Hidden Constellations or Negotiable Meanings?

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 87):

Exploring axiological constellations is thus vital for understanding how people affiliate in communities, understand the world around them, maintain solidarity and distance themselves from 'outsiders'. But by their very nature, such constellations are often implicit and rarely discussed in detail. The result is that they often only surface when someone goes against the order of things – whether this be someone new to the community who does not know the way things are, someone with a different constellation that leads to a clash, or whether it be someone aiming to challenge the constellation, either through iconoclastic ruptures or through gradual progressive adjustment.

 

ChatGPT Comments:

The authors conflate what is implicit in social practice with what is implicit in language. In SFL, interpersonal meanings are always negotiable and observable in the patterns of engagement, appraisal, and projection — they do not “surface” only through exceptional breaches. By adopting the LCT framing, the narrative risks overstating the rarity and opacity of the background meanings that SFL would model as ordinary, ongoing construals.