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Halliday’s ‘social semiotic’
By Bob Hodge
Michael Halliday was already arguably Britain’s leading linguistic theorist when he coined the term ‘language as social semiotic’ in 1978. This prestige gave his intervention great impact, while at the same time it has kept the scope of that influence mainly within the study of verbal language. For him ‘the formulation “language as social semiotic” means… interpreting language within a socio-cultural context, in which the culture itself is interpreted in semiotic terms’ (1978:2). Implicit here is a division between ‘language’, understood as verbal language as studied by linguistics, and semiotics as the study of other systems, which interact with verbal language to make up culture.
Halliday here simultaneously illustrates and contests a widespread understanding of linguistics and semiotics as different branches of knowledge, as they often are institutionally, but not conceptually, as in Saussure’s grand scheme, which places linguistics within Semiotics (or Semiology, as he called it). Halliday’s position regarding semiotics is ambiguous. In one interpretation of his project he points to an as-yet undeveloped social semiotics to complete the work of his purely linguistic theory. However, in a more positive interpretation he is opening the way to a more complex relationship between linguistics and semiotics, in which insights into verbal codes, as understood with a more adequate linguistics, will illuminate the study of all other codes. In this sense his linguistic theory, framed to have a more adequate account of social forces and contexts, is already a strand in a Social Semiotics which did not yet exist when he wrote.
In spite of work by some of his followers (e.g., Martin and Rose 2005) the potential of Halliday’s ideas on verbal language has still not been fully realised as part of a general social semiotics, though some writers in Social Semiotics (e.g., Kress and Van Leeuwen) have absorbed Halliday’s ideas so deeply that the full extent of his influence is impossible to determine. The key premises of his linguistic theory, which work equally well as general premises for Social Semiotics, are:
‘Language is a social fact’ (1978:1) i.e., social relationships constitute language. This is the case with all semiotic codes.
‘We shall not come to understand the nature of language if we pursue only the kinds of question about language that are formulated by linguists’ (1978:3) That is, autonomous linguistics and semiotics alike are incapable of understanding the nature of their object in disciplinary isolation.
‘Language is as it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve in people’s lives’ (1978:4). That is, a functional perspective is a key to the inseparable relationship between semiotics and society, structure and function.
There are three functions, or ‘metafunctions’, of language (1978:112): ideational (‘about something’); interpersonal (’doing something’) and textual (‘the speaker’s text-forming potential’). The semiotic interpersonal and textual functions are more obviously social, but are inseparable in semiotic practice from the interpersonal.
Language is constituted as ‘a discrete network of options’ (1978:113). The idea of systems and networks (systems organised as networks) proposed by Halliday before the ‘Network Society’ has applications to all aspects of Social Semiotics that are yet to be fully explored.
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Margith A. Strand//July 16, 2010
Semiotic Theory can and will be used on the Dissertation to expound on the ideologies involved in Distance Education. Semiotic theory expresses the function of language as an evolution; I feel that language and its construction have not changed, however the nature of the language in its context has evolved and this is indicated by the use of language in the field of Education.
Distance Education has forced the nature of language to extend itself into a structure of need and expression in that the communication involved has become one of culture and truth.
I will be writing on these features more.
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