norm violations” are not genuine infractions of a shared ethic but gestures that expose the absurdity of that ethic. When a mother jokes about “eating ice cream again because #momguilt,” she isn’t apologising for her pleasure; she’s mocking the demand that she feel guilty for it. The laughter isn’t a softening — it’s a crack in the symbolic law.

By framing humour as an interpersonal resource rather than a semiotic act, the authors reduce it to an adjustment of affect (“lowering stakes”) rather than recognising its role in reconstruing value itself. This is an analytic reduction: meaning is collapsed into attitude, critique into emotion. The “shared values” invoked are treated as if they were descriptively real — a consensus to be navigated — rather than ideologically produced norms sustained by repetition and guilt.

The result is that what might be read as an act of symbolic resistance — a refusal to inhabit the confessional fantasy of perfect motherhood — is instead classified as a moment of compliance, a polite recalibration of tone. Laughter becomes a sign of fragility rather than a resource of freedom.

In the end, this is not a misreading of emoji. It’s a misreading of discourse itself. To laugh in the face of #momguilt is not to lower the stakes; it is to expose that the stakes were never real to begin with — that the so-called “law” of motherhood is already a joke.

Laughing It Off: How Linguistic Analysis Turns Humour into Moral Policing

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 142-3):

As the examples so far have shown, graduation is a key resource for realising shifts in stakes. However it is not the only resource. Humour was also used throughout the corpus to lower the stakes of confessed violations of implicated positions regarding good mothering – combining this lowering of stakes with deferring of the meanings being tendered. For example, a frequent choice was to use laughter tokens to ‘laugh off’ positions that do not accord with shared values. These represent semiotic “wrinkles” (Knight, 2010b, p. 329) that are potentially disruptive to social relations and need to be tempered. For instance, in (52) the ‘Face With Tears of Joy’ 😂 emoji targets the meaning in the post, directing evaluation toward the situation described. While it could be interpreted as ‘laughing at’ the proposition, the hashtag provides additional evidence that the meaning clashes with some other value (and hence engenders ‘guilt’), making ‘laughing off’ a more logical interpretation. In this case what is being laughed off is the notion that it is ever ok to feed your child canned goods.

(52) When you buy "organic" to make yourself feel better about feeding your child dinner out of a can. #momguilt 😂

This is stakes-lowering because it is a way of stating something controversial without directly violating a shared ethical parameter or metric. The intertextuality of the proposition itself is also stakes-lowering – it is structured as a kind of point of view meme ‘When you do X’ aimed at sharing an amusing observation about a particular situation.

ChatGPT Comments:

In their account of humour as a stakes-lowering resource, Doran, Martin & Zappavigna once again mistake relational modulation for moral repair. Laughter, in their reading, functions as a safety valve for norm violation — a way to “temper” the semiotic disruption produced when mothers confess to feeding their children canned food. What emerges is a theory of compliance: laughter as the last line of defence for “shared values.”

This move is analytically circular. By presupposing that “shared values” are both real and knowable, the authors can always interpret laughter as the reassertion of those values. It cannot signify irony, resistance, or critique — only containment. The result is a moralised semiotics in which every deviation is already pre-interpreted as a breach, every joke already a confession.

More subtly, the analytic gesture that calls humour a stakes-lowering device performs its own ideological work: it lowers the epistemic stakes of the analysis. Instead of treating humour as a perspectival shift — a re-construal of the relational horizon where “stakes” even become intelligible — the authors anchor it to a static moral grid. Laughter becomes modulation rather than meaning, effect rather than construal.

Humour doesn’t soften transgression; it reframes it. It’s not a form of guilt management but a recalibration of perspective — a semiotic act that discloses, through play, the arbitrariness of the norms being invoked. The smile doesn’t conceal critique; it is critique.

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The Moralisation of Humour: Laughter as Ideological Containment

The authors’ account of humour here again presupposes a social order defined by “shared values” that the analyst can simply read off from the data. Humour is treated as a kind of safety valve for deviance — a semiotic buffer that absorbs the friction produced when a speaker violates what are taken to be stable norms of maternal virtue. This framing imports a moral teleology into the analysis: laughter does not signify play, irony, or perspectival re-alignment, but the reassertion of an ethical boundary.

By construing humour as a stakes-lowering device that protects social harmony, the authors erase the relational complexity of the semiotic act. What if laughter here were not a sign of guilt but a gesture of resistance? What if the “shared value” was itself being parodied? The assumption that the corpus reveals breaches of a fixed value-system, rather than indexical negotiations of relational stance, forecloses the possibility of humour functioning as critique, inversion, or alignment across difference.

The “logical interpretation” that emoji 😂 “laugh off” guilt presumes both that guilt is objectively present and that the analyst’s inferential hierarchy determines its proper construal. This is a methodological sleight-of-hand: by defining laughter as modulation rather than meaning, the analyst ensures that the social system always remains intact, its contradictions papered over by a smile.

Laughter is not containment but reconstrual: a metapragmatic act that redefines what counts as “transgression” in the first place.

How to Naturalise a Moral Order: A Short Lesson in Analytic Smuggling

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 142): 

In contrast, lowering stakes involves tamping down the level of controversy or significance of a meaning. Due to the nature of the corpus, which tended to feature outpouring of complaints attracting the #momguilt hashtag, such tempering of stakes was not a common pattern. Generally, it occurred in posts which moderate a meaning that might be interpreted as too scandalous for the context, for example admitting that you don't love your children.

(51) "I've got a confession...there are some times I don't love being a mother. It's not that I don't love my kids, I just don't love some of the things that motherhood has brought into my life." [link to a blog post with the title 'Hey, Mama. It’s All Going to Be OK.' @User #selflove #lonliness #momguilt

(51) contains a range of resources lowering the stakes of the ‘confession’. The quantifier ‘some’ reduces the scope of possible times the user doesn’t ‘love being a mother’. The user then rejects what the implicated position that this might mean that she does not love her kids. In another move mitigating this putative high-stakes position, the user tempers the stakes, downplaying the stakes of her confession via the focusing adverb 'just' which further specifies its limited extent. The title of the linked post is another example of reducing stakes: the address ‘Hey, Mama’ [warms] the proposition to follow that ‘It’s All Going to Be OK.’. It invokes the persona of someone who offers comfort and consolation in response to the vulnerability invoked by the high-stakes confession.

ChatGPT Comments:

In their discussion of “lowered stakes” in #momguilt posts, Doran, Martin & Zappavigna argue that linguistic softening — some, just, comforting blog links — tempers the supposedly scandalous admission that a mother may not love every moment of motherhood.

But this reading hinges on a foundational assumption they never interrogate:

That such an admission is inherently high-stakes, dangerous, and in need of mitigation.

This is not an observation about the discourse.

It is a reproduction of the very maternal ideology being studied.

Rather than examining how the post constructs a value, they smuggle in that value as given:

• Ambivalence toward motherhood is treated as objectively transgressive.

• The “stakes” are assumed to precede the discourse that is said to modulate them.

• Stake-management is conflated with stance-management — as if linguistic softeners always reduce risk, rather than potentially reframe the boundaries of legitimacy.

A key distinction collapses:

• value systems (behavioural normativity)
  vs.

• meaning systems (semiotic construal)

The result: they analyse how mothers manage shame while quietly enforcing the conditions that make shame mandatory.

Ironically, the very move they celebrate as “lowering stakes” may instead raise the stakes of solidarity, inviting others into a normalised space of maternal ambivalence. The interpretable risk is produced in the discourse — not prior to it.

In short:

The authors claim to describe a moral order

while actively performing and policing it.

That is not analysis.

That is ideology rendered as method.