The Shout of the System: When Paralinguistic Emphasis Masquerades as Social Risk

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 139):

In the case of motherhood guilt, a lot of staking work is undertaken against a background of oriented and positioned meanings about what it is to be a 'good' mother. An example is (31) which likens, through a token-value relation, self-care to the state of being a good mom.

(31) I always forget that self care DOES equate to being a good mom. #momguilt #iForget #poor[Name] #moremomguilt

The ALL CAPS font (DOES) raises the stakes of the proposition by both acting as a form of emphasis and as a paralinguistic shouting token. The move to raise the stakes also suggests a direct challenge (rejection and opposition) to an implicated perspective – that is, that a bad mother takes care of their own needs. The linguistic intensification ('always') also raises the stakes of the user's confession ('I always forget...'). Both instances of escalating stakes function in conjunction with the string of hashtags that explicitly mark the relevant values under scrutiny – the guilt or not of mothers and whether or not they remember their place in the order of things.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage exposes a recurrent problem in the authors’ treatment of “staking”: the conflation of semiotic intensity with social consequence. The example of (31) is described as raising “stakes” through ALL CAPS and linguistic intensifiers such as always. Yet these are resources of graduation—they scale affect or engagement within language, not risk within context. To equate emphasis with consequence is to confuse the semiotic amplification of commitment with the social evaluation of value.

In SFL, stakes—if construed as part of tenor—must refer to shifts in the relative social significance of a move within a given community’s network of meanings. A proposition typed in capitals does not become high-stakes by orthographic volume alone; it becomes high-stakes only if it threatens or reinforces the value structure of the field or community in which it circulates. In (31), the risk lies not in the typography but in the challenge to normative ideals of maternal self-abnegation.

By treating paralinguistic shouting as a proxy for social risk, the analysis collapses the distinction between graphological realisation and contextual enactment. What’s at stake is not how loudly something is said, but what order of meaning that utterance contests.