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.