Rebranding A Metaphor Of Mood As Context (Repositioning)

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 66):

We will begin to explore repositioning through what (Zappavigna & Martin, 2018b), drawing on Ventola (1987), call linguistic services. Linguistic services involve moves in dialogue that command an action, but the action requested is speech. In this sense, they look like they are both demanding action and requesting information. This is illustrated in (17), which is an example from a Youth Justice Conference (a formal legal process that aims to divert young people away from court) given in (Zappavigna & Martin, 2018b).

(17) Convenor: Tell me what happened when mum found out what you did.

Did she cry?

Young Person: Lecture

Convenor: You got a lecture.

This example involves a Convenor, who is responsible for organising the Youth Justice Conference, and the Young Person who has been charged with an offence. In the first line, the Convenor commands the Young Person to tell them what happened, drawing grammatically on an imperative (tell me what happened when mum found out what you did). Commands and imperatives are typically used to propose actions of some sort, and so typically realise proposals in tenor. This could have been more explicitly acknowledged in the dialogue if the Young Person had begun their turn with Yeah sure… to explicitly render support for the proposal. 

But what is being commanded here is that the Young Person speak – and specifically, that they give information. In other words, from the perspective of tenor, the dialogue looks more like it is negotiating an open proposition (what happened when mum found out what you did?). This is highlighted by the fact that once the Young Person gives their response Lecture, the Convenor follows up by rendering it with You got a lecture. Here the Convenor renders the information that is given (i.e,. they respond to the proposition), rather than rendering the action of speaking itself by saying something like thanks. In terms of repositioning, the Convenor is repositioning a proposition as a proposal.

Reviewer Comments:

To be clear, this is simply a metaphor of mood. A demand for information (question) is realised grammatically as an imperative clause, which congruently realises a demand for goods-&-services (command). Because grammatical metaphor is a junctional construct (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 283), the clause tell me what happened when mum found out what you did realises both a demand for information (question) and a demand for goods-&-services (command). In the case of verbal processes, the service demanded is verbal.

In short, the authors here rebrand a metaphorical relation between semantics (speech function) and lexicogrammar (mood) as their system of context (tenor: repositioning). 'Repositioning a proposition as a proposal' is simply the metaphorical realisation of a question by imperative mood.

And again there are the usual confusions of semantics (speech function) with misunderstood context (render, reposition):

• from the perspective of tenor
• rendering it with You got a lecture
• renders the information
• rendering the action of speaking itself by saying
• repositioning a proposition as a proposal

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage again exemplifies the persistent conflation of semantics, lexicogrammar, and context throughout the authors’ framework. What is in fact a textbook instance of grammatical metaphor—an imperative clause (Tell me what happened…) enacting a demand for information (a question)—is redescribed as a contextual repositioning within tenor. The notion that a command to speak realises a proposal, but gets "repositioned" as a proposition because the content is informational, mistakenly substitutes a semantic-lexicogrammatical mapping (mood–speech function) with a contextual relabelling. The metaphorical nature of “verbal services” is already fully accounted for within SFL’s cline of instantiation and stratal organisation. Rather than offering analytic clarity, “repositioning” simply obfuscates this with unnecessary contextual gloss.

Moreover, the authors once again misattribute processes of semantic "rendering" (the response You got a lecture realising a proposition) to the realm of context, where rendering becomes a parameter of tenor. In SFL, such moves are construed in semantics, not context. The shift from one speech function to another, or from one mood structure to another, remains squarely within the semantic and lexicogrammatical strata.