Collapsing Scope: From Semiotic Resource to Social Group

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 137):

As mentioned earlier, the most frequent hashtags co-occurring with #momguilt provide an overview of the kinds of groups that are explicitly convoked or sourced in the corpus, for instance 'working moms' in posts such as (23).

(23) Can we talk about #momguilt? Especially that particular bind #workingmoms put themselves in: guilty for not being with their kids AND guilty for not devoting enough energy to work...

In this post the hashtag #workingmoms enacts scoping as it collectivises this group as the target of negative judgement, reinforcing the 'particular bind' for which this post casts them as responsible. Background meanings about the so-called 'mommy wars' (Abetz & Moore, 2018) which set 'stay-at-home mothers' (SAHM) against 'working mothers' are relevant to this scoping. An example of a hashtag used to convoke this opposing group is #SAHM in (24).

(24) I'm only REALLY happy when my husband is home. The second he leaves I feel like I will never be happy again. I hate this. #MomGuilt #SAHM

We can imagine that a high-stakes reply to this post would be to suggest that the mother find employment, because of the way that it leverages previously scoped and arranged bonds from the shared cultural context.

ChatGPT Comments:

The central problem in this excerpt is that Doran, Martin & Zappavigna once again blur the boundary between language and context. They treat hashtags like #workingmoms and #SAHM as though they enact contextual processes—“scoping,” “convoking groups,” or “reinforcing binds”—rather than as linguistic tokens whose semantic selections realise contextual relations. This collapses the Hallidayan distinction between semantics (as the construal of context) and context (as the semiotic potential realised through semantics).

By attributing contextual agency directly to the hashtags—claiming that #workingmoms “enacts scoping” or “collectivises a group”—the authors treat linguistic form as though it directly manipulates the social order. In the canonical model, however, this is a realisation relation: the hashtag realises a semantic construal of alignment, identification, or judgement within a field of discourse. It does not perform the contextual process itself.

The conceptual slippage is further revealed in their statement that “background meanings about the so-called ‘mommy wars’ … are relevant to this scoping.” Here, the ‘background meanings’ (that is, contextual semiotic potential) are treated as already arranged resources that language merely “leverages.” This reverses the dependency: it is through language that these contextual potentials are activated, instantiated, and made meaningfully relevant. Without that construal, there is no “background meaning” to leverage.

Finally, the speculative gesture—“we can imagine that a high-stakes reply to this post would be…”—reveals an even deeper confusion: they are analysing not actual social meaning but their own hypothetical construals as though these were features of the corpus. This imports the analyst’s imagination into the data without reflexive acknowledgement, reinforcing the illusion that “shared cultural context” exists independently of its linguistic construal.

In short, the authors mislocate meaning-making: instead of analysing how language realises contextual meaning, they describe language as doing contextual work directly, thereby erasing the stratification on which systemic functional linguistics depends.