language, register and genre

1 In Coffin, C., Lillis, T. and O'Halloran, K.A. (eds.) (2009) Applied Linguistics Methods: A Reader, London: Routledge. Reader 2 Investigating language in action: tools for analysis J.R. Martin Chapter 1: LANGUAGE, REGISTER AND GENRE Without thinking EVERYBODY DOES THINGS WITHOUT THINKING. People learn to talk and walk, drive cars, serve and volley, play instruments, and so on. And the point comes where what was once a slow and painful, often error-prone process becomes automated. It is then simply taken for granted - we forget about it. At least until something goes wrong. If we fall or stutter, have an accident, double fault or play out of tune, we may stop for a moment and think about what we were doing. But for the most part we carry on, functioning as members of our culture, doing what other people accept. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, three famous scholars became very interested in the unconscious forces that shape our lives. These men, Saussure, Durkheim and Freud, were the founders of what is now known as social science. Saussure is the father of linguistics, Durkheim sociology, and Freud psychiatry. All were concerned with what it is that makes people tick, without their knowing that it does so. They were interested, in other words, not in physical, material things, as in anatomy or astronomy, but in human behaviour - in social facts. Taken together, these social facts constitute a system. These systems are set up to explain why, people do what they do without really thinking about what they are doing. For example, I am writing this paper in English, in English of a particular kind in fact. I am not using slang; I am not using double negatives (I don't write, though many speakers of English might say I don't use no double negatives), and I am not writing in French or Tagalog. Why am I doing this? I am not doing it because you cannot write about language, register and genre in French or Tagalog. I am doing it because I want to interact with you the reader. I know that you expect me to use English - that is the language we share. So, by convention, I 2 use English. Or, to take another example, as I sit here writing I am wearing trousers. I am doing so because I am a male, working in Australia, and in winter this is what Australian males wear. I am not necessarily wearing trousers because of the cold. A number of females pass by my window from time to time, and many of them are not wearing trousers, but skirts or dresses. I, like them, am dressing the way I do by convention. I dress, without thinking about it, as people expect. I could, if I wished, think about it, and mutter to someone in Tagalog or put on a dress. But if I do, my behaviour will be taken as a joke, or considered asocial, perhaps even outrageous. If I break the rules, people will start thinking. Otherwise life simply goes on. Now, the point of these remarks about the unconscious nature of language and culture is to try and give you an idea of what linguists and sociologists do. Their job is to discover the unconscious rules which govern our behaviour and to make them explicit - to make the invisible visible in other words. In order to do this they develop models for organising these social facts and theories about the best way to build these models (Culler 1976; Saussure 1915/1966). Let me try and illustrate with regard to a small example the kind of description of human behaviour linguists and sociologists interested in social facts come up with. Imagine that you are an alien, that you have just landed on earth, and are standing at a pedestrian crossing. You notice that there is a set of lights, with green and red pictures of what appear to be men. The lights change in a certain sequence, first a green man, then a flashing red man, and then a red man which does not flash. This goes on repeatedly. You also notice that there are real people crossing the street and that their movements seem to be conditioned by the lights. When the light is green they walk, when the light is flashing red they walk faster or run, and when the light is red they stop and wait for cars to go by. Now, if you were an alien semiotician (a semiotician is someone who is interested in the systems of meaning or social systems which regulate human behaviour) you would jot down in your journal a brief description of the system you have been observing. The system would have three terms or options: 'walk', 'hurry up’, and 'stop'. Each of these choices has a meaning: when people choose 'walk' they start to move across the street; if they choose 'hurry up' they start to run or walk more quickly across the street; and if they choose 'stop', they wait on the corner. In addition, each of these options has an expression - a way of communicating its meaning: 'walk' is expressed by (linguists 3 would say 'is realised by') the green man, 'hurry up' by the flashing red man, and 'stop' by the red man. The notes you have made are in fact a description of the semiotic system of pedestrian crossing lights. The description has three parts: (1) a statement of the meanings, in this case the socially significant human behaviour the system regulates - moving across the street, moving quickly across the street and not moving; (2) the choices themselves - 'walk', 'hurry up' and 'stop'; and (3) the realisation of the choices, in this case the lights - red, flashing red and green. An outline of this little semiotic system is presented in Figure 9. 1, as it would be modelled in systemic functional linguistics. Figure 9.1 Pedestrian crossing lights as a system Systemic functional linguistics Systemic functional linguistics is one of the main functional theories of language developed in the twentieth century and which continues to evolve in this one. Its major architect is M.A. K. Halliday, formerly Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney (Halliday 1978, 1994); one of his main influences was J.R. Firth, the first Professor of Linguistics in Great Britain, who held the chair at the University of London (Firth 1957a, b). In origin then, the theory is a British one, with much stronger ties to European linguistics than to American approaches. The influence of Saussure (who taught in Geneva), Hjelmslev (who worked in Copenhagen), Malinowski (an anthropologist based in London), linguists of the Prague School and another of Halliday's teachers, the Chinese linguist Wang Li, combine to give the school its distinctive flavour (Hjelmslev 196I; Malinowski I923, 1935; Mathesius 1964). Halliday moved to Australia in 1975, with the result that metropolitan Sydney became the main international centre for this research. 4 How do systemic functional linguists differ from linguists of other schools? First of all, they place considerable emphasis on the idea of choice. They view language as a large network of interrelated options, from which speakers unconsciously select when speaking. In more technical terms, their focus is on paradigmatic relations - on what you say in relation to what you could have said. Other linguists have much stronger syntagmatic perspective - on what you say in relation to what you said before and what you are going to say next. Systemicists formalise these choices by means of systems (thus the name of the theory): for example, singular versus plural, active versus passive, declarative versus interrogative and so on. The way in which these systems bundle together in their grammars gives systemicists an insight into how language is related to the contexts in which it is used; this takes us to the second distinctive feature of systemic linguistics. Second, then, systemicists, like Firthians before them, have taken a great interest in the relation between language and context. They have always argued, following Malinowski (1923, 1935), that you cannot understand the meaning of what someone say's or writes unless you know something about the context in which it is embedded. Or, looking at this the other way round, if you understand what someone says or writes (a text in technical terms), you can also figure out a great deal about the context in which that text occurred (Ure and Ellis 1977). This idea about the relationship between language and context was taken over from Malinowski into linguistics by Firth (1957a, b). Malinowski was an anthropologist who worked largely in Melanesia, studying the culture of people living on islands to the south and cast of Papua New Guinea. Malinowski was what people commonly think of when they hear the word linguist: not someone who describes languages, but someone who knows a lot of languages and learns them easily. Malinowski believed that learning the language of the people you were studying was essential for an anthropologist, and he collected a number of texts, taken from many different aspects of the life of the Melanesians he was studying (note that anthropologists like Malinowski are social scientists too, very closely related to sociologists in what they do, though tending to work on more exotic and less familiar cultures). When he was translating these texts into English, for the benefit of his English readers, Malinowski noticed that the translations he was producing did not really make much sense. This was partly because Malinowski was not a linguist in the grammar-describing sense of the term, and tended to give word-for-word translations which 5 exaggerated the differences between Melanesian languages and English. But more importantly and this was Malinowski's point, no matter how good a translation he made, it still turned out that if you didn't know what the people involved in the text were doing, and didn't understand the culture, then you couldn't make sense of their text. In order to deal with this problem Malinowski introduced the terms 'context of situation' and 'context of culture'. Let me try and give an example of what Malinowski was on about. Suppose you are sitting in a room, and hear someone yell: 'John, don't do it there mate!' (if you know another language, think about how you would say this in that language). Now, however faithfully you translate this sentence into another language, it will still be the case that unless on know what John was doing, you don't really know what the person talking to him meant. You don't know what John was doing, what he was doing it to, and where he was doing it. If however you had a translation of this sentence, and a description of the context of situation in which it was uttered (say John dumping a load of broken mud bricks into a drainage trough), then you would be able to understand the text. So, in order to explain the meaning of a sentence, you need both a description of that sentence and of the context in which it was used. But Malinowski believed that even this would not be enough. Alongside a description of the context of situation, you also need a description of the culture in which the utterance is used. Suppose, for example, you are wandering down a corridor at Sydney University, and hear someone say 'Okay, now what we have here is a mental process rank-shifted into the Carrier of a relational clause'. (Try translating that into another language if you know one!) Suppose as well that you happen to glance through an open door and see a lecturer talking to a group of students and pointing to the underlined constituent in a clause such as the following written on the whiteboard: what they want is unacceptable. You have now heard the sentence; if you look closely at the whiteboard you can see which part of the clause the Carrier is; and you can see what the lecturer is doing and who he is talking to. But if you are not studying functional linguistics you will still be at a loss as to what exactly is going on. This is because you have not been socialised into the world where such a sentence makes sense. You are not a member of the subculture which goes around talking about language in his way. This is Malinowski's point about needing a description of the language, the context of situation and the context of culture in which a sentence is used. If you are not a member of the culture, you cannot understand what is meant. 6 Malinowski's ideas about language in relation to context of situation and context of culture were taken over by Firth and incorporated into linguistic theory. In sharp contrast to the goals of many of his American contemporaries, Firth believed that the purpose of linguistics was to explain meaning (American linguists such as Bloomfield felt that this was a hopelessly complicated goal). Firth did little to flesh out Malinowski's concept of context of culture, but he did take steps to outline those aspects of the context of situation which were relevant to linguistic description. This work was carried on by Firth's students, who adopted the term 'register' for the study of the relation between language and context of situation. Firth's students were for a time referred to as neo-Firthians (many, following Halliday would go on to develop systemic linguistics; Bazell et al. 1966). They developed a more sophisticated framework than Firth for describing register, making use of three main cate- gories: field, mode and tenor (at first they used the term 'style' for 'tenor', but then, following Gregory, agreed to reserve that term for the study of literary texts; Halliday 1978; Halliday and Hasan 1985). Definitions of these three categories varied slightly, over the years (Gregory in fact suggested splitting tenor into personal tenor and functional tenor in 1967 - this will be further discussed below; see Gregory and Carroll 1978); but in general the terms can be understood as follows. Field refers to what is going on, where what is going on is interpreted institutionally in terms of some culturally recognised activity (what people are doing with their lives, as it were). Examples of fields are activities such as tennis, opera, linguistics, cooking, building construction, farming, politics, education and so on. When people ask you what you do when first getting to know you, you tend to answer in terms of field (e.g. Well, I'm a linguist. I play tennis. I'm interested in popular music and so on). Tenor refers to the way you relate to other people when doing what you do. One aspect of this is status. Our society, like all other human societies we know of, is structured in such a way that people have power over one another. This power is of various kinds: mature people tend to dominate younger ones, commanding their respect; bosses dominate employees; teachers dominate students and so on. There is no escaping, this, however nice we try to be about it. When you think people are bossy or 'above themselves', it is usually because they are asserting an inordinate amount of power over you. When you think someone is quiet, evasive and looking insecure, it is often because they are being overly deferential to you. And of 7 course you can resist, as when feminists struggle to renovate the power relations between women and men. Renovation is hard work as we all know, and however democratic our ideals, there always seems to be a lot of power pushing us around. Mode refers to the channel you select to communicate - the choice most commonly presented is between speech and writing. But modern society makes use of many additional channels: blogs, Facebook, YouTube, SMS messages, e-mail, telephone, radio, television, video, film and so on, each a distinct mode in its own right. It should perhaps be stressed here that writing is a relatively late development in human culture, both in terms of the history of our race and in the life of a child. Writing as we know it was invented just three times in human history - once in China, once in the Middle East (and once in Central America, although this tradition has not survived). In European and Asian contexts writing is only a few thousand years old; many languages still do not use a writing system in day-to-day life, and across cultures children have learned to speak much of their language before they put pen to paper. Interestingly enough, the emergence of writing systems has had a considerable effect on the structure of languages which use them. This is related to why speech and writing differ as they do, and why learning to write involves far more than using squiggles to make meaning instead of sounds. The choices you make from your grammar are themselves very different in speech and writing. It is for this reason that learning to write effectively takes so long. Formalising the relationship of language and culture In the late 1960s, after working for some years on formalising the choices relevant to clause structure in English, Halliday made a significant breakthrough as far as work on the relationship between language and context is concerned (Halliday 1973). He noted that the register categories of field, mode and tenor that he and his colleagues had developed earlier in the decade had striking parallels in the structure of language itself. What had happened was that as work on formalising clause systems progressed, it became clear that those systems were tending to cluster into three main groups. One bundle of choices was referred to in his early work by Halliday as TRANSITIVITY; this bundle of choices was concerned with the structure of clauses in terms of the way they map reality - the difference between verbs of doing and happening, reacting, thinking and perceiving, saying, and describing and identifying, along with the VOICE (active/passive) potential associated with each. Another bundle he referred to as MOOD, and was concerned with distinguishing statements from 8 questions from commands from exclamations as well as expressing usuality, probability, inclination, obligation and ability. The third bundle, called THEME, has to do with the way in which speakers order constituents in a clause, putting first a Theme which connects with the overall development of a paragraph or text, and last something that contains information which is new to the listener. Later, Halliday was to use more semantically oriented terms to generalise these three broad areas of meaning potential: 'ideational' for meaning about the world, 'interpersonal' for intersubjective meaning between speakers, and 'textual' for meanings relating pieces of text to each other and to their context (Halliday 1978, 1994). Looked at in this way, in terms of the kinds of meaning involved, the three main bundles of systems were seen to match up with register categories in the following way. Field obviously correlated with ideational meaning. There was a connection between the institutional activities in which people engage and what they were talking about. Mode was most clearly related to textual meanings. The channel you choose has a big effect on the relationship between language and its context. And tenor was closely related to interpersonal meaning; power and solidarity are both implicated in whether you are giving or demanding goods and services or information and how sure you are about what you are doing. This correlation between register categories and functional components in the grammar is very important. It is this that enables systemicists to predict on the basis of context not just what choices a speaker is likely to make, but which areas of the grammar are at stake. Conversely it allows us to