Positioning Mispositioned: Stratal Collapse in the Semantics–Context Interface

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 56):

In the previous chapter we explored how people react to various positions through rendering. We noted that people can render positions that have been previously tabled in dialogue as separate moves, or they can render implied positions that have not yet been introduced. We also saw that people can render positions at the same time as they tender them. Throughout that chapter we were concerned with the different ways people can react to positions, in terms of supporting them, rejecting them, noting them and others, and the ways these can be realised. What we did not explore, however, was the different ways people put things forward for negotiation – the different ways people tender meanings. This is the focus of the present chapter. In particular, we will focus on how people tender meanings so as to position others to respond – to support or reject, to do something or to say something, or to tender a whole new set of meanings.

ChatGPT Comments:

This paragraph makes visible a foundational confusion in the authors’ account: the conflation of meaning with position, and the mis-stratalisation of positioning itself. According to the authors, speakers “tender meanings so as to position others to respond” — a formulation that oscillates between the semantic and the contextual without distinguishing them.

In systemic functional theory, tenor is not a behavioural feature of text but a configuration of intersubjective relations — that is, a dimension of context construed through linguistic choices. It is enacted by, but not identical with, those choices. “Positioning,” as described here, is thus not tenor itself but a semantic resource through which tenor is construed. If positioning is treated as a linguistic act — as this chapter does — then it must be located at the level of semantics, not context.

By treating positioning as a component of tenor while simultaneously analysing it in terms of specific wordings (e.g. don’t you, how about), the authors misplace it both ontologically and stratally. The result is a blurred theoretical frame in which context is reduced to language, and language inflated to context — a move that ultimately erodes the explanatory power of both.