Why does any of it matter? harrumphs half our tag team.

Well, the linguist’s Halliday-inspired answer might be: what we do here is produce collaborative texts with both ideational meaning and interpersonal meaning – the need to express not only ideas but also our social relationships with others.

We just have to make sure there is some kind of balance of content and context, to avoid sounding like the tedious yapping of stray dogs!