Rebranding Attitude as Positioning

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 46-7):

This discussion also brings us back to the point made above – namely that attitude itself can also indicate rejection or support, as long as there is a target or trigger for the attitude (i.e., it is not what Martin 2017b calls ‘moody’ affect or some other attitude without an explicit trigger or target, as in she’s happy and has no idea why). 

Kristy’s mother relies on this throughout the conversation, sourcing support or rejections to Kristy herself (see Chapter 4), in a bid to show her that she will in fact enjoy being out of the house (we have removed the ‘I think’ in (29) to simplify the analysis, but we will discuss it below). 

There is also one instance where Kristy’s mother renders support not for a full proposition, but for an item day.

This final example highlights that rendered meanings do not need to be whole propositions, but can in fact be of any stretch in meaning. We will return to this point in the following section.

Reviewer Comments:

This excerpt exemplifies the authors’ persistent conflation of semantic choices with contextual parameters—resulting in a confused and confusing analytical framework.

[1] The authors are rebranding positive and negative values within the semantic system of ATTITUDE (White 1998) as support and reject in their proposed contextual system of POSITIONING—which they situate in tenor, despite attending to linguistic resources, not role relationships.

[2] The claim that the mother “supports” day is analytically incoherent. It arises from treating lovely (a token of attitude) as a contextual stance rather than a semantic evaluation. It is you’ll have a lovely day that constitutes an arguable proposition—not the lexical item day in isolation.

The result is a form of reanalysis that prioritises terminological novelty over semantic clarity—obscuring meaning beneath a veneer of innovation.

At stake here is not an advance in theory but a rebranding exercise: established semantic systems are redescribed using newly coined contextual terms, giving the illusion of innovation where there is merely renaming.