Lowering the Stakes of Theory: How ‘Modality Metaphor’ Became Emotional Tone

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 144):

Modality metaphor can also be used to lower the stakes of a proposition in terms of its certainty:

(56) I guess that’s me off the hook for the kids dinner 🍕#NationalPizzaDay #MomGuilt

This occurs during Kristy and her mother’s discussion, where her mother tentatively puts forward an initial suggestion of why Kristy is upset, using I don’t think and I think:

(57) I don’t think you’re really upset about me going, I think you’re upset because the TV wasn’t working.

Kristy and her mother’s conversation is filled with lowered stakes in this regard. In the following stretch from later in the conversation, for instance, Kristy wants to give her baby sister Ruth a cuddle. To do this, Kristy draws on interpersonal grammatical metaphor (specifically mood metaphor) to lower the stakes of her requests using can I questions, to realise proposals (in bold). Despite this, however, her mother rejects her requests. But she does this rejection while also lowering the stakes – first by tendering another position rather than outright rejection and second through modality metaphor 'I think' (in italics), in addition to other resources underlined. Nonetheless, her mother’s rejection sends Kristy back into her high-takes crying.

(58) Kristy can I give her a cuddle?

Mother I don’t think she wants her cuddle just now.

Kristy: She doesn’t like me (CRIES)

Mother: No come on, sometimes you don’t want to be cuddled either.

Kristy: … could you umm put her on my lap like a little possum?

Mother: (TO RUTH) Do you want to sit on Kristy’s lap? (RUTH REFUSES)

No?

(TO KRISTY) I think she’d like to stay here for the moment

Kristy: No (CRIES)

Interpersonal metaphors are regular resources for lowering the stakes, but they can also raise the stakes of a proposition.

(59) It's raining so I'm sure he won't go outside. Still #momguilt. - [name]

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage exemplifies the slippage that occurs when interpersonal resources are read psychologically rather than semiotically. Doran, Martin & Zappavigna treat modality — whether metaphorical or congruent — as a scalar of emotional certainty rather than as a system for negotiating validity or obligation within a semiotic exchange. The analytic gaze here never rises above the interpersonal plane: “lowering the stakes” is reduced to “sounding softer” or “feeling less sure.”

But modality does not merely express affect; it enacts alignment. A clause like “I think she’d like to stay here for the moment” doesn’t lower emotional intensity — it reconfigures the speech function by shifting commitment to a proposition through metaphorical mood. The authors’ reading translates this into a psychologised drama of reassurance and rejection, collapsing systemic delicacy into conversational empathy.

In short: modality is not therapy, and grammatical metaphor does not “soothe” propositions. By conflating interpersonal modulation with emotional mitigation, the analysis once again psychologises semiosis — mistaking the calibration of commitment for the calibration of comfort.

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Or if you prefer…

In this section, Doran, Martin, and Zappavigna treat modality metaphor as a mechanism for “lowering the stakes” of interpersonal exchange, aligning grammatical choice with affective tact rather than with the construal of epistemic stance. Their examples—from “I guess that’s me off the hook” to Kristy’s child-mother dialogue—show how interpersonal metaphor is reinterpreted as a kind of emotional cushioning device.

In Hallidayan terms, interpersonal grammatical metaphor involves the instantiation of a semantic selection in a lexicogrammatical form that enacts that meaning incongruently. The theoretical point of this incongruence is not politeness, but perspective: the metafunctional organisation of meaning allows the speaker to construe the same stance through alternate structural realisations. In other words, modality metaphor is a meaning-technical phenomenon, not an emotional strategy.

By contrast, Doran et al. interpret the use of I think and I don’t think as instances of “lowered stakes” in an interpersonal exchange, as if modality operated to regulate social temperature. The result is a theoretical inversion: the example is made to demonstrate empathy, while the system that enables such construals of stance disappears from view.

The irony is that, in translating modality into tact, they themselves lower the theoretical stakes. The shift from systemic-functional description to pragmatic psychology re-metaphorises the semiotic system it purports to analyse: I think no longer realises modality, it performs sensitivity. The framework that once mapped the semiotic potentials of interpersonal meaning is reduced to an interpretive shorthand for “gentler speech.”

In the end, what is presented as a case study in stake-management becomes a case study in theoretical drift: modality metaphor, once a principle of systemic meaning variation, is redescribed as the modulation of social comfort. The stakes lowered, indeed.