Reader Positioning and Social Context: Affiliation, Alignment, and Familiarity in Online Written Discourse

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.