Misunderstanding Halliday On Linguistics As Ideologically Committed Social Action [New]

Martin (1992: 2):

There are any number of uses to which the analyses presented here can be put. In Australia they have evolved in two main contexts: (i) as a means of exploring the relation between text and context — between text and register, genre and ideology (see Chapter 7 below); and (ii) as one foundation for the development of an educational linguistics, which has been used in particular to focus on literacy development (e.g. Painter and Martin 1986, Hasan and Martin 1989). From the start, this work has been pursued within the framework of critical linguistics (inspired by Fowler et al. 1979, Kress and Hodge 1979, Chilton 1985, Kress 1985/1989, Fowler 1987, Fairclough 1989) — a linguistics which "deconstructs" texts in such a way as to draw attention to the semiotic systems they instantiate, with a view to critically evaluating the ideologies they construe. Observational, descriptive and explanatory adequacy aside, this means that English Text has been written as a contribution to the linguistics envisioned by Halliday (1985e:5) as "an ideologically committed form of social action." For this reason it needs in part to be read in the context of projects oriented to de-naturalising hegemonic discourses and, concomitantly, facilitating intervention in political processes (e.g. Poynton 1985/1989, Martin 1985b/1989, Threadgold et al. 1986, Christie 1991, Giblett and O'Carrol 1990, and the new journal Social Semiotics).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the relation between text and context is the realisation relation between an instance of language (text) and an instance of context (situation).  Martin, however, misunderstands varieties of language, register and genre, as not language, but the context of language. This is analogous to claiming that varieties of dog, such as Rottweiler and Retriever, are not dogs, but the context of dogs.

In SFL Theory, register is the midway point on the cline of instantiation — for the content plane of language — viewed from the system pole, and genre (in sense of text type) is the same point viewed from the instance pole. That is, register and text type are complementary perspectives on the same phenomenon: functional varieties of language.

Ideology, on the other hand, is a different matter. Ideology is realised in language, and as such, is located at the level of context, where 'context' means the culture as semiotic system. Ideationally, then, ideology is modelled in terms of field, with different ideologies characterised by different combinations of FIELD system features. And interpersonally, the fact that ideologies tend to be realised more by proposals than propositions suggests that modelling them also involves TENOR system features.

Martin, however, here models ideology as a stratum above genre and register, though he has since withdrawn ideology from this hierarchy.

[2] From the perspective of SFL Theory, this confuses both levels of symbolic abstraction and poles of the cline of instantiation. To be clear, the semiotic systems that texts instantiate are those of language, whereas the ideologies that texts construe, are characterised by the selection of contextual features that specify the instance of context: the situation.

[3] This is a very widespread misunderstanding of Halliday (1985e: 5). What Halliday actually wrote was:

… linguistics cannot be other than an ideologically committed form of social action.

That is to say, any linguistics is 'an ideologically committed form of social action', whether linguists realise it or not. The question then is 'Which ideology?'. For example, SFL Theory foregrounds the notion of choice, whereas Formal linguistic theories foreground rules, government and binding.

[4] To be clear, it will be seen that Martin (1992) provides nothing in this regard that SFL Theory, properly understood, does not already provide.