Vocatives, Hashtags, and the Problem of Conflated Scope

 Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 135):

Mustering a community around a bond requires some way of gathering that community into the negotiation, for example via vocatives which include phenomena such as calls, addresses and exclamations (Zwicky, 1974 in Poynton (1984)). Vocation is an optional system within clause grammar that is important in how power, solidarity, status, role-relationships and in/formality are interpersonally construed (Poynton, 1984). SCOPING is thus realised in this text through resources such as vocatives which convoke and source an ambient community of mothers – such as the Vocative Moms at the beginning of the tweet. The use of the plural pronoun 'we' also collectivises these mothers as the relevant identity, together with the hashtags, #momguilt, #momlife, and #Moms. Collectivisation thus runs as a prosody through the tweet, realised opportunistically throughout. Through the hashtag positively judging god (#godcan), together with other meanings about god in the embedded image, suggesting that the particular community is not all 'moms' but specifically Christian ones, this tweet convokes a very particular community.

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This passage sets out to explain how communities are “mustered” in discourse, focusing on vocatives, pronouns, and hashtags as resources of collectivisation. Yet the treatment raises several issues.

First, vocatives are described as “an optional system within clause grammar” (after Poynton, 1984), but this grammatical framing sits uneasily with the much broader claim that vocatives “convoke and source an ambient community.” The theoretical leap—from the structural position of a clause element to the socio-semiotic act of rallying a community—is asserted rather than explained. What is missing is an account of how such a local grammatical resource scales into the ambient collective invoked.

Second, the conflation of scope with solidarity categories is problematic. While the use of we or hashtags such as #momlife can indeed collectivise, this collectivisation is not a neutral scoping operation but an ideological act of bounding identity. The analysis collapses this complexity into a generic cline from “individualising” to “collectivising,” thereby erasing the political and cultural work performed by such categories. For instance, “moms” functions not only to collectivise but also to normalise a particular cultural and gendered role, which is left unexamined.

Third, the treatment of hashtags like #godcan extends the collectivisation argument into matters of belief and value. The authors note that the tweet convokes “not all ‘moms’ but specifically Christian ones,” but they fail to unpack the consequences. Religious invocation is not merely narrowing scope; it is layering symbolic alignment onto social identity. By treating it as simply another scoping operation, the analysis reduces meaning to a technical adjustment rather than recognising the intersection of ideology, value, and belief.

Finally, the claim that collectivisation “runs as a prosody through the tweet” gestures to systemic-functional semantics but without the systematic demonstration that such a claim would require. Instead of carefully mapping how collectivisation permeates the text, the authors rely on a series of examples loosely tied together under the heading of scope.

In short, the account overextends the concept of scope by stretching it across grammar, identity, ideology, and belief without clarifying how these levels cohere. The risk is that the analytic apparatus begins to explain too much, leaving the specificity of each semiotic resource under-theorised.