Tuning or Rebranding? When Scope, Stakes, and Spirit Claim a System

 Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 128):

Following on from our exploration of POSITIONING and ORIENTING, this chapter explores another significant dimension in relation to how interpersonal meanings are negotiated – which we will refer to as TUNING. Tuning offers additional ways to adjust meanings that are being put forward – to raise or lower the stakes of what is being said, to broaden or narrow the scope of who it relates to and to shift the spirit in which the meanings are being put forward. In this chapter we will introduce three main resources within the TUNING system:

- scope - whereby the ambit of a position is either broadened or narrowed in terms of the personae and communities it may concern (How inclusive or encompassing is the meaning?).

- stakes - whereby positions are calibrated in terms of interpersonal risk (How concerning or significant is the meaning? How tenuous is its standing?)

- spirit - whereby a position is adjusted to be read more or less favourably (What's the vibe of the meaning? What's its tone?).

ChatGPT Comments:

The chapter opens by positioning Tuning as a new dimension following Positioning and Orienting, promising additional ways to adjust interpersonal meanings. At first glance, the framing gives the impression of a theoretically necessary system, but a closer reading raises a number of concerns.

1. Repackaging, not innovation

The three dimensions of Tuning — Scope, Stakes, Spirit — largely repackage already-described SFL resources:

• Scope reflects the breadth of engagement, pronominal reference, and quantification.

• Stakes maps onto Graduation (force/focus) and Engagement (contestability).

• Spirit aligns with Attitude, Graduation, and Engagement, capturing positive or negative affective tone.

By branding these adjustments as a “system,” the authors create the illusion of novelty, when in fact these phenomena are already accommodated within existing appraisal and discourse-semantic frameworks.

2. Metaphor over stratal clarity

The labels themselves are evocative — scope as inclusivity, stakes as risk, spirit as vibe — but they foreground effect rather than linguistic instantiation. This emphasis risks obscuring the distinction between what is linguistically expressed and how it is socially interpreted.

3. Orthogonality and meta-system framing

Tuning is framed as orthogonal to Positioning and Orienting, yet all three concern the negotiation of interpersonal meaning. Tuning may be better understood as a meta-layer: a way of describing modulation across familiar resources rather than a discrete system in its own right.

Verdict

The introduction sets up Tuning as a systematic innovation, but careful reading reveals it to be a conceptual and pedagogical framing of existing SFL mechanisms, with metaphorical labels that appeal rhetorically but risk inflating the theoretical claims.