Clarifying Scope: Individualising, Collectivising, and the Limits of Tuning

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 130):

In addition to the various ways that the positions in this exchange are put at risk and the extent to which they are cast in more or less threatening terms, we also need to consider the personae and communities for whom they are positioned as relevant. Even though shared background values about motherhood are leveraged at points in this interaction (as we have seen in the previous two chapters), the mother-child dyad remains the primary locus for establishing the relevance of the meanings construed. In other words, in terms of what we refer to as SCOPE, the negotiation is mainly individualising rather than collectivising. As we saw when considering vocatives, the proposals in the exchange are directly targeted at the interlocutor – making their ambit very clear and giving the children little wiggle room in which to get out of doing what the mother wants them to do. Also relevant to how scope is regulated is the way in which the source of feelings is directly ascribed to the children by the mother, rather than making general statements about pushing legs or going out (e.g., 'she doesn't want her leg pushed'; 'you'll have a lovely day'). There are some instances of collectivising, for instance the 'we' in 'we'll get Kristy dressed; but these are bounded by the limited scope of the mother-child dyad. As this example shows, the scope, stakes and spirit are constantly being nuanced, all at the same time, and often through the same language resources (such as Vocatives – Mummy, pet, Ruth etc.) as Kristy, her mother and Ruth all try to get what they want.

ChatGPT Comments:

What stands out in this passage is how the authors move rather fluidly between three distinct dimensions — (i) the social scope of interlocutors (dyad vs. community), (ii) the discursive targeting of vocatives and pronominal choices, and (iii) the experiential construal of affective sources. These are not the same kind of thing, yet they are grouped together under the single heading scope.

The effect is that “scope” becomes a grab-bag for any linguistic move that seems to delimit or extend relevance, whether in terms of participants, meanings, or values. This is convenient, but conceptually imprecise. It blurs the difference between scope as social distribution (how broadly a meaning is ratified across a community) and scope as interpersonal reference (how narrowly a meaning is addressed in the moment).

The invocation of collectivising vs. individualising is also problematic. On the one hand, the authors claim that the dyad is the “primary locus,” yet they acknowledge shared background values around motherhood as shaping the negotiation. But this is precisely the point: scope cannot be treated as a binary between dyadic vs. collective. Meanings always operate across multiple intersecting planes of scope — immediate interlocutors, proximate kinship group, wider community norms. To collapse these into a single sliding scale misses the layered way in which interpersonal meaning distributes.

Finally, the claim that “scope, stakes and spirit are constantly being nuanced … often through the same language resources” points to another difficulty. If every feature of language potentially adjusts all three dimensions at once, then the proposed distinctions risk dissolving into redundancy. Without a principled basis for separating them, we are left with overlapping redescriptions of interpersonal dynamics, rather than an organised system.

In short, the analytic apparatus here risks conflating the distribution of meanings across social formations with the addressivity of utterances within interaction, while also failing to maintain clear criteria for what counts as a scope-adjusting resource.