Language, Context and Text - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2020

Michael Halliday’s argument for the value of ‘trinocular vision’ in linguistic research has particular relevance to the observation, exploration and description of register. Taking each semiotic dimension relevant to the characterisation of register by turn, I begin by discussing Halliday’s proposition. I then proceed, using the metaphor of cartography, to examine register variation via the intersection of three semiotic dimensions: stratification, instantiation and metafunction. I discuss how such examinations enable us to create description maps of register variation. From this basis, I discuss a long-term programme of systematically producing descriptive maps of registers, which I and colleagues have begun. Finally, I suggest that by using such maps we can better understand such important phenomena as aggregates of registers and personal register repertoires.

Halliday (1978: 111) defines register as “the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation type.” Elsewhere, however, he stresses that when we talk of “a register” this is a term of convenience: register is more properly theorised as continuous variation along many linguistic dimensions. In this paper I review progress in our capacity to describe register and context of situation and ask whether the tension between discrete and continuous models of register might hinder such progress. I then consider Hasan’s (1983, 2013) contextually-open networked model of message semantics, arguing that in conjunction with context networks it has potential to map register variation but still needs to be tested across a large and varied set of domains. Examples from healthcare interaction ground the discussion.

This article examines whether the incorporation of prosody within register studies can lead to a richer description of what speakers can mean in a specific environment. In order to situate how prosody resets the probabilities of contextual variables, a number of texts are examined and it is argued that prosodic systems at and above the rank of tone group are meaningful and situated on the content plane. The article concludes by suggesting some redrawing of the standard SFL stratification model by arguing that the view that meaning redounds with wording which in turn redounds with sounding needs some revision to incorporate the higher units of the phonological rank scale being situated on the content plane.

Some international law scholars have argued that international war law, rather than proscribing violence in war, has instead been a vehicle for its legitimation. Given that laws are constituted in and through language, this paper explores this paradox through register analysis of the text of the Rome Statute, an international treaty adopted in 1998 which established the International Criminal Court to prosecute the crimes of “genocide”, “crimes against humanity”, “war crimes” and “crimes of aggression”. The parameters of field, tenor and mode are considered in conjunction with a brief account of linguistic features of Article 8 of the Rome Statute, which defines the scope of the term “war crimes”. The linguistic patterns provide evidence that the Rome Statute simultaneously outlaws some acts of violence while affording legal cover for others, despite their well-known devastating human consequences. The analysis provides linguistic evidence for Malešević’s (2010) claim that at the heart of modernity lies an “ontological dissonance”, through which we criminalise some forms of violence while legitimating others.

This paper examines the extent to which regional varieties of English influence register variation. Register is a key concept in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), whereas regional variation is rarely studied in this framework. However, languages like Chinese, Spanish and English are used in more than one region and such more complex language situations raise the question of whether registers are used consistently throughout. In this study, texts from three varieties represented in the International Corpus of English are analysed for frequencies of 41 lexico-grammatical features and subjected to exploratory multivariate analysis. The analysis shows that, while there are clear indications of register patterns irrespective of varieties, variety appears to override register in some cases. Variety therefore needs to be accounted for in language theory in addition to the language system and registers as subsystems.

This paper explores one aspect of the operationalisation of a patient-centred ideology of care by examining an oncologist’s answers to questions asked by her patient and his companion during a palliative oncology consultation and comparing her answers to the markedly different answers of another oncologist. Halliday’s concept of register and Hasan’s semantic networks are used to examine the oncologists’ answers. Patients’ questions create the semiotic environment for clinicians to provide the information patients need for informed decision-making – an important aspect of patient-centredness. The answers clinicians provide construe their position towards this ideology of care. Findings suggest that one way patient-centredness can be operationalised, at the level of semantics, is through providing elaborated answers that explicitly display the reasoning employed by the oncologist.

Halliday proposes that a key role in the language of science is played by compacting nominalisation, a strategy by which qualities and processes in one phase of a discourse are then nominalised in a following phase to facilitate the flow of argument. Compacting nominalisation is very characteristic of Priestley’s 1767The history and present state of electricity. However, another book of the same era and field, Franklin’s 1751–1754 New experiments and observations on electricity, employs little of this strategy. One explanation lies in genre differences. Franklin’s book and accounts of electrical experiments into the Philosophical transactions of the same era are both generically similar to and different from Priestley’s book, quite beyond the issue of compacting nominalisation. Generic similarities and differences are here demonstrated in terms of register values.

Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen was a long-time collaborator and close friend of M. A. K. Halliday, and has co-authored various books with Halliday, some of which have not yet been published. In the second part of the interview, Matthiessen discusses Halliday’s engagement with computational linguistics, provides details of Halliday’s experiences as a language teacher, comments on Halliday’s contributions to language development, introduces Halliday’s collaboration with Basil Bernstein and Halliday’s conception of language as social semiotics, and reflects on Halliday’s influence on Matthiessen himself.