Overview

Reader Positioning and Social Context investigates how writers in diverse online social contexts construct relationships with their readers, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to offer a fine-grained model of interpersonal meaning. Focusing on what has been termed as ""solidarity"", ""contact"", ""social distance/proximity"" and ""affiliation"" in past research, linguists Alexanne Don and Peter R.R. White insist on the value of treating these aspects of Tenor as involving two primary axes of variation: the degree to which writers position the imagined reader as sharing their attitudes and beliefs and the degree to which this reader is constructed as having experiences and/or knowledge in common with the writer. Making a compelling case for this perspective, they provide a method for its operationalization and demonstrate the variation of findings it makes available. This book also provides examples of how these tenor relations may be investigated along with worked examples in a variety of written social contexts. Together, these analyses show how more nuanced descriptions of social context yield deeper insights into how writers align with readers, negotiate proximity, and shape persuasive communication.

Full Product Details

Author:   Alexanne Don ,  Peter R.R. White
Publisher:   University of Toronto Press
Imprint:   University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.001kg
ISBN:  

9781487582272

ISBN 10:   1487582277
Pages:   232
Publication Date:   21 April 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available, will be POD  
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Table of Contents

List of figures List of tables 1. Introduction: Affiliation, Alignment, and Familiarity in Context Peter R.R. White and Alexanne Don 2. Invoking Affiliation: Fashion Journalism and the Projection of Community in Newspaper Lifestyle Contexts Alexanne Don 3. Probing the Dynamics of Addressee-Management in Corporate Sustainability Reports: A Corpus-Assisted SFL Study Donna R. Miller and Cinzia Bevitori 4. Sharing the Extras of Life: Affiliation in Reviews of Experience-Based Luxury Charlotte Hommerberg and Maria Lindgren 5. Reader Positioning in Environmental and White-Supremacist Terrorist Discourses: Distinguishing Reader Alignment from Writer-Reader Familiarity Paul Bennetts White 6. The Putative Reader, Persuasiveness and Relations of Solidarity/Affiliation in Mass-Communicative Opinion Writing Peter R.R. White List of Contributors Index

Reviews

Author Information

Alexanne Don is an independent researcher working on written texts using the Appraisal framework, with a particular interest in evaluative language invoking social relations. Peter R.R. White teaches linguistics and journalism studies at the University of New South Wales Sydney.

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