Purview Overstated: Rebranding Rhetorical Stance as Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 79-80):

This contrasts with the prosody of assertion, with few exceptions, in Text 3.7. By virtue of this purview, this report on different types of matter establishes the ‘expert’ stance that is so highly values in scientific texts:

Physicists currently view matter as being grouped into three families – quarks, leptons and bosons. The standard model explains interactions in terms of these families, which it further classifies as follows:

1. Matter particles. These are fundamental particles (that is, they have no known smaller parts). They are the quarks and leptons. 

2. Force-carrier particles. Each type of fundamental force is caused by the exchange of force-carrier particles (also called messenger or exchange particles). These are the fundamental (or gauge) bosons. They include photons and gluons.

Text 3.7. Report on types of matter (Warren, 2003, pp. 246-247)

As these texts illustrate, purview is a resource that can be drawn upon to negotiate social relations in dialogue as we manage turns in conversation. But it is also a resource we can draw on in monologue to manage the play of voices that permeate our texts. In the informational plaque, the writer is clearly aiming to engage the reader through putting forward possibilities, while at the same time making it clear that they are pure speculation. In the scientific text, the aim is to present its knowledge in an expert voice.

ChatGPT Comments:

This excerpt again illustrates the drift toward conflating purview (a category they are attempting to develop) with stance, voice, or rhetorical orientation that are already well captured in existing systemic-functional theory.

1. Purview reduced to “stance.”
   The contrast drawn here between the Wedding Cake Island plaque and the scientific text boils down to whether the writer projects speculation or authority. But SFL already has the categories of engagement (expansion vs contraction), projection, and modality to capture this. To rebrand these as “purview” obscures what is already theoretically available, while offering no sharper analytic purchase.

2. Misdescription of scientific discourse.
   The claim that the “prosody of assertion” in the scientific text derives from “purview” is misleading. Scientific texts establish authority through institutionalised conventions of projection, technicality, and taxonomic structure (Halliday & Martin 1993; Halliday & Matthiessen 1999), not through some abstract manipulation of purview. What they are describing is simply the conventionalised voice of authoritative report.

3. Epistemology vs rhetoric.
   The real contrast is between a text that foregrounds rhetorical play (speculation for engagement) and one that foregrounds epistemic closure (assertion of established knowledge). The authors’ account misframes this as a difference in “purview,” rather than in register, and appraisal orientation.

4. Theoretical redundancy.
   By treating purview as a kind of meta-resource that explains both dialogic turn-taking and monologic stance-taking, the authors stretch the category until it collapses into vagueness. This adds another layer of terminology without increasing explanatory clarity.

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⚖️ Overall assessment:

What’s presented here as “purview” is nothing more than the contrast between speculative engagement and authoritative assertion. The phenomena are real, but the concept of purview contributes nothing distinctive to their explanation.

League Table Of Visitors

Purview Misapplied: Mistaking Rhetorical Play for Epistemic Positioning

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 78-9):

As for all other resources presented in this chapter, purview is not just a resource for managing the flow of conversation; it can also nuance positions in monologic text. To exemplify this we can consider the use of purview in Text 3.6, an informational plaque about a rocky outcrop off the coast of Coogee Beach in Sydney, Australia known as Wedding Cake Island. This text begins with an open proposition about the name of the island (Why is it called Wedding Cake Island?), which is then rejected internally as not being answerable – No-one really seems to know for sure. The rest of the text then plays with purview in order to put possibilities out there and leave it to the reader to decide - beginning with the proposal so use your imagination!

Why is it called Wedding Cake Island?

No-one really seems to know for sure – so use your imagination! Perhaps the white spray from breaking waves over its long low shape is reminiscent of white icing on a wedding cake. Or perhaps hundreds of seagulls frosted the cake with their whitened droppings over the edge of the rocks! Or……… What do YOU think?

Text 3.6. Informational plaque about Wedding Cake Island, Coogee Beach, Sydney, Australia. (Randwick City Council nd.)

After proposing that readers use their imagination, the following two sentences put forward propositions, but do so with no speaker purview (marked by perhaps and the two linking connectors realised by or): Perhaps the white spray from breaking waves over its long low shape is reminiscent of white icing on a wedding cake. Or perhaps hundreds of seagulls frosted the cake with their whitened droppings over the edge of rocks! Or……… 

Here, the unfinished clause complex marked by the second or, with its long set of 'ellipsis' makers (………), emphases that other possibilities are there, and that the writer is not tied to them (or even proposing them). Together, this heavily weakens speaker purview as far as explaining the name of wedding cake island is concerned. As a final step, purview is handed over to the reader through an another open proposition, What do YOU think? – with purview highlighted through the capitalisation of YOU.

ChatGPT Comments:

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 79) analyse the informational plaque about Wedding Cake Island as a “play with purview,” in which speaker commitment is progressively weakened before finally being handed over to the reader. But once again, their account is grounded less in the grammar than in the categories of their own framework.

The examples they cite are all readily described using established resources of mood and modality:

• “Why is it called Wedding Cake Island?” → an interrogative.”

• “No-one really seems to know for sure – so use your imagination!” → a negatively declarative clause followed by an imperative.”

• “Perhaps the white spray …” / “Or perhaps hundreds of seagulls …” → modalised declaratives, realised through modal adjuncts and conjunctive relations.

• “Or … What do YOU think?” → an elliptical disjunctive conjunction followed by a second interrogative, with tonic prominence — realising the Focus of New information — marked by orthographic highlighting.

Every feature invoked here—interrogative, imperative, modality, ellipsis—is already accounted for within the canonical grammar of mood and modality. To redescribe these as manoeuvres of “purview” is not to clarify meaning but to overlay a redundant system that blurs the distinction between grammatical resources and interpretive stance.

The plaque does not “play with purview”; it exploits interpersonal mood structures to draw the reader in, shift footing, and dramatise indeterminacy. The interpersonal nuance arises from grammatical mood choices and modalisation strategies, not from a notional resource of “purview.”

In this way, “purview” functions less as an analytic tool than as a conceptual gloss on phenomena that are already systematically described. It thereby risks confusing the descriptive model: presenting grammatical mood as if it were merely an instantiation of “purview,” rather than recognising “purview” as a mislabelled abstraction from those very same grammatical categories.

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The Broader Pattern: “Purview” as Redescription of Mood, Modality, and Projection

What this case shows is consistent with the earlier examples: the category of purview is sustained not by demonstrating an independent system, but by recasting existing grammatical resources in its own terms.

• In the earlier projection example, purview was defined by detaching speaker commitment from the logico-semantic relation of projection, thereby confusing the distinction between process + projection and interpersonal stance.

• In this “Wedding Cake Island” example, purview is defined by detaching speaker commitment from the mood system (declarative, interrogative, imperative) and from modalisation.

The common manoeuvre is:

1. Identify a case where interpersonal commitment is at stake (projection, modality, speaker stance).

2. Abstract “purview” as the resource supposedly managing this commitment.

3. Re-describe the existing grammar in terms of “purview,” thereby erasing the systematic distinctions that are already established (projection vs mood vs modality).

The result is a pseudo-system that appears to unify diverse resources, but at the cost of explanatory clarity. Instead of showing how interpersonal meanings are realised differently across strata, the model collapses those realisations into a single notional category of “purview.”

Thus, “purview” is not an independent resource. It is a gloss on the analyst’s interpretation of speaker commitment, superimposed on grammatical systems that already account for the phenomena in question. This is why, across examples, purview can only be demonstrated by misdescribing projection, mood, or modality. 

Purview Inflation: Seeing Two Propositions Where There Is Only One

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 78):

Finally, instances that involve projection, such as (52) from a news report given in Martin and White (2005, p. 112), also establish multiple propositions with the potential for different purview (plus sourcing – see Chapter 4).

Here, the reporter does not tie themselves to whether or not the Church of England’s status is indefensible (airing: – speaker purview; – listener purview), but they do assert the fact that a bishop today described the Church of England’s established status as indefensible (+ speaker purview; – listener purview).

 

ChatGPT Comments:

The example in (52) is mis-analysed. Structurally, we are dealing with a single clause: an attributive clause with assignment (A bishop today describes X as Y). This clause realises only one proposition. It is not a clause complex, nor does it project a secondary clause.

The authors, however, construe the instance as if it contained two propositions:

• an “air/proposition” (The Church of England’s established status is indefensible), and

• an “assert/proposition” (A bishop describes…).

By construing a clause as clause complex, the purview framework doubles the number of propositions where there is only one. This not only misrepresents the grammar but also artificially inflates the analytical complexity. Such inflation obscures rather than clarifies the semiotic organisation of discourse.

The added claim that the reporter withholds commitment to the indefensibility of the status, while asserting that a bishop described it as such, depends entirely on this misidentification. There is no separate “inner” proposition that can be independently assigned purview. What the reporter does is to assert a single relational attribution, not to air one proposition and assert another.

In short, the framework here does not clarify interpersonal stance but fabricates distinctions by misconstruing clause structure. And if purview relies on such misconstruals to generate its analytical categories, then the system itself cannot be trusted to track meaning but only to project its own confusions onto the grammar.

Purview Confounded: Duplicating Grammar and Semantics as Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 78):

This opens space for reconsidering examples such as (49) above along the same lines, replayed here as (51). Externally speaking, considered in terms of whether or not mass extinctions were caused by changes in sea level or disruptions in the food chain, the proposition is aired – the may indicates that the author is not tied to whether or not this is the case. A response could render this proposition with something like No, they weren’t – focusing on whether or not this was the cause, rather than any negotiation of whether it could be the cause. On the other hand, the possibility of them being caused this way is asserted (through the use of a declarative without any tagging). One could focus on the could and render the possibility of them being caused by saying something like No, they couldn’t have. Asserting this suggests that rejecting the position along these lines would be more socially risky. But for academic discourse in particular, the play between the two purviews given through NEGOTIATION (the statement) and ENGAGEMENT (through the modality could) allows an author to have their cake and eat it too – to assert something baldly while not tying themselves to its actuality.

ChatGPT Comments:

In this excerpt, Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 78) propose a dual-layered system of purview in which external purview (– speaker; + listener) “airs” a proposition, while internal purview (+ speaker; – listener) simultaneously “asserts” its possibility. The example in (51), concerning mass extinctions, is intended to illustrate how an academic author can assert something baldly without committing to its factual actuality.

From a systemic-functional standpoint, however, this theorising is deeply problematic. The authors relocate what are fundamentally clause-level interpersonal distinctions and engagement up into the realm of context (tenor: purview). Grammar and semantics, language, are treated as independent contextual variables, effectively conflating content and context in a manner that SFL explicitly resists. This move is conceptually confused: the internal/external purview distinction does not describe a separate level of social organisation but merely re-describes the interplay of hedging and assertion already encoded in modality.

Further, the dual purview framing introduces unnecessary complexity without explanatory payoff. By splitting a single clause into “external” and “internal” propositions, the system duplicates semantic distinctions at the level of tenor. The distinction between commitment to actuality and commitment to possibility is culturally and register-specific, and cannot reliably support a generalised system of context. The authors’ discussion of “having their cake and eating it too” highlights this: it is less an insight into social interaction than a re-labelling of standard hedging practices in academic English.

In short, the dual purview model is theoretically confused, duplicative, and inconsistent with SFL’s canonical stratification. External and internal purviews do not constitute a new distinction of context; they are a misapplied reinterpretation of what is already realised grammatically and semantically. The excerpt exemplifies the broader issue with purview: by elevating grammar and semantics into tenor, the authors obscure the very mechanisms they claim to describe.

Duplicating Meaning: Grammatical Metaphor Misread as Context in Purview

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 77-8):

Heteroglossia often involves instances that in fact put forward two (or more) propositions. This opens space to nuance the purview of each position at the same time. For example, (47) above could alternatively have been written as (50).

In this instance, the proposition realised through the embedded clause the organ screen in the stables was designed by Thomas Chippendale indicates – speaker purview (airing), by virtue of the heteroglossic scoping given by it is possible. That is, the speaker is not committed to the proposition about whether or not the organ screen in the stables was designed by Thomas Chippendale. But the ranking clause it is possible... is baldly asserted; the speaker here is committing themselves to it being possible. In other words there are two propositions being put forward with different purview – whether or not the organ screen was designed by Thomas Chippendale is left open, but the possibility that it could have been designed by him is asserted. The distinction between (50), it is possible that.., and (47), possibly, is what Halliday refers to as explicit objective (it is possible that...) vs implicit objective (possibly) modality (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014, p. 689). Once again we can interpret this opposition in terms of internal and external purview – the proposition of whether or not the design was by Thomas Chippendale is externally aired, but the assessment of its possibility is internally asserted.

ChatGPT Comments:

In this excerpt, the authors attempt to nuance purview through heteroglossic constructions, using (50) to illustrate how an embedded clause can create distinct internal and external purview readings. While the example is linguistically interesting, the account problematically conflates grammatical metaphor with context. Specifically, the authors treat the heteroglossic scoping of it is possible as a separate instance of purview at the level of tenor (context), when in fact this is a classic case of grammatical metaphor operating within the clause itself. The embedded clause the organ screen in the stables was designed by Thomas Chippendale is not introducing a new contextual variable; it realises a semantic expansion.

By reifying internal vs. external purview in this way, the authors effectively duplicate semantic distinctions at the contextual stratum, violating the SFL principle that context (here, tenor) and semantics (here, modality and engagement) are distinct strata, with the latter realising the former. The example conflates the assessment of possibility (internal assertion) with the aired proposition about the design itself (external), treating each as separate contextual positions rather than as grammatical-semantic realisations that encode stance. In short, the conceptual apparatus of purview risks obscuring the actual grammatical mechanism at play, turning a well-known instance of objective modality into an artefact of context.

This approach exemplifies a broader pattern in the book: reinterpreting lexicogrammatical or semantic phenomena as if they were contextual variables, rather than carefully tracking the stratification from semantics to context. While the internal/external purview distinction is analytically neat, its application here stretches the theoretical framework in ways that are not justified by the data or by canonical SFL theory.