The Exhaustion of Stakes: When Intensification Becomes Performance

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 139-40):

Intensification via resources such as the modal adjuncts was frequently used in the corpus to raise the stakes of the users' attitudes toward the proposition or situation being described, in terms of possibility, probability, necessity, or obligation. For example, 'always' in (33)- (35) raises the stakes of the meaning by presenting the situations described as intractable and ongoing.

(33) You guys moms guilt is so real.. No matter what I do I always question whether or not I made the right decisions.

(34) Im SURE it’s not just me but as a mom I ALWAYS feel like I should be doing more or that I didn’t do enough before I went to work. #momguilt

(35) I always feel guilty going to the #spa when my family is free to hang. #momguilt #lifestyle

In these examples the intensification also raises the stakes by stressing that the users are engaging in a behaviour that contravenes a set of assumed values about good motherhood. These examples also illustrate that, like scoping, stakes often runs as a prosody through texts and is realised through an array of different language resources – in the first tweet above, for instance, it is realised through so real, No matter what I do and I always question…

ChatGPT Comments:

The authors’ appeal to “raising the stakes” through intensification misrecognises what is actually happening in these posts. The repeated always, so real, and no matter what I do are not mechanisms for staking a proposition within a social semiotic field — they are symptoms of a discourse that has already collapsed into performative exhaustion. The mothers are not negotiating risk; they are reaffirming a structurally predetermined guilt economy in which the very act of self-reference is already subordinated to communal expectation.

By interpreting intensification as a means of “raising stakes,” Doran, Martin & Zappavigna mistake the automation of affect for its escalation. These users are not heightening the value of propositions; they are tracing the prosodic contour of an internalised injunction. The “stakes” do not rise — they circulate, forming a feedback loop in which self-blame is semantically recharged through the very linguistic resources meant to express relief.

Thus, what the authors take as evidence of “prosodic attitudinal flow” is more precisely the semiotic residue of value reproduction: the rhythmic recycling of guilt as a form of social synchronisation. Always doesn’t raise the stakes — it sustains the circuit.