Society in Language, Language in Society

Essays in Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan

Wendy L. Bowcher, Jennifer Yameng Liang, Wendy L. Bowcher, Jennifer Yameng Liang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137402851
• eBook ISBN: 9781137402868
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection of original articles covers a range of research connecting with the work of the eminent linguist Ruqaiya Hasan. It contains contributions from M.A.K. Halliday, G. Williams, D. Butt, D. Miller and M. Berry among others, an interview with Ruqaiya Hasan, and notes from the contributors about their connection with Ruqaiya Hasan's work.

Part I

Hasan’s Linguistics

1

The Ontogenesis of Rationality: Nigel Revisited

M. A. K. Halliday

1.1 Introductory

It is exactly 50 years since Ruqaiya Hasan received her PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis in which she showed how much could be revealed by detailed lexicogrammatical analysis about a full-length prose novel in which every sentence was written in ordinary everyday language. This was at a time when few Anglophone linguists were paying any attention to literature; and among those who were, the prevailing view was that ‘literary language’ was marked out by deviation from the norms of everyday discourse.

Since that time, a number of key motifs can be seen coursing through Ruqaiya’s work: the centrality of everyday language, and dialogic interaction, in life and especially in learning; registers of discourse, and their variation in structure and texture; the special nature of verbal art; rationality and inference; the networking of semantics and context. All these, in turn, can be thought of as aspects of one underlying pursuit: the study of meaning, and of reasoning, in the contexts of language use.

Early in her career she worked alongside Basil Bernstein, Professor in the Sociology of Education at the University of London; her job was to analyse the stories made up by very young children as elicited in the course of his experiments into the role of language in transmitting the semiotic foundations of the culture. Later on, in her own groundbreaking programme of research at Macquarie University in the 1980s, she pursued this issue in depth, as revealed in the natural spontaneous exchanges between 3½-year-olds and their mothers. Papers such as ‘Questions as a mode of learning in everyday talk’ (1991), ‘Language in the processes of socialization: home and school’ (1988) and ‘The ontogenesis of ideology’ (1986) show how, from the ordinary exchanges going on inside the home, children build up a complex picture of the assumptions, and the values, that are naturalized in the world in which they live.

In this chapter I revisit some fragments of my original Nigel data from the early 1970s [see ‘Listening to Nigel’, included as a compact disc in volume 4 of my Collected Works],¹ picking up on a topic I had hoped to write about many years ago but never got around to: Nigel’s steps along the road to what the adult world he was growing up in would regard as coherent and acceptable reasoning. This too was a topic that Ruqaiya had explored in her own data: see ‘Reading picture reading’ (Hasan, 1987a) and ‘Rationality in everyday talk: from process to system’ (Hasan, 1992). I shall cite one or two passages from Nigel’s discourse which show how everyday linguistic interaction provides the means whereby the child learns to reason, about the eco-social environment and his own complex of relationships within it. These are part of the same story, of taking on and engaging with the human condition.

The one really valuable study of Nigel’s earliest reasoning was that carried out by Joy Phillips, first as an MA course assignment, then developed and expanded into an MA honours thesis [‘The development of comparisons and contrasts in young children’s language’, University of Sydney, 1985]. Phillips’ principal source was the Nigel data; she also wrote up a study of Nigel’s development of modality and hypothetical meaning [Working Papers in Linguistics 3, 1986]. In her thesis, Phillips worked with four semantic categories, two of comparison (sameness, similarity) and two of contrast (difference, opposition), pointing out that each is typically commented on only where ‘there is an element of’ the other: things are compared only in the context of difference, contrasted only in the context of similarity. For example (1; 10), mummy hair like railway line, that tree got leaf on but that tree got no leaf on, that very hot (pan) … that very hot (‘is the handle hot?’).² The first is a straightforward comparison, made because mummy’s hair is not, in fact, a railway line; the second and third show internal contrast, one declarative with a switch of polarity and the conjunction but, the other with a switch of mood from declarative to interrogative. (The ‘interrogative’ is realized by intonation. Nigel already was using the inverted ‘form’ of interrogative at that time, but not to signal a question; the meaning was informative, ‘I’m telling you something you wouldn’t otherwise know’.)

Comparing and contrasting are basic strategies in reasoning, and all such reasoning depends on being able to generalize: to ‘refer’ using terms that are ‘common’ (class names) as well as those which are ‘proper’ (individual names). Construing classes is in fact a condition of entry into the mother tongue; and children seem to take this step at about the same time as they take their first steps in walking, which is also when they can see objects from every angle under their own control. Nigel was soon naming interesting things that he saw when he was taken for walks in the neighbourhood; he would enumerate them on his return, such as (1; 6; 1) ‘ducks, sticks, holes and buses’ (gaaugaau tikutiku loulou baba). Repeating the name with full tonic prominence (both times with falling tone) was probably his way of saying ‘more than one’. Phillips notes the use of ‘another’ from 1; 6, and ‘more’ and ‘two’ from 1; 7; effectively at this time Nigel had a number system of ‘one/ two/a lot’ (or singular/dual/plural). By 1; 11 he could use the number ‘two’ in comparing quantity: (1; 11; 6) I can see more light than two.

But as soon as you start naming classes, you face problems of classification. Nigel was already struggling with these at the age of 1; 7, and used the dual ‘two’ as a frame for sorting them out. There was no problem with two books – he could hold one in each hand, and look from one to the other; and likewise with two apples, two nuts. But sometimes there was no name for the common class, or if there was he did not know it. Sometimes he simply used one of the names to cover both, like two brush for a brush and a comb. A toy engine and a toy hammer he construed as two hammer, though with some sign of uncertainty; but contemplating an engine in one hand and a bus in the other, he first tried two engines, was clearly not convinced, and finally gave up on it altogether: two … two chuffa … two … two. … These were all in the last ten days of 1; 7. He had now been listening to talk for his life of one year and a half, and talking himself for much of the past nine months, though not yet in the adult mode. But he now engaged firmly with the mother tongue, introducing in the first half of 1; 8 the critical functional distinction into mathetic and pragmatic which is a common feature of children’s transition from protolanguage to language. Pragmatic utterances were spoken on a rising tone, and they demanded a response, at first in the form of goods and services (‘give to me’, ‘do for me’) but increasingly, towards the end of his second year, in the form of information (‘tell me’). Mathetic utterances were spoken on a falling tone and demanded no response; they functioned as the construal of experience, ‘that’s the way things are’. Utterances which named or compared classes were of course mathetic. This did not mean that they were not addressed to anyone; they usually were, because the interlocutor was the one who was sharing or had shared the experience, and could therefore confirm or deny the proposition if he or she chose to do so.

Nigel continued naming things, especially less familiar things, over the next few months; but such utterances became less and less prominent as his resources for talking about them expanded. This happened very rapidly; by 1; 9 he was saying things like Anna make noise grass (‘Anna was making a noise with (a blade of) grass’), letter fall out mummy book, and (a pragmatic one) dada get knife take skin off apple. When he did assign something to a class, it was likely to be as part of some more complex observation; for example, at 1; 11; 4, That a high chair. But that is not a high chair; that a low chair (with contrastive tonic prominence on low). Here one class is being recognized to include two subclasses. He does not distinguish, of course, between high in high chair, which is a Classifier (there is a class of high chairs) and low in low chair, which is an Epithet (there is no class of low chairs); both fall within the class chair. But by this time, new class names are incorporated into Nigel’s discourse without being brought into attention.

1.2 Working things out

I had often been struck by the contrast between what experiments had shown that children could and could not say, or understand, when tested at particular ages, and what Nigel actually did say, and understand, in the course of his everyday life. His mother had been conversing with him from a very early age, while Nigel listened attentively. I was simply out of a job and so had the chance to make detailed notes of what I was able to observe. A child – like all human beings – if put into an unnatural situation will tend to behave in an unnatural way; he may fail to produce a passive, or to understand a relative clause, when his performance is being monitored and assessed, long after he has been using these patterns with fluency in his own unselfconscious conversation. I ought to make it clear, perhaps, that at no time in Nigel’s early life did either I or his mother try to elicit from him any reaction or response. Here is a little snatch of Nigel’s conversation from age 2; 4:³

The lady had to go out of the car to pick the dog ùp, because she thought the dog was lòst; but she wàsn’t.

The reasoning is fully explicit. But Nigel has been reasoning already for quite a long time; only, you could not hear it. The meaning has not been explicitly worded. Nevertheless you may be able to follow the semantic trail.

At 1; 11, Nigel heard his mother and me planning a visit to the aquarium. We were talking to each other, not to him; he was doing something at the other side of the room; but he must have been paying attention. Then I heard him say thoughtfully to himself, ‘we not going to see a rao … vopa … there will be some water’. He had gathered that we were going somewhere like a zoo; he knew that a zoo is where you go to see lions – but instead of a lion we were going to look at fishes. Fishes live in water; so where we were going there must be water for them to live in.

I knew that rao was ‘lion’ and vopa was ‘fish’; I also knew how these words had developed. I knew much of Nigel’s prior experience; I knew his mastery of language at the time (it was unlikely he had heard the word aquarium, or if he had he would have filtered it out as unknowable); and I knew the immediate context of what he was saying – not being addressed, but in earshot. So I was able to follow his reasoning and notice what inferences he was making. He was not talking to either of us; but he was thinking something out for himself.

Here is another example from around the same age (1; 11). We were in a train, on our way to visit some friends for the day. Nigel was looking out of the window and talking about what he saw. ‘This not an underground train’, he said. ‘Ooh, there’s a bi-i-ig crane! There’s another railway line there; we’re not going on that railway line. It not lion’, he corrected himself with a growl. ‘It line … Fast weel train. Our train go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Part I: Hasan’s Linguistics
• Part II: Verbal Art
• Part III: Semantic Networks
• Part IV: Context of Situation
• Part V: Structure and Texture: Two Kinds of Unity
• Part VI: Literacy and Education
• Part VII: In Her Own Words
• Part VIII: In Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan
• A Bibliography of Work by Ruqaiya Hasan
• Author Index
• Subject Index