Rebranding Heteroglossia as ORIENTING

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 91-2):

One of the most explicit relations in terms of marking social relations in a text is sourcing. Sourcing involves linking positions or items to a particular person or voice… Sourcing is often done by explicitly attributing a position to someone through what Martin and White (2005) call attribution heteroglossia… Grammatically speaking, the most typical realisation is through projected clauses or a circumstance of Angle (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014).

ChatGPT Comments:

Sourcing is well-grounded in SFL concepts such as heteroglossia, projection, and attribution. The main critique is that the rebranding under ORIENTING may obscure this: it suggests a new system when the phenomenon is already theoretically described. There is also no discussion of gradience or optionality—e.g., when sourcing is implicit versus explicit, which is central to understanding how positions are construed interpersonally.