Tenor as Interpretive Sleight-of-Hand

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 67):

Analysing the full example as (19) then, the Young Person’s response supports the proposal by speaking and completes the open proposition by specifying what happened (Lecture). As the Convenor followed up their initial command by asking Did she cry? (a complete proposition), the Young Person’s response additionally rejects this tendered proposition. As this example shows, a lot of interpersonal meaning can get negotiated in small stretches of dialogue! To indicate the repositioning, we have added a tilde (~) before the proposal analysis. 

ChatGPT Comments:

🧩 Key Problems and Comment Points

1. Speech Function Slippage

   • The Young Person’s one-word response “Lecture” is being interpreted simultaneously as:

     • a support for the prior proposal (a command, allegedly: “Tell me…”),

     • a completion of the open proposition (“what happened?”), and

     • a rejection of a yes/no proposition (“Did she cry?”).

   • That’s quite the multifunctional load for a single noun with no Mood element.

   • This encourages wild interpretive elasticity under the guise of technical precision.

2. Metaphoric Recycling of Roles

   • The text claims that the response “supports the proposal by speaking,” yet “Tell me what happened…” is an indirect directive (grammatically an interrogative, functionally a command) but is labelled as an open proposition.

   • This labelling of an indirect command as a proposition, only to then claim its proposal status is ‘repositioned,’ is self-undermining. If it's a command in function, why label it as a proposition to begin with?

   • Then they double back with a tilde (~) to acknowledge that maybe it's a proposal after all.

3. Overstretching the Exchange Structure

   • The diagram presents an overly layered vertical analysis that maps interpersonal meanings with a kind of false modularity.

   • It gives the impression of rigour, but it’s simply retrospective interpretive gloss mapped onto grammatical fragments, under the illusion of systemic necessity.

4. Construal Treated as Context

   • The analysis treats interpretive inferences as if they were part of the context structure proper.

   • But interpersonal negotiation is not located in grammar — it is construed by it. This exchange demonstrates interpersonal alignment in negotiation, but that doesn’t mean every clause needs to be labelled as supporting or rejecting.

5. The Tilde as Theoretical Patchwork

   • The introduction of the tilde (~) to mark “proposal” status suggests a deeper incoherence in the system being applied.

   • It’s a workaround — an admission that the model can't cleanly resolve how the utterance functions.