Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 137):
Since the corpus consisted of posts about experiences of guilt, the people and groups experiencing guilt or judging others as guilty are pertinent to tuning. The choice of the source tends to operate in the service of scoping in the corpus. For example, as we have seen mothers reject themselves through negative self-judgement throughout the corpus (e.g. 'moms' in (21)), with the most common source of such negative self-judgement being the author themselves (e.g. 'I' in (22).
(21) Do any other #moms feel guilty about just vegging and watching tv while their kid naps? #momguilt #momlife #motherhood #shouldibedoingsomethingproductive
(22) I feel like the worst parent in the world listening to my kid sniff with snot in their nose. #momguilt #momlife #sickbaby
ChatGPT Comments:
This paragraph once again exposes a recurrent conceptual confusion in the authors’ model — namely, the conflation of contextual variables with linguistic realisations. Scoping and tuning are presented as contextual (tenor-level) systems, yet the examples offered are entirely linguistic: pronouns (“I,” “moms”), appraisal lexis (“worst parent”), and hashtags. These are all resources of the discourse semantic system of APPRAISAL, not contextual categories.
By treating linguistic patterns as contextual systems, the authors collapse the crucial Hallidayan distinction between context (the culture as semiotic system) and language (the realisation of that potential). The passage thus fails to maintain the semiotic stratification that underpins systemic functional theory: field, tenor, and mode should be realised by semantics, not constituted by it.
The result is a descriptive circularity — “scope” appears both as context and as language realisation, with no theoretical cut between the two. What should have been a reflection on how context is construed through linguistic resources becomes instead a blurred fusion of strata.
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