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.

---

⚖️ 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.