Misunderstanding Engagement And Rebranding A Discretionary Response As Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 43-4):

Various heteroglossic options within engagement which acknowledge and engage with other voices allow speakers to support, reject or note meanings that may or may not have been put forward (Doran, 2020b). For Kristy and her mother, these resources are often drawn upon to reject each other’s positions. They most often do this through heteroglossic denial, realised through explicit negation. As Martin and White (2005) explain, negation is not simply the logical opposite of a positive; rather it works to acknowledge the positive in order to deny it. In this sense, both Kristy and her mother render rejections of positions that have not yet been tendered, so as to, in some sense, ‘head off’ possible lines of argument. 

For example in (20), when Kristy says, don’t want to go out today, she rejects through the n’t the idea that she would want to go out today (a curved arrow is used to indicate that the rejection is to something that hasn’t been previously said). At the same time, by using a full clause, she tenders the proposition that she does not want to go out.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] This characterisation of engagement misrepresents the system's function. Engagement does not allow speakers to “support, reject or note meanings”; rather, it models how speakers position propositions with respect to alternative voices within a dialogic space. To describe engagement as supporting or rejecting meanings confuses semantic positioning with SPEECH FUNCTION. 

The phrase “meanings that may or may not have been put forward” further suggests that engagement tracks actual prior speech acts, rather than positioning utterances within a semantic space of potential viewpoints. This misunderstanding becomes foundational for several later claims.

[2] To be clear, don’t want to go out today is language, not context (tenor). In terms of SPEECH FUNCTION, as an initiating move ("tendering"), it is a statement.

But if it is interpreted as a response to an imaginary move ("rendering"), it could be any of the discretionary responses: rejection of an offer, refusal of a command, contradiction of a statement, or disclaimer to a question, because the SPEECH FUNCTION of the initiating move is unknown. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 137):