Rebranding Mood and Engagement as Context: A Stratificational Misstep

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 76-7):

As the examples above suggest, the potential realisations of purview options are diverse – for one thing, purview is very sensitive to phonological and paralinguistic (‘body language’) choices (Halliday & Greaves, 2008; Ngo et al., 2022). For example, like for wh- interrogatives, a distinction between the falling tone 1 and rising tone 2 on a declarative would often distinguish assert from pose.

(44) Kristy: //1 I don’t want to go away from you // assert/proposition

(45) Mother: //2 you don't want to go to Dee’s?// pose/proposition

Similarly, an open posture, supine hand position and/or decentred facial features would typically lessen speaker purview paralinguistically (what (Ngo et al., 2022, p. 144) calls paralinguistic expansion).

ChatGPT Comments:

In their discussion of tenor, Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 76–7) introduce the system of purview, which they locate explicitly at the level of context. At first glance, this seems like a straightforward extension of systemic modelling into new semiotic terrain. But if we look more closely, the theoretical footing becomes much less secure.

The problem is that the categories instantiated in purview are not distinctive features of context at all. Rather, they are drawn wholesale from systems that have long been established at lower strata:

• mood at the level of grammar

• engagement at the level of semantics

In other words, what is presented as a system of context is in fact a duplication of grammar and semantics under a new label.

This move creates several problems:

1. Redundancy. Mood and engagement already provide powerful accounts of how interactional stance is construed and realised. Relabelling these same oppositions as “purview” does no additional theoretical work — it simply duplicates categories already accounted for elsewhere in the stratification.

2. Circularity. If purview is said to be realised by tone, gesture, hand orientation, and so on, we immediately face a problem: mood and engagement are already realised by these same resources. The theory starts chasing its own tail.

3. Stratificational incoherence. In the canonical Hallidayan model, context is a higher-order semiotic stratum, realised by semantics. Its function is to model the situation type, not to repeat semantic or grammatical systems in disguise. By shifting mood and engagement “up” into tenor, context ceases to be an independent plane of abstraction. It collapses into a duplicate description of what is already present in the strata below.

What is at stake here is not just terminological neatness, but the integrity of the architecture itself. If context can be populated by rebranded grammatical and semantic categories, then the delicate explanatory hierarchy of SFL is undermined. Context no longer provides a theory of situation, but becomes an echo chamber of lower-level systems.

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That’s the kernel of it: the “purview” system does not open up new explanatory ground at the level of tenor; it merely duplicates existing accounts, blurring the very stratificational distinctions on which SFL depends.

Reviewer Comments:

See Problems With The Authors' Analysis Of Paralinguistic Engagement