Language and Situation

Language Varieties and their Social Contexts

Michael Gregory, Susanne Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429790195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Originally published in 1978. This book provides and explains a framework for understanding and describing variations of style of language in relation to the social context in which it is used. Constant features of language users, such as their temporal, geographical. and social origins, their range of intelligibility, and their individualities, are related to concepts of dialects, but dialects are not the only kind of language variety. There are features of language situations that yield others; the medium used, the roles of the users and their relationships, as well as recurring situations and cultural habits, all relate to the style employed. Variety in language can be seen in terms of the major functions of language, as 'content' as 'inter-action' and as 'texture'. Studying variety in language from sociological and linguistic aspects this book is also interesting for psycholinguistics and literary study.

Chapter one

Introduction

In the traffic of daily life, situations are constantly arising so closely similar that we do not hesitate to speak of them as the ‘same situation’. Every language has its own fixed ways of coping with certain recurring situations. A. H. Gardiner, The Theory of Speech and Language

Among the various definitions distinguishing humanity from other created beings is that of man as the ‘talking animal’. The inescapable fact—that ‘man talks’—and the implications of this human capacity, have been at the centre of investigation in the linguistic sciences in the last couple of decades. Linguists (such as Noam Chomsky) and psychologists (such as G. A. Miller) have been concerned with the innate and, in many respects, infinite capacity the human being has for language, and much light has been thrown by such scholars both on the nature of language and on the nature of being human. Such an approach, emphasizing ‘what the speaker knows’ and concentrating on ‘language as knowledge’, has been characterized as an intra-organism approach (Halliday, 1974).

Nevertheless, from another point of view it has to be remembered that in many crucial respects (such as ‘what the speaker does’ and ‘language as doing’) what is more important is not so much that ‘man talks’ as that ‘men talk’; that is, that language is essentially a social, an inter-organism, activity (Halliday, op. cit.). We do not use it in isolation from the wider framework of human activity, and even in the extreme case when we are talking to ourselves, we still, in a sense, have company.

This book is written from the latter perspective on language, which is a social one. It is concerned with what is involved in looking at the language people really use (cf. Benson and Greaves, 1973) talking or writing to each other at different times, in different places, for different purposes, in different social and personal contexts, and it is concerned with the mutual relations that can be seen to exist between different human social situations and different varieties of a language.

Of course, the notion that there is a strong and constant relationship between the language we use in a particular situation and certain features of that situation is no new one. It lies behind the rhetorics of ancient Greece and Rome, the mediaeval lists of ‘hard words’, eighteenth-century English handbooks on Polite English, and the present series of technical dictionaries by Penguin Books: Dictionary of Sailing, Dictionary of Psychology, etc. However, to assert that we all use similar language in similar situations is not, of course, to claim that we all use the same language in the same situation. The claim is more modest but more important. It is not so naive as to fail to recognize the ultimate uniqueness of any instance of language, but it is concerned with what any instance of language shares with some other instances, and the important predictability patterns that can be traced between situation and language. When we open a letter from our bank, a novel of Irving Wallace or indeed Graham Greene, go to hear a sermon or a political speech or read a Times editorial or Time Magazine, we have an idea of what we are going to get, and most times we more or less get what we expect. There is a match between language and social context, and it is the purpose of this book to be explicit about such matches and how we may talk about them.

So, with Catford (1965, p. 83), it will be assumed here that:

the concept of a ‘whole language’ is so vast and heterogeneous that it is not operationally useful for many linguistic purposes, descriptive, comparative, and pedagogical. It is therefore desirable to have a framework of categories for the classification of ‘sub-languages’ or varieties within a total language.

This book is based on such a framework as it has been developed in the past fifteen years or so, particularly by British scholars (cf. Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens, 1964; Enkvist, Spencer and Gregory, 1964; Catford, 1965; Gregory, 1967, 1969; Halliday, 1974, 1975a, 1975b, forthcoming); but it has similarities with work on the ethnology of communication by Dell Hymes and others in the USA (cf. Hymes, 1967). Though regarded as being relevant to languages in general, the framework of insights and categories presented here will be largely applied to, and exemplified from, English.

The first assumption we make is that the idea we have of ‘language’ or ‘a language’ is related to our knowledge and observation of, and participation in, actual occurrences of language—what are called language events. Most of these events, occurring as they do within the complex and continuing process of social activity are, of course, sequential and transitory, and are thus not readily amenable to investigation at the time of their actual occurrence. So we have to have recourse to records of these events through our memory, through informed recognition of what is likely in the particular language, and through the use of sound-recordings or of scripts, written either in conventional orthography or in some form of phonetic notation. Any such record, recalled, sound-recorded, written or printed, of a language event, is known as a text: it is both a physical thing and a semantic unit; and it is what happens in language in action.

Language is transmitted; it is patterned, and it is embedded in the human social experience. So it is both possible and useful to discern three crucial aspects of a language event—the substantial, the formal, and the situational. The transmission of language is by means of audible sound waves or visible marks on a surface. This is the substance of the language event, which is either phonic (audible sounds) or graphic (visible signs).

In bits of phonic or graphic substance that are instances of language, and not mere babbling or scribbling, there are discernible patterns, regularities in internal relations which go beyond mere similarities in sound or vision; in other words, the patterns are more than just patterns of substance. They are, rather, patterns in substance which are meaningful in terms of our human social behaviour and our understanding of it—as in the comparable yet contrastive grammatical and vocabulary patterns of

He’s gone to the game.
Has she gone to the store?

This internal meaningful structure is known as form.

Now it is also observable that language events do not occur in isolation from other aspects of human behaviour; rather, we know that they operate within the manifold complex of human social behaviour and are mutualy related to it. They take place in situations, and situation is the third aspect of the language event: ‘the environment in which text comes to life’ (Halliday, 1975b). For the moment, situation can be thought of as the relevant extra-textual circumstances, linguistic and non-linguistic, of the language event/text in question.

These, therefore, are the three essential aspects of the language event: substance, which is either phonic (audible sound waves) or graphic (visible, or in the case of Braille, tactile, marks on a surface); form, its meaningful internal patterning; and situation, its relevant extra-textual circumstances, linguistic and non-linguistic. These aspects of the language event are relatable to the levels or strata of language and linguistic description (cf. Halliday, forthcoming; Lamb, 1966). The lexico-grammatical level (syntax, morphology and vocabulary) is concerned with form; semantic statements correlate the contextual relations between situation and form; and phonology links form and substance, attempting to be explicit about how sounds and features of sound are utilized in a given language in order to realize the meaningful contrasts of grammar and lexis.

A framework for understanding and describing language varieties has to deal with the constant features of the situational circumstances of language events that can be consistently related to variety in the language texts. Such features fall into two main groups: one group relates to reasonably permanent characteristics of the user in language events, the other relates to the user’s use of language in such events; and they yield the two main kinds of language variety that will be discussed in this book: dialects and diatypes.

‘A language variety is a sub-set of formal and/or substantial features which correlates regularly with a particular type of socio-situational feature’ (Catford, 1965, p. 84). A variety category is then a contextual category correlating groupings of linguistic features with recurrent situational features. So there is needed a set of situational categories for the description of those socio-situational features which correlate with subsets of linguistic features.

Now when we talk about Mr X’s English or Miss Y’s English we are referring to the language varieties of different users of English and recognizing that our individuality is, as it must be, reflected in our language—that ‘the style is’, to an extent, ‘the man’. Most of us can detect our friends in what they speak and write, and this is not just because of the sound of their voice or the look of their handwriting. It is also because they have favourite grammatical structures, pronunciations, pitch and stress patterns, and vocabulary items. The situational category we need to handle this aspect of language behaviour is user’s individuality, and the set of linguistic features associated with a particular person constitutes his/her ‘individual dialect’ or idiolect.

Terms like Old English, Middle English, Elizabethan English and Modern English recognize that language varies along the dimension of time and the appropriate situational category in this instance is user’s temporal provenance (place in time), and the related set of linguistic features constitutes a temporal dialect.

Contrasts and comparisons between British and American English, on the other hand, indicate that the place in which we learnt and customarily use English is reflected in what we speak and write. Geographical provenance and geographical dialect are the related categories.

In the 1950s an attempt was made to distinguish between U and non-U English, that is Upper Class and non-Upper Class English (Ross, 1954, 1956), and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was customary for scholars to distinguish Polite from Vulgar English. Such distinctions, when valid, reflect the relationship between language and social class. Social provenance of users and social dialect are appropriate categories for looking at such relationships.

There remains another type of dialect distinction which it is useful to make for a language that is spoken in many different and differing communities, not always with inter-intelligibility. This is the distinction between a standard and a non-standard dialect. Standard dialect need not have a simple or direct reference to the influence of particular social or geographical provenances, nor is it just a matter of accent. The term is needed to indicate, where that is appropriate, what has been called ‘the universal form’ of a language (Abercrombie, 1955, p. 11): that set of semantic, grammatical, lexical and phonological patterns which enables certain users of English (for example) throughout the English-speaking world to communicate intelligibly with each other. So user’s range of intelligibility is the related situational category: and like all other dimensions of situation variation which correlate with language variety this, too, is a continuum (or cline) of variation rather than a series of discrete steps, although it is useful to make distinctions such as standard, sub-standard, non-standard, to mark points along the cline.

Today, standard English has world-wide currency, being spoken in varying accents, and written by, Englishmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Scots; by Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, West Indians, Rhodesians and South Africans; and by many other people, in Black Africa and the Indian sub-continent, for whom it may not be a mother tongue. Of course there are grammatical and vocabulary differences amongst the standard Englishes throughout the world but they need not be significant in relation to the standard/non-standard contrast.

All the varieties discussed so far, which are known as dialectal varieties or dialects (summarized in Table 1), have a long history of recognition and use in philological and linguistic scholarship. They are, as has been noted, concerned with the linguistic reflections of reasonably permanent characteristics of the user, a necessary and constant feature of situations in which there are language events. The qualification of ‘permanent’ with ‘reasonably’ is not unimportant because, although a user’s individuality, temporal, geographical and social provenances, and range of intelligibility within the wider speech community all have a high degree of constancy, it is of course possible for a language user to assume, at least partially and temporarily, the linguistic habits of another individual, or time, or place, or social class for reasons of parody, art, humour, etc., or indeed to assume them unconsciously as a result of linguistic social accommodation. For example, many English speakers and many Canadian speakers of French, in particular, control both a standard and a non-standard dialect: the selection of one rather than another in different situations being related to questions of use—particularly relationships with the hearer or reader, the type of situation variation yielding diatypic varieties or diatypes—the linguistic reflection of the user’s use of language in situations (Table 2).

The three major dimensions of such variation are contextually categorized as field, mode and tenor of discourse. In a general sense they are all related to the role being played by the user in the language event. Field of discourse is the consequence of the user’s purposive role, what his language is ‘about’, what experience he is verbalizing, what is ‘going on’ through language. This includes, of course, topic and subject matter and reflects Gardiner’s point (1932, p. 98) that in speech events participants are revealing ‘an intelligible purpose’. Some non-specialist purposive roles such as ‘establishing personal contact’ or ‘phatic communion’ (cf. Malinowski, 1923; Firth, 1957) have a number of possible related topics such as ‘weather’, ‘health’, ‘projected holidays’, ‘current news’. The specialized roles of scientist, technologist, expert, and informed enthusiast, relate to specialist fields, and are more likely to have a one-to-one field relationship.

An important initial distinction in classifying a language such as English according to field of discourse might be between what are called Technical Englishes and non-Technical Englishes, between, that is, those Englishes in which the field-purposive role correlation so determines the language used that it becomes rather restricted to that role and to those acquainted with it (e.g. the English of Mathematics, Legal English, the English of Linguistics), and those Englishes which are not so restricted.

The mode of discourse is the linguistic reflection of the relationship the language user has to the medium of transmission. Initially, this relationship may be seen as the simple one of which medium is being used: speech or writing. However, as soon as relationships such as those between conversation in real life and dialogue in novels and plays, or between a speech and an article, are considered, then more delicate distinctions are necessary, and differences between spontaneous and non-spontaneous speech, and between what is written to be spoken and what is written ‘to be read with the eye’, become relevant.

The relationship the user has with his audience, his adressee(s), is the situational factor that is involved in tenor of discourse. Tenors of discourse result from the mutual relations between the language used...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General editor’s preface
• Chapter one: Introduction
• Chapter two: Dialect
• Chapter three: Fields of discourse
• Chapter four: Modes of discourse
• Chapter five: Tenors of discourse
• Chapter six: Register
• Chapter seven: Code
• Chapter eight: Conclusion: textual varieties, meaning and social context
• Appendix
• Some suggestions for further reading
• Bibliography