The Offer Overwritten: When Purview Distorts the Exchange

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 76):

This allows us to understand in more detail the purview of offers in exchanges (exchanges with Da1^A2^A1 as its structure, in Berry’s terms) – as illustrated by (43) from the same text (leaving aside the repositioning). In this example, Kristy’s mother offers to fill the cup. In doing so, she gives internal purview to Kristy to decide whether the action of filling the cup will happen (internal pose), while giving herself purview over actually doing the cup filling (external assert).

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In (43), Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 76) attempt to extend their two-tiered account of purview to offers. The example involves Kristy’s mother offering to fill a cup, with Kristy specifying Nearly up to the top. The analysis assigns internal purview to Kristy (she decides whether the cup will be filled) and external purview to the mother (she performs the filling).

This layering produces the same categorical problems we saw with commands. The mother’s initiating move Do you want the cup full? is analysed as both a proposal and an external assert. Yet once again, an act that is structurally a proposal (a demand/give goods-&-services) is relabelled with a category from the domain of propositions. To call an offer an “assert” is to collapse Halliday’s central distinction between propositions and proposals.

The duplication of roles compounds the confusion. The authors claim Kristy’s mother simultaneously “gives Kristy purview over whether the action will happen” (internal pose) while retaining “purview over actually doing it” (external assert). But this is not an insight into exchange structure; it is a restatement of the obvious: an offer entails both a decision and an action. Kristy must accept or reject, and her mother must carry out the action if accepted. The system of speech function already models this through the pairing of offers with acceptances/refusals. No additional “purview” mechanism is needed.

Even more problematically, Kristy’s response Nearly up to the top is labelled a “support proposition.” But this is no proposition at all: it is a specification within the exchange of goods-&-services, a modulation of the proposal. Calling it a “proposition” misrepresents both the role of Kristy’s utterance and the structure of the exchange.

In short, the analysis overwrites the exchange with an improvised two-level purview scheme that obscures the simplicity and precision of Halliday’s model. The price of introducing “purview” is redundancy, category confusion, and the erosion of the core distinction between propositions and proposals.