Scoping the Collective: Stratal Misalignment in the Treatment of Scoping

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 137-8):

As mentioned in Section 5.4, membership categorisation tends to be a scoping resource since in order to point out to whom a meaning is relevant, a person or group needs to be identified or at least implicated through some meaning that activates relevant associations. Less explicit collectivising can also occur through resources that invoked putative others. For instance, we or us were quite frequent in the corpus and this choice can be seen to invoke an implicit them.

(25) #Momguilt is real, but we deserve a break too. Be sure to take it #momlife [URL to blog post titled ‘resetting’]

The collectivisation device ‘we’ in the above, in conjunction with ‘too’ implies that there is another group of non-mothers who are getting the break that these mothers deserve. Collectivisation was also used in construing the shared complaint that mothers and not others are undertaking too much emotional labour and so is involved in the policing of scoping.

(26) Lets talk #selfcare and #momguilt for a minute. It is all too often we lose sight of ourselves as Moms. We take on the role of boo-boo kisser, butt wiper, laundry queen, maker of meals you…[link to an Instagram post]

ChatGPT Comments:

The authors once again blur the boundary between language and context, treating membership categorisation (a semantic resource) as if it were a contextual operation (“a scoping resource”). In doing so, they mislocate the level at which collectivisation is modelled.

In SFL terms, “we” and “us” are grammatical resources realising interpersonal meaning at the semantic stratum. The collectivisation they effect is a semantic construal of social relation, not a contextual operation of “scope.” To treat such linguistic instantiations as contextual “resources” is to collapse the distinction between language and culture (context) — precisely the slippage that Halliday’s stratified model was designed to prevent.

Further, the claim that “membership categorisation tends to be a scoping resource” treats reference to social identity as if it directly adjusted contextual scope rather than construing participants within a meaning potential. This erases the crucial semiotic mediation through which such categories enter into context in the first place.

The authors’ use of the term “policing of scoping” adds another layer of confusion. “Policing” is metaphorically social, but “scoping” is analytically contextual in their model — yet here, both are used to describe textual patterns of interpersonal meaning. This reveals an unacknowledged drift toward analysing language as if it were contextual behaviour, which again conflates strata. The linguistic phenomena (pronouns, evaluative lexis, implicature) are semantic; the “scope” they are said to “police” is not part of the language system at all, but a construct of the authors’ contextual metalanguage.

Finally, the authors’ interpretation that “we” implies an implicit “them” is not wrong at the semantic level — but to treat that implication as a contextual operation rather than a semantic alignment introduces conceptual noise. The inclusive/exclusive contrast operates within language; it does not constitute scoping at the contextual level.