Calibrating Interpersonal Force: A Critical Reading of “SPIRIT” as a System of Tuning

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 135-6):

Our third system, SPIRIT, concerns whether the message is tabled positively [warm] or negatively [warn]. Another way of thinking about this dimension is whether the message provokes bonding that moves people closer together, or whether it is oriented to something potentially disruptive and disuniting. For instance, vocatives, in addition to acting as a scoping resources, can evoke positive and negative stances about those being addressed that adjust the SPIRIT of a message. For instance, in (15) the vocative 'Moms' calls together mothers in a relatively positive way, as opposed to for instance 'breeders' which invokes negative connotations – mothers as mere biological reproducers. For example, (16) invokes a negative stance with the vocative, 'Handmaids', most likely a reference to the handmaids in the film adaptation of Margaret Attwood’s novel 'The Handmaid's Tail' which explores the oppression and subjugation of women:

(16) Handmaids, you have your orders.

These choices in vocation have potential impact across a text: “once a speaker addresses another as Your Honour for example the dominance/deference dyad has been effectively revealed” Martin (1992, p. 258). In a similar way, spirit can be sensitive to variations in voice quality and to the way that (Hyper/Macro-) thematised attitude is established in longer texts. As we will see later, additional paralinguistic resources such as emoji can be used to adjust the spirit of a post.

ChatGPT Comments:

This section defines SPIRIT as the interpersonal variable governing whether a message is tabled positively (warm) or negatively (warn), aligning it with the system of tuning that modulates the tenor of discourse. The framing is consistent with the tradition of interpersonal meaning as a continuous resource for adjusting stance, but the theoretical precision of “SPIRIT” as a systemic category invites closer scrutiny.

In Halliday’s model, systems of attitude are already distributed across APPRAISAL and realised through interpersonal metaphor and prosody. The notion of SPIRIT appears to re-label a portion of this terrain without clearly specifying its paradigmatic relation to APPRAISAL: AFFECT/JUDGEMENT/APPRECIATION. If SPIRIT functions at the level of tuning—that is, as a higher-order resource modifying the tenor orientation of a message—it should be positioned as a semantic prosodic overlay rather than as a distinct system. In other words, SPIRIT modulates the force and polarity of interpersonal meaning but does not introduce a new parameter of interpersonal semantics.

The authors’ examples—vocatives such as Moms versus breeders, or Handmaids—illustrate how lexical realisation of attitude can colour the interpersonal key of a clause or text. Yet these contrasts are already modelled in SFL as APPRAISAL prosodies coupled with addressivity in tenor relations. The proposed system risks conceptual overlap unless its scope is delimited as a calibration mechanism within the interpersonal metafunction: one that dynamically adjusts the affective charge of a text’s stance rather than extending the interpersonal system network itself.

The concluding remarks on “spirit” being sensitive to voice quality and thematic attitude would benefit from situating these under realisation statements linking discourse semantics to phonology and prosody. Without that, “SPIRIT” risks drifting toward a rhetorical descriptor rather than retaining systemic definition.

In short, while the category captures an intuitively useful dimension of tenor modulation, its theoretical integration would be stronger if framed as a prosodic calibration of interpersonal polarity—a system of modulation rather than a novel stratum of meaning.