Blurb:

This chapter explores the concept of affiliation – how social bonds are enacted in discourse – by considering how values are proposed and negotiated in language as couplings of ideation and attitude. It surveys recent social semiotic work on coupling and affiliation that has arisen out of Knight’s (2010) work on conversational humour. The affiliation framework is applied to a case study featuring a face-to-face multiparty conversation between mothers talking about their experience of ‘mom guilt’ in a video posted to YouTube. Coupling analysis is applied to the transcript of this verbal interaction in order to explore the unfolding negotiation of values. Throughout this analysis we will see that the mothers orchestrate a highly intricate, yet subtle, pattern of meanings to affiliate with each other. This involves curating a range of language features including NEGOTIATION, concerned with the organisation of dialogue, APPRAISAL, concerned with sourcing and evaluation of meanings, IDEATION, concerned with the organisation of ideational meanings, and INVOLVEMENT concerned with marking social solidarity and status. Together, this chapter will show just how much work goes into building community and the ways in which SFL analyses can bring out the highly intricate ways of speaking that enable it.