Halliday himself it should be noted has remained rather Firthian in character as far as semantics is concerned, preferring register specific descriptions and cautioning against premature attempts to describe the semantic system as a whole — e.g. 1988: 3; needless to say English Text has nowhere heeded this caution.
Like Firth, Bakhtin was interested in the heterogeneous nature of speech communities (for which he developed the notion of heteroglossia); and like Firth he saw this heterogeneity manifested in all texts (for which he developed the notion of dialogism*, using the metaphor of dialogue to capture the sense in which different voices converse as texture).
The distinction between heteroglossia and dialogism in Bakhtin's writing is unclear; here heteroglossia is associated with system and dialogism with process. Bakhtin himself however did not work with the Hjelmslevian notion of system and process, and was unlikely to have developed an opposition of this kind in light of his objections to Saussure's opposition of langue and parole.
The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions — social, historical, meteorological, physiological — that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualisation as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress.
Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole — there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be no actual monologue. One may, like a primitive tribe that knows only its own limits, be deluded into thinking there is one language, or one may, as grammarians, certain political figures and normative framers of "literary languages" do, seek in a sophisticated way to achieve a unitary language. In both cases the unitariness is relative to the overpowering force of heteroglossia, and thus dialogism.
The advantage of the dynamic perspective is that choices can be conditioned by the point reached in a text's development. Keeping in mind Firth's comment that "The moment a conversation is started, whatever is said is a determining condition for what, in any reasonable expectation, may follow" (1935/1957: 31-2), this is an important perspective to keep in mind.
As noted above, the fact that notions of purpose and effect do not correlate with any one metafunctional component of language and have been associated with different variables in the development of register theory suggests that a teleological perspective on text function might be better set up as superordinate to — rather than alongside or incorporated in — field, mode and tenor.
Another thing that resulted from science was a profound change in the conception of man's place in the universe. … Moreover purpose, which had since Aristotle formed an intimate part of the conception of science, was now thrust out of scientific procedure. … The world might have a purpose, but purposes could no longer enter into scientific explanations.
In broad terms the development of work on register and context reviewed above can be interpreted in terms of a gradual de-materialising and concomitant semioticising of frameworks for relating language to situation (see in particular Hasan's 1977, 1979, 1985/1989 use of contextual features to generate text structure).
Overall it would appear that "rhetorical purpose" is the wild card in contextual description, being variously categorised under field (Halliday 1965), tenor (Gregory 1967), mode (Halliday 1978, 1985/1989) and as a separate contextual variable in its own right (Firth 1950 — effects, Ure & Ellis 1977 — rôle, Fawcett 1980 — pragmatic purpose). The main reason for this is that purpose is difficult to associate with any one metafunctional component of the lexicogrammar or discourse semantics. The effect of a text is the result of all components of its meaning. This makes associating the notion of rhetorical purpose with Bakhtin's more global notion of speech genres an attractive one (cf. Gregory 1982).
Register is defined as "the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture associates with a situation type. It is the meaning potential that is accessible in a given social context" (Halliday 1978: 111).
Defining register in these terms pushes considerations of context such as those addressed by Malinowski and Firth one level up, to what Halliday refers to as context of situation — presumably what is referred to as situation (non-linguistic phenomena) in Fig. 7.4. Context of situation is then organised metafunctionally into field, tenor and mode as described above.
Systemic approaches to context derive from the work of Malinowski (1923, 1935) who argued that texts have to be understood in relation to their context of situation and context of culture. Malinowski developed these ideas with respect to the problem of translating specific texts in particular contexts, leaving it to Firth (1950, 1957b, 1957c) to develop context more abstractly as a level of language. For Firth, context was one of a number of levels of analysis (alongside grammar, morphology, lexis, phonology and phonetics) required for linguistics to make statements of meaning about text (Firth 1935/1957a: 33).
Each function will be defined as the use of some language form or element in relation to some context.
A. The participants: persons, personalities and relevant features of these.
(i) The verbal action of the participants.B. The relevant objects and non-verbal and non-personal events.
(ii) The non-verbal action of the participants.
C. The effect of the verbal action.
In this projection [Fig. 7.3 Language and its semiotic environment] metaredundancy (Lemke 1984) is reflected through the metaphor of concentric [sic] circles, with larger circles recontextualising smaller ones; the size of the circles also reflects the fact that the analysis tends to focus on larger units as one moves from phonology to ideology. Thus the tendency in phonology to focus on syllables and phonemes, at the level of lexicogrammar to focus on the clause, at the level of discourse semantics to focus on the exchange or "paragraph", at the level of register to focus on a stage in a transaction, at the level of genre to focus on whole texts and at the level of ideology to focus on discourses manifested across a range of texts. More in the spirit of Firth than Hjelmslev, this projection lends itself to a reading whereby meaning is constructed on all levels …
