Interpersonal Fog: When Linguistic Resources Are Mistaken For Social Roles

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 56-7):

Negotiating meaning is a two-way affair. People can affiliate, align, gossip, attack, chat etc. by rendering meanings, but they can also do so by tendering meaning. The way people tender meanings implicates a range of interpersonal systems – in particular those of NEGOTIATION, concerned with how people exchange meanings in dialogue (Berry, 1981a; Martin, 1992; Ventola, 1987) and ENGAGEMENT, concerned with how people manage the play of different voices (Martin & White, 2005). As we mentioned in the previous chapter, we are particularly concerned with how these two resources interact as they work together. Work by Muntigl (2009), Kim et al. (2023) and Zhang (2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2021) in particular have highlighted how people position each other as they work toward consensus. These systems in turn implicate a wide range of interpersonal grammatical systems – including the core system of MOOD as well as systems often positioned as supporting MOOD choices, such as TAGGING and MODALITY (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). The way all of these systems engage with tone choices in phonology is also part of the picture (Halliday & Greaves, 2008). 

In short, to understand how people organise social relations, it is not enough to just understand how people react; we also have to look carefully at how people put meaning forward – we draw on a full set of interpersonal resources in language.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] This continues the confusion between context and language. Specifically, the authors mistake the interpersonal linguistic resources for realising tenor for tenor itself, the roles and relationships of the interlocutors in the cultural setting. The authors simply do not understand what different levels of symbolic abstraction actually means, and the sense in which levels are distinct from each other. It is from this failure of understanding that this entire publication proceeds.

[2] The authors here demonstrate their lack of understanding of stratification by using the term 'implicate', which does not describe the relation of symbolic abstraction, instead of the term 'realise', which does. See Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 269).

[3] To be clear, SFL Theory models language in context. The notion of understanding 'how people organise social relations' by just understanding 'how people react' is a rhetorical straw man.