High Stakes and Shifting Grounds: When Tenor Becomes Institutional Loyalty

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 139):

Staking describes the resources that adjust the relative risk of a proposition or proposal, making it more or less consequential. The risk is relative in the sense that it works in concert with the constellations of values that are always in play within the discourse of any particular community and which may shift abruptly or evolve over time. The tendering of a proposition or proposal will be more or less disruptive to these constellations. For example, if within the SFL community, one was to reject Halliday’s work, it would be tantamount to rejecting the SFL community itself. On the other hand if one were to reject the work of one of the authors of this book, it would not necessarily have the same effect (though it would have a larger or smaller effect depending on which author you are rejecting). In the constellation surrounding SFL, Halliday is very high stakes.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage attempts to introduce staking as a system for describing the relative “risk” associated with meaning in discourse. However, it immediately anchors that risk not in the semantics of discourse but in the social politics of academic communities — in this case, the institutional hierarchy of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The example of “rejecting Halliday’s work” equated with “rejecting the SFL community” does not merely illustrate the concept; it inadvertently collapses the distinction between tenor as semiotic context and tenor as sociological affiliation.

Within canonical SFL, tenor is a variable of context realised by interpersonal semantics. It describes the relations enacted through meaning, not the institutional relations maintained through allegiance. By using “risk” in this way, the authors conflate the semantic system with the social system, translating the modulation of interpersonal meaning (e.g. commitment, obligation, affective alignment) into the sociological maintenance of community identity.

The analogy therefore re-grounds staking not in the grammar of interpersonal exchange, but in disciplinary loyalty. Rather than clarifying how meanings scale in value, commitment, or investment within discourse, the passage reduces staking to an index of orthodoxy — a measure of how far a speaker can deviate from institutional norms without being excommunicated. The result is that risk is treated as reputational rather than semiotic.

A theoretically coherent treatment of staking would instead keep the focus within the discourse semantic plane: on how evaluation is intensified or mitigated, how commitment is modulated through ENGAGEMENT, or how alignment is negotiated in APPRAISAL. These are the mechanisms by which stakes are raised or lowered within the meaning system, rather than within the discipline.