Interviews with M.A.K. Halliday

Language Turned Back on Himself

J. R. Martin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441190819
• eBook ISBN: 9781441145857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume gathers together 14 interviews with M A K Halliday, the founder of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), recorded over four decades – the most recent of which was conducted in 2011 and published here for the first time. In these engaging conversations with colleagues Halliday explores his own development as a student of language in Britain and China, the evolution of SFL theory around the world, its place in the field of general linguistics and its many sites of application. The dialogic mode enacted here allows Halliday to touch on many points of personal history and intellectual challenge that have not been addressed in formal publications (in his books or collected papers), including answers to the many thought-provoking questions his colleagues had waited sometimes years to ask. Accordingly each chapter offers a fresh illuminating window on the innovative thinking and assured convictions of this towering figure in linguistics.

1

With Herman Parret (1972)

HP: Michael Halliday, you are one of the most representative linguists of what one might call the trend of sociolinguistics. You use terms like sociogrammar and sociosemantics; does that imply a very particular view on the scope of linguistics?

MAKH: I would really prefer to leave out the ‘socio’, if I had the choice. But we probably have to talk about ‘sociolinguistics’ these days, because of the shift in the meaning of ‘linguistics’. When I was a student, with J. R. Firth, linguistics was the study of language in society; it was assumed that one took into account social factors, so linguists never found it necessary to talk about sociolinguistics. But during the last ten or fifteen years the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, away from the social context towards the study of language from what I would call an ‘intra-organism’ point of view, or language as knowledge if you like; so that anyone who is concerned with the other, ‘inter-organism’ aspect of language, with how people talk to each other, has to prefix ‘socio’ to what he is doing. Hence you have sociolinguistics; and hence, also, ‘sociosemantics’ or ‘sociogrammar’.

Let me put it this way: these two perspectives – on the one hand the intra-organism perspective, language as what goes on inside the head (language as knowledge), and on the other hand the inter-organism perspective, language as what goes on between people (language as interaction, or simply as behavior) – are complementary and not contradictory. There tend to be fashions in linguistics, as in many other things. I started in a tradition where the perspective was mainly of the inter-organism kind. Then the pendulum swung the other way, largely through the influence of Chomsky who emphasized the philosophical and psychological links of the subject. And so those wanting to talk about language from the point of view not so much that ‘people talk’ but that ‘people talk to each other’ have called what they are doing sociolinguistics. I think both Hymes and Labov have pointed out that the ‘socio’ is really unnecessary, and I rather agree with them.

HP: You wrote that a good linguist has to go outside linguistics. What do you mean by that?

MAKH: This is a related point. If you look at the writings of linguists in the 1950s, you find great stress laid on the autonomy of linguistics. Linguistics is seeking recognition as a subject in its own right; it has not to be evaluated against other disciplines. Now, as long as you concentrate attention on the core of the linguistic system, on linguistic form (grammar and vocabulary), then the interrelationships that you are studying are – or can be treated as if they were – wholly bounded within language, since their immediate points of reference are also within language: on the one hand the semantic system, and on the other hand the phonological system. But once you become concerned with the linguistic system as a whole, including the semantic system, then you have to look outside language for your criteria of idealization.

The essential question at issue is this: what are or are not two instances of the same phenomenon, two tokens of the same type? The moment you include the semantic and phonological systems in your picture, then you are involved in the interfaces between language and something else: in one direction meaning, and in the other direction sound. The two are not symmetrical, of course, because the system is not symmetrical; the classic problem in phonology, the debate over the phoneme, is a debate about the nature of idealization at the ‘output’ end – in classifying two sounds together as tokens of the same type, do you look ‘downwards’ and take account of the expression system, or only ‘upwards’ towards the content? But when we are concerned with the grammatical system our point of reference is clearly ‘upwards’. We relate the distinctions that we draw in the grammatical system (grammar and vocabulary) to the semantics. Where then do we find the criteria for distinctions in the semantic system? How do we decide what are or are not instances of the same meaning, tokens of the same semantic type? Only by going outside language. In practice most people, including many linguists, without even really thinking about this issue quite arbitrarily use the orthographic system as their criterion of idealization. They assume that if two things are written the same they are the same, and if they are written differently they are different. (They are reluctant to accept, for example, that differences of intonation may realize distinctions within the semantic system, distinguishing one semantic type from another in just the same way that different words or structures do.) This in the last resort is circular. You cannot find within language criteria for semantic idealization, criteria for deciding whether two things are the same or are not the same in meaning. You have got to go outside language. The accepted way of doing this is to postulate a conceptual system. One says, in effect, we have a system of concepts, two concepts are the same or different, and that is how we decide whether two linguistic elements are the same or different. If we admit that there is a semantic system, a semantic level of organization within the linguistic system, then the question we are asking is “What is above that?”; and it is at that point that we move outside language. We are regarding semantics as an interface between language and something else, and it is to that something else that we go for our criteria of idealization. In that sense, the linguistic system is not autonomous. Only, once we admit that, we can then take account of the fact that there is more than one direction that we may go outside language. A conceptual system is not the only form that such a higher-level semiotic can take.

HP: Do you stress the instrumentality of linguistics rather than its autonomy?

MAKH: These are not really contradictory. But there are two different issues involved when you talk about autonomy. One is: “To what extent is the subject self-sufficient?” My answer is: “It isn’t.” (But then what subject is?) The second is: “To what extent are we studying language for the purpose of throwing light on language or for the purpose of throwing light on something else?” This is a question of goals; it is the question why you are doing it. In this sense the two perspectives are just complementary. Probably most people who have looked at language in functional terms have had a predominantly instrumental approach; they have not been concerned with the nature of language as such so much as with the use of language to explore something else. But I would say that in order to understand the nature of language itself we also have to approach it functionally. So I would have both perspectives at once. It seems to me that we have to recognize different purposes for which language may be studied. An autonomous linguistics is the study of language for the sake of understanding the linguistic system. An instrumental linguistics is the study of language for understanding something else – the social system, for example.

HP: One needs for a relevant linguistic theory other larger theories, behavioral and sociological theories. One can find in your publications many allusions to Bernstein’s sociology. What does Bernstein mean for you?

MAKH: If you are interested in inter-organism linguistics, in language as interaction, then you are inevitably led to a consideration of language in the perspective of the social system. What interests me about Bernstein is that he is a theoretical sociologist who builds language into his theory not as an optional extra but as an essential component (Bernstein 1971). In Bernstein’s view, in order to understand the social system, how it persists and changes in the course of the transmission of culture from one generation to another, you have to understand the key role that language plays in this. He approaches this first of all through the role that language plays in the socialization process; he then moves on towards a much more general social theory of cultural transmission and the maintenance of the social system, still with language playing the key role. To me as a linguist this is crucial for two reasons, one instrumental and one autonomous if you like. Speaking ‘instrumentally’, it means that you have in Bernstein’s work a theory of the social system with language embedded in it, so that anyone who is asking, as I am, questions such as “What is the role of language in the transmission of culture? How is it that the ordinary everyday use of the language, in the home, in the neighborhood and so on, acts as an effective channel for communicating the social system?” finds in Bernstein’s work a social theory in the context of which one can ask these questions. In the second place, speaking ‘autonomously’, this then feeds back into our study of the linguistic system, so that we can use the insights we get from Bernstein’s work to answer the question: why is language as it is? Language has evolved in a certain way because of its function in the social system.

HP: Why this privileged position of language in the socialization process, for Bernstein and for you?

MAKH: I suppose because, in the processes by which the child becomes a member of society, language does in fact play the central part. Even if you take the most fundamental type of personal relationship, that of the child and its mother, this is largely mediated through language. Bernstein has the notion of critical socializing contexts; there are a small number of situation types, like the regulative context (control of the child’s behavior by the parent), which are critical in the socialization of the child. The behavior that takes place within these contexts is largely linguistic behavior. It is the linguistic activity which carries the culture with it.

HP: You and Bernstein mean by language vocalized language and no other systems of signs?

MAKH: Yes, although we would of course agree on the important role of paralinguistic systems like gesture. Clearly the more that one can bring these into the total picture, the more insight one will gain. But nevertheless language, in the sense of speech, natural language in its spoken form, is the key system.

HP: Other linguists working in the field of sociolinguistics are Hymes and Labov. Is there again solidarity with these researchers?

MAKH: Hymes has adopted, in some of his work at least, an intra-organism perspective on what are essentially inter-organism questions (Hymes 1971). This is a complex point. Let me put it this way: suppose you are studying language as interaction, you can still embed this in the perspective of language as knowledge. This is what is lying behind Hymes’ notion of communicative competence, or competence in use. To link this up with the recent history of the subject, we should mention Chomsky first. The great thing Chomsky achieved was that he was the first to show that natural language could be brought within the scope of formalization; that you could in fact study natural language as a formal system. The cost of this was a very high degree of idealization; obviously, he had to leave out of consideration a great many of those variations and those distinctions that precisely interest those of us who are concerned with the sociological study of language. From this point of view Chomskyan linguistics is a form of reductionism, it is so highly idealized. Now, Chomsky’s idealization is expressed in the distinction he draws between competence and performance. Competence (in its original sense) refers to the natural language in its idealized form, performance to everything else – it is a ragbag including physiological side-effects, mental blocks, statistical properties of the system, subtle nuances of meaning and various other things all totally unrelated to each other, as Hymes himself has pointed out. If you are interested in linguistic interaction, you don’t want the high level of idealization that is involved in the notion of competence; you can’t use it, because most of the distinctions that are important to you are idealized out of the picture.

What can you do about this? You can do two things. You can say, in effect “I accept the distinction, but I will study performance”; you then set up “theories of performance”, in which case it is necessary to formulate some concept (which is Hymes’ communicative competence) to take account of the speaker’s ability to use language in ways that are appropriate to the situation. In other words, you say there is a “sociolinguistic competence” as well as a linguistic competence. Or you can do what I would do, which is to reject the distinction altogether on the grounds that we cannot operate with this degree and this kind of idealization. We accept a much lower level of formalization; instead of rejecting what is messy, we accept the mess and build it into the theory (as Labov does with variation; Labov 1970). To put it another way, we don’t try to draw a distinction between what is grammatical and what is acceptable. So in an inter-organism perspective there is no place for the dic...

Table of contents

• Also Available From Bloomsbury
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 With Herman Parret (1972)
• 2 With Noboru Yamaguchi and Shun’ichi Segawa (1977)
• 3 From The English Magazine
• 4 With M. L. Tickoo (1985)
• 5 With Paul J. Thibault (1985)
• 6 With Ruqaiya Hasan, Gunther Kress and J. R. Martin (1986)
• 7 With Michael O’Toole and Gunther Kress (1989)
• 8 With Caroline Coffin (1998)
• 9 With Manuel A. Hernÿndez (1998)
• 10 With Geoff Thompson and Heloisa Collins (1998)
• 11 With Anne Burns (2006)
• 12 With Hu Zhuanglin and Zhu Yongsheng (2010)
• 13 With Bilal Ibne Rasheed (2010)
• 14 With J. R. Martin and Paul Thibault (2011)
• Bibliography
• Index