Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 69, 84):
Although repositioning is commonly involved in linguistic services, it is in fact a more general resource for re-orienting resources in tenor as other resources. It regularly involves interpersonal grammatical metaphor, in Halliday’s terms.⁶
⁶ Note that while repositioning and interpersonal grammatical metaphor are related, there is not a one-to-one relation. Repositioning is a relation within tenor, realised through discourse semantics, while grammatical metaphor is a relation between (discourse) semantics and lexicogrammar. For example, linguistic services are not typically grammatical metaphors. They grammatically involve a command in the semantics, and so are congruent; the command just happens to be to use language. But the exchange they set up in discourse semantics involves a tension between action (proposal) and knowledge (proposition). The relation is at a higher stratum than grammatical metaphor deals with.
This relation is comparable to the ideational distinction Hao (2020) makes between activity entities in discourse semantics and ideational grammatical metaphors. Activity entities, such as phagocytosis, typically realise activities reconstrued as items in field (Doran and Martin, 2021) and cannot be unpacked – i.e. we cannot say ‘the phagocyte phagocytoses the lysosome’. Comparable ideational grammatical metaphors, such as invasion, are figures within discourse semantics, which means they can be unpacked – i.e. we can say Germany invades France.
This is a laboured way of restating well-known stratal distinctions without actually clarifying the analytic payoff. The attempt to elevate “repositioning” above interpersonal grammatical metaphor is muddied by equivocal terminology and by glossing over the fact that many of the cited examples are simply grammatical metaphors of mood. The supposed “higher-stratum” contrast here risks becoming a pseudo-precision: the description of linguistic services as “commands in the semantics” that are “congruent” but somehow still set up a “tension” between proposals and propositions is simply the familiar congruent/metaphorical relation re-described.
The analogy with Hao’s (2020) ideational categories is strained. “Activity entities” and their (un)packability depend on lexicogrammatical realisation and semantic construal, but here the comparison seems designed more to legitimise the repositioning concept than to illuminate it. Without clear, reproducible criteria for identifying “repositioning” independently of grammatical metaphor, the distinction risks collapsing into a renaming exercise.
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