Raising and Lowering Risk: STAKES as Semiotic vs Social Evaluation

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 135):

Another system in tuning, STAKES, is about raising or lowering the degree of risk imbuing a meaning. For example, within a particular community we might consider how much of an issue it is if someone rejects a particular tendered meaning. Returning to (15), it would be a controversial and high-stakes position to reject the post's tender that moms don't need to carry guilt or that they don't need to follow the commands in the image ('Stop giving life to negative feelings. Bring it to God. Release it. Move forward. Be free.'). In addition to implicit staking that relies on the background of already positioned values about motherhood guilt that this community likely holds, the post raises the STAKES of the tender through various resources. For instance, the semiotic risk is intensified via ENGAGEMENT: DISCLAIM (e.g. 'don't need to'), the commands in the image and the hashtag (e.g. '#letitgo'), and the upscaled GRADUATION (e.g. 'heavy enough').

ChatGPT Comments:

The authors position STAKES as a system that modulates the degree of interpersonal risk within a discourse. While this framing is conceptually clear, it risks conflating the linguistic construal of risk with sociocultural evaluation. SFL would describe the same phenomena in terms of co-instantiation of interpersonal resources — mood, polarity, appraisal, and engagement — without presupposing that the text alone carries a fixed level of risk. By treating the rejection of a proposition as “high-stakes” based on assumed communal values, the account imports social interpretation into what is fundamentally a linguistic description. While the examples given (imperatives, hashtags, disclaimers, graduation) do indeed adjust the intensity of a proposition, the analytical leap from linguistic choice to community-level controversy is not fully grounded in observable semiotic patterns, leaving the risk evaluation more inferential than descriptive.