Purview: Importing Normativity and Cognition into Systemic Description

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 70):

3.5 Purview: Speaker and listener positioning

There is one further step we need to take in order to understand how social relationships are negotiated through the system of POSITIONING. When negotiating meanings, speakers regularly nuance their messages in relation to the meanings they may share with the listener. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, speakers generally try to massage conversations toward maximising affiliation. That is, in friendly and cooperative conversation, people will generally try to speak in a way that maximises support and agreement; and when disagreement is a possibility, people will tend to soften the message in a way that makes the rejection less risky or impactful. As Zhang (2021) shows, extending the work of Berry (1981a) and Muntigl (2009), a major resource for doing this involves speakers indicating whether or not they have the knowledge being negotiated or not and at the same time position the addressee as either having this knowledge or not.

ChatGPT Comments:

The excerpt introduces Purview: Speaker and listener positioning as a system for understanding how social relationships are negotiated through nuanced messaging related to shared knowledge. However, the presentation relies heavily on normative social generalisations, such as speakers generally seeking to “maximise affiliation” and soften disagreement, which risk universalising culturally specific interactional tendencies rather than describing systemic potential. Moreover, the authors adopt a cognitive framing, attributing motivations and intentions to speakers, which is inconsistent with systemic functional linguistics (SFL) where systems model the potential linguistic choices available rather than psychological states. Overall, the introduction of Purview would benefit from alignment with SFL’s stratal and systemic principles to avoid conflating normative social behaviour and cognitive motivation with the formal organisation of interpersonal meaning.