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Introduction
Social Semiotics: Key Figures, New Directions contains interviews with five scholars, who have all contributed immensely to the expansion of Michael A. K. Halliday’s ideas about semiosis, i.e. human meaning making. What the scholars have in common is that Halliday’s theory of a social semiotics has inspired them to do ground breaking work themselves. In other words, the scholars are key figures in social semiotics, and their work represents a plurality of new directions. The scholars in question are Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, James R. Martin, Gunther R. Kress, Theo J. van Leeuwen and Jay L. Lemke. In this book, we present their thoughts and ideas in the form of five separate interviews followed by a discussion of their similarities and differences. The dialogical form of an interview is particularly apt for making inroads into complex theories and making connections among the scholars and across fields. With the interviews in this book, we highlight the main lines of thought of each of the fives scholars, and we discuss how they relate to Halliday’s original concept of social semiotics, as well as to each other.
In order to establish a context for the remainder of the book, we shall provide below a concise introduction to the intellectual legacy from Michael A. K. Halliday (in the section What is Halliday’s social semiotics?). This section is no more than a brief outline of the fundamentals of Halliday’s social semiotics; the main aim of the book is to present and discuss how our five scholars have taken Halliday’s ideas to new frontiers, and how they have redefined and reshaped several of his original ideas, not to present Halliday’s ideas themselves. After the brief introduction to Halliday’s social semiotics, we shall provide an overview of the academic careers of each of our interviewees (in the section Who are the scholars?); in this second section of this introduction, we shall also sketch out their main contributions to social semiotics. The final section of this chapter contains some remarks on the way in which we have gathered and edited the interviews, i.e. some remarks on the methodology behind the book.
What is Halliday’s social semiotics?
“Language is as it is because of what it has to do”, Halliday states in his Language as Social Semiotic, and in a concise and typical Hallidayan down-to-earth way, the statement conveys the axiomatic hypothesis that language (and other semiotic systems) has developed and is as it is because of the meanings that people have perceived the need to create in order to communicate; semiotic systems (such as language) reflect, construe and enact our reality.
In a social semiotic approach, therefore, semiosis is not done by minds, but by social practices in a community. Meanings do not arise in the individual; meaning is a superindividual and intersubjective activity, and consciousness is approached from a Vygotskian perspective, whereby consciousness is a social mode of being. The functionality of any semiotic system is based on a social understanding of meaning and meaning making, as signalled with the notion of social semiotics. The social understanding of meaning is, in fact, also a cultural understanding of meaning, since Halliday – inspired by Malinowski – equates social with cultural, whereby all meanings are cultural. With a social and cultural foundation for semiosis there is no need for the concept of mind, or for the idea of some extra-semiotic knowledge base in the Hallidayan approach. Meanings do not exist or arise in a separate cognitive universe of concepts or ideas; instead Halliday sees them as patterns of semantic organization, which are realized through grammar.
Halliday suggests that a semiotic system can be located as a fourth order of complexity in an evolutionary typology of systems, i.e. in a typology representing the emergence of grammar (through time). The most basic system type is a physical system. If we add life to a physical system, we have a biological system. If we then add value to our biological system, we have a social system. To the social system, we can then add meaning, and thereby the typology culminates in a semiotic system.
A semiotic system is a fourth order of complexity, since it is at the same time semiotic and social and biological and physical. Semiotic systems can be of two kinds: they can be primary, consisting of content/expression pairs (i.e. of signs), or they can be of a higher order, involving a stratification of content into a dual layering of semantics and grammar; language is a higher order semiotic system. Higher order semiotic systems are not systems of signs (pairings of content and expression), they are meaning systems in which entities function along different dimensions in complex “grammatico-semantic” relations to each other.
Being a linguist, Halliday is primarily concerned with language, and he only occasionally reaches out to other semiotics systems. In effect, social semiotics is a notion seldom used by Halliday himself, he prefers the notion of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Part of the reason is that his original use of the notion of social semiotics was intended to cover only higher order semiotic systems (systems with a distinct grammar) but, in its contemporary use, the notion is associated with any semiotic system, i.e. also with systems that Halliday as a linguist would regard as primary semiotic systems.
Halliday upholds the Whorfian idea of a close connection between thinking and language. Whorf describes this connection as follows:
… thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language ( … ). And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.
(Whorf, 1956, p. 252)
Halliday’s approach is multifaceted and rich in detail, and different aspects of semiosis and different parts of language are described with a varying emphasis on the many different theoretical and descriptive concepts. However, we can single out three major organizing principles, which are crucial in every aspect of his approach: stratification, instantiation and metafunction.
Language is regarded as being stratified, which means that language is organized in four strata: semantics, lexicogrammar (both of these are “content” strata, meaning that they organize the content part of meaning), phonology and phonetics (both of these are “expression” strata, organizing the resources for expressing meaning). Language is context sensitive, both in the sense that its categories are motivated by the (social) context, in which language has a function, and in the sense that its categories reflect back on context by imposing a certain understanding of reality. Halliday therefore embeds the four linguistic strata in a stratum for context, as it is illustrated in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 Stratification (language)
The relationship among the strata is that of realization, so context is realized in semantics, which again is realized in lexicogrammar, and so forth. The realizational relationship has a progressive scope, meaning that context is realized not only in semantics but in the sum of all the linguistic strata, i.e. in all the strata below context. In the same way, semantics and lexicogrammar are realized in the sum of all their lower-level strata. Realization, thus, is accumulative.
Halliday suggests that the realizational relationship between the “content” strata (semantics and lexicogrammar) and the “expression” strata (phonology and phonetics) is arbitrary, while the more internal realizational relationship between the two content strata (between semantics and lexicogrammar), and between the two expression strata (between phonology and phonetics) is natural. Thus, grammar is not just form. Grammar is the wording of semantics, which organizes the meanings – the flux of experience – that are significant for a community. Ultimately, therefore, grammar is motivated by context: it is functional.
The concept of realization holding the strata together is distinct from another major type of relation recognized by Halliday, namely that of instantiation. Instantiation designates the relationship between a semiotic system regarded as an underlying potential, and text. In the light of instantiation, text is understood as a particular instance of the underlying potential, i.e. a text represents a particular actualization of parts of the total (and abstract) semiotic system. From the idea that system and text are the same phenomena seen by different perspectives, Halliday links system and text as poles on a continuum; this is illustrated in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2 Instantiation
Halliday’s third major organizing principle is that of metafunction. Halliday sees a semiotic system as diversified into three metafunctions: the interpersonal, the ideational and the textual metafunction. The interpersonal metafunction enacts exchange, which includes expression of personalities and personal feelings on the one hand, and forms of interaction and social interplay with other participants in the communication situation on the other. The ideational metafunction is further subdivided into the experiential and the logical metafunction; the experiential metafunction concerns the way language construes experience, both of the external world and of the inner, mental world, while the logical metafunction organizes basic logical relations. Finally, the textual metafunction enables the speaker to organize ideational and interpersonal meaning in such a way that it makes sense in the context and fulfils its function as a message.
The theoretical inspiration to the metafunctional hypothesis comes from Malinowski, Whorf and Mathesius; Malinowski’s work has inspired Halliday to the idea of the interpersonal metafunction, Whorf’s work to the idea of the ideational metafunction, and Mathesius’s work to the idea of the textual metafunction. Halliday pays tribute to these scholars as follows:
For Malinowski, language was a means of action; and since symbols cannot act on things, this meant as means of interaction – acting on other people. Language need not (and often did not) match the reality; but since it derived its meaning potential from use, it typically worked. For Whorf, on the other hand, language was a means of thought. It provided a model of reality; but when the two did not match, since experience was interpreted within the limitations of this model, it could be disastrous in action ( … ). Mathesius showed how language varied to suit the context. Each sentence of the text was organized by the speaker so as to convey the message he wanted at that juncture, and the total effect was what we recognize as discourse. Their work provides the foundation for a systemic functional semantics.
(Halliday, 1984, p. 311)
Halliday’s conceptions of stratification, instantiation and metafunction have been used by our five scholars in their work with varying loyalty to Halliday’s original formulations; in one scholar’s work, the concepts have to a very large extent been adapted as intended by Halliday, in others’ work, the concepts have been reshaped (beyond recognition, nearly, in some cases). Common for all, however, is that the three concepts (and Halliday’s work at large) have functioned as an undeniable source of inspiration and frame for exploring semiosis.
Who are the scholars?
Christian Matthias Ingemar Martin Matthiessen
Photo by Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Christian Matthiessen was born in Sweden in 1956. He credits his mother, Christine Matthiessen, for inspiring his interest in language, an interest also nurtured by the fact that he grew up in a family whose members were dispersed all over the world, speaking numerous languages. Matthiessen completed his candidate’s degree (Phil. Cand.) in English and Linguistics at Lund University in 1980, and he took his MA at UCLA (completed in 1984). He holds a PhD from UCLA (1989); his thesis was entitled Text generation as a linguistic research task, and this signifies one of his major interests, namely in computer-helped descriptions of language(s). He held various positions at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California during his time in Los Angeles, in the years from 1980 to 1988. Whilst there, he met and worked with Halliday, who functioned as a consultant on the Penman project (which produced a large-scale systemic functional grammar of English (the Nigel grammar)), in which Matthiessen was involved; this work was so fruitful and inspiring that he followed in Halliday’s footpath and moved to the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney (a department originally set up by Halliday in 1976) in 1988, where he worked first as Lecturer, then as Senior Lecturer. He moved to the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in 1994 to take up a position as Associate Professor. He became Chair Professor there in 2002, and he worked at Macquarie University until 2008, when he moved to Hong Kong to take up a position as Chair and Head of the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Since he moved to Sydney, Christian Matthiessen has been Halliday’s closest associate and, in collaboration with Halliday, he has extended and revised Halliday’s seminal An Introduction to Functional Grammar (IFG). Matthiessen’s influence on this work, which for the last 30 years h...
