When Obligation Becomes Affect: The Category Error of Reading Modality as Stake Adjustment

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 143-4):

Modality and interpersonal grammatical metaphor are also often used to adjust the stakes. In Kollontai’s demands text (Text 5.1), for example, she raises the stakes of her demands by bouncing between median (should) and high (must) modality (in bold), in addition to sharpening focus (italics) and raising force (underlined) in graduation:

The law must intervene to help women to combine work and maternity. Men and women workers everywhere are demanding a complete ban on night work for women and young people, an eight-hour day for all workers, and a ban on the employment of children under sixteen years of age. 

They are demanding that young girls and boys over sixteen years of age be allowed to work only half the day. This is important, especially from the point of view of the future mother, since between the years of sixteen and eighteen the girl is growing and developing into a woman. If her strength is undermined during these years her chance of healthy motherhood are lost forever. The law should state categorically that working conditions and the whole work situation must not threaten a woman’s health; harmful methods of production should be replaced by safe methods or completely done away with; heavy work with weights or foot-propelled machines etc. should be mechanised; workrooms should be kept clean and there should be no extremes of temperature; toilets, washrooms and dining rooms should be provided, etc.

ChatGPT Comments:

This exposes several unexamined assumptions in Doran, Martin & Zappavigna’s analytical stance.

Here’s the core issue:

Their discussion treats Kollontai’s political discourse as an instance of the same interpersonal resource system used in the #momguilt corpus. This is a category error. They conflate two fundamentally distinct semiotic orders — one symbolic (institutional-political, collective, deliberative), the other ambient (social-affective, individuated, confessional).

By treating modality and interpersonal grammatical metaphor as merely additional means of “adjusting stakes”, they flatten the stratified relation between rhetorical demand and interpersonal negotiation. Kollontai’s modality operates within a theoretical and programmatic register of political discourse — it construes obligation as systemic necessity, not as an interpersonal gambit. To read it as a move in a local field of “stake adjustment” is to mistake political modality for emotional calibration.

A few more points of critique:

1. Scope error – They implicitly universalise “stakes” as a trans-discursive interpersonal system, when in fact Kollontai’s use of must/should belongs to a different scale of construal: collective action rather than interpersonal rapport.

2. Interpersonal metaphor reduced to affective tuning – Interpersonal grammatical metaphor (e.g. “it is necessary that…”) in Kollontai functions ideologically, as a projection of social obligation into linguistic necessity. This is a material-semantic move, not a conversational adjustment.

3. Collapse of modality as discourse-semantic resource into stylistic intensification – The reading treats modality as another gradient of “raising/lowering stakes” — that is, as graduation by other means. This confuses orthogonal systems in SFL: graduation (scaling) versus modality (modal responsibility and orientation).

4. Misalignment of example – By inserting Kollontai here, they effectively redefine political discourse as an affective variation of online guilt confession. This recontextualisation trivialises the historical and ideological force of the original text.