Riassunto esame di Linguistica Inglese, prof.ssa Maggioni, testo consigliato Aspects of Discourse and Genre, Ulrych

Halliday distinguishes three main variables in the context of situation:

1. the field of discourse refers to the play – the kind of activity, as recognised in the culture, within which the

language is playing some part. This refers to the type of social action which is taking place: the event, the set

of participants it includes, the spatial and temporal setting what the participants know and believe in relation

to all the notions which become subject-matter. Field therefore refers to what is going on, including:

activity focus, the nature of the social activity;

- object focus, the subject matter.

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Establishing text’s field of discourse implies decisions on the shared knowledge that can be assumed

between the addresser and addressee, on what degree of specialised terminology may or should be used

and how information is presented grammatically (e.g. active/passive).

2. the tenor of discourse refers to the players – the actors, or rather the interacting roles, that are involved in

the creation of the text. In other words, it indicates the set of socially meaningful participants roles and

relationships – social, psychological and intellectual – which are involved, including the status of the

participants and other situation-specific characteristics.

Tenor therefore refers to the social relationships between those taking part, and can be specified as:

status of power: agent roles, peer or hierarchy relations (mother-daughter, teacher-student);

- affect: degree of like, dislike or neutrality (whether they are on good terms or not);

- contact: frequency, duration and intimacy of social contact (whether they know each other well);

- role structure: questioner-answerer, informer-enquirer.

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Martin Joos gives an example of five levels of formality, ranging from the extremely formal and impersonal to

the highly informal and personal: frozen, formal, consultative, casual and intimate.

Establishing a test’s tenor discourse implies decisions on mood (indicative or imperative), the use of

archaic/modern terms and formal/informal choice of lexis and syntactic structures.

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3. the mode of discourse refers to the parts, that is, the particular functions that are assigned to language in a

particular situation. Mode includes the channel of communication, both in the sense of medium (written,

spoken, written to be spoken) and of instrumentality (phone, tape, telex) and the type of presentation of the

text (extempore, prepared). The rhetorical function of the text (descriptive, didactic, expository etc.) also

comes under mode of discourse. Mode therefore refers to how language is being used and to the medium

chosen, whether spoken or written.

Speaking and writing are manifestation of the same linguistic system but they differ in various ways and make use

of different linguistic resources. One very obvious difference is that writing does not incorporate all the meaning

potential of speech since it leaves out the prosodic and paralinguistic traits that are typical of spoken discourse.

Besides, spoken language is typically more dependent on its context than written language and presents a

dynamic view or reality (a world of happening) as compare to writing, which offers an essentially synoptic view (a

world of things). Descriptions of spoken discourse are necessarily process-oriented while those of written

discourse are product-oriented. Most

importantly, spoken and written discourse are

used in different contexts and for different

purposes. In addition, these two media should

not be viewed as totally separate varieties but

rather as a continuum with extremes that display

marked differences and various overlapping forms in between.

An interesting range of mode variation is illustrated by Gregory and Carroll and reproduced below:

A further feature of the mode of discourse is the way information is presented in a text in terms of theme and

rheme, given and new information focus. The Beatles’ song Yesterday is a vivid example of how information can

be foregrounded and backgrounded by differences in syntactic structures.

4. The concept of register 7

These three variables of field, tenor and mode, taken together, determine the range within which meaning are

selected and the forms which are used for their expression. In other words, they determine their register. The

notion of register refers to fact that language not only varies according to the type of situation but also that it can

also be predicted from what is known about the situation. In developing his theory of meaning-in-context, Firth

pointed out that if people are given a description of a context, they can predict what language will be used. In

other words, the speakers of any discourse community can reconstruct the context of situation surrounding a text

on the basis of their shared knowledge about typical and recurrent relationships between text and context.

5. The context of culture

Both the co-text and the context of situation are essential features of communication but in order for language

users to be able to function effectively a further component of context comes into play, namely, the context of

culture. Awareness of cultural differences and similarities is essential to the interpretation of meaning. Culture

has generally been taken to refer to the personal development of a cultivated mind (she's a cultured person) or a

knowledge of country’s history and institutions as contribution to human civilisation (the cultural heritage of

Great Britain). Here, however, culture is used in the sociolinguistic and anthropological sense to mean all socially

conditioned aspects of human life: the way of life of a society.

Language is an integral part of culture and not an isolated phenomenon. The relevance of this to linguistic lies in

the extent to which culture conditions people’s behaviour and is reflected in the language they speak. An extreme

view claimed that the language people speak determines their perception of reality as thought is conditioned by

language. A more moderate view is that the lexical distinctions drawn by each language will tend to reflect the

culturally important features of objects, institutions and activities in the society in which the language operates.

Just as each text has its environment, the context of situation, so the language system has its environment. The

context of culture determines the nature of the code. As a language is manifested through its texts, a culture is

manifested through its situations.

6. The concept of genre

The close relationship that exists between text send context means that a speaker will look for the linguistic

resources that are most appropriate to any given situation. The concept of appropriateness is, however,

culture-specific and related to conventions that are recognizable by the members of a particular culture. Native

speakers will have an implicit competence of the linguistic behaviour that is associated with each situation in their

culture and will also be aware of the purpose or goal of the interaction. These culturally-specific, goal-oriented

forms of communication are known as genres. In the words of Hatim and Mason genres

are conventionalised forms of text which reflect the functions and goals involved in particular social

occasion as well as the purpose of the participants involved in them.

This definition is akin to the one given by Swales in relation to English for special purposes. For Swales genre

is a recognizable communicative event characterised by a set of communicative purposes identified

and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in which it

regularly occurs. 8

There are different genres as there are conventionally-recognizable types of social activity, ranging from literally

genres (novels, short-stories, autobiographies and sit-coms) to popular written genres (newspaper articles,

instruction manuals and recipes) and educational genres such as textbooks, essay writing, lectures, seminars and

examinations. In everyday life people take part in genres like the following:

making appointments; gossiping;

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exchanging opinions; chatting with friends;

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telling stories; going to interviews;

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seeking and supplying information; buying and selling things.

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Each of these genres carries with it a set of convention or “scripts” which enables members of a discourse

community to produce and predict the kind of “moves” that are involved and the linguistic exchanges associated

with them.

Genres tend to reflect conventionally-accepted types of goal-oriented discourse, which differ from one another

mainly in the lexicogrammar and phonological features that typically accompany or realise these meanings. The

number of possible situations in which people use language (registers) is only apparently infinite; in reality they

make un a much smaller number of general types of situations (genres).

An analysis of the contextual configuration of a single text in terms of field tenor and mode (i.e. its register) will

provide the evidence of this genre (i.e. a conventionally-recognised purposeful activity or event or situation) since

it displays the same basic set of obligatory elements. Genres are closely bound to culture and there are

repertoires of culturally-recognisable linguistic behaviour that members of different cultural communities will

implicitly relate to the various type of situation. Thus, vocabulary and grammar are often used in regular ways and

are restricted by conventions pertaining to a given culture. As cultures evolve, genres may change or disappear

altogether with new ones taking their place. TV quiz programmes have undergone profound changes since their

first appearance while web-sites and e-mails constitute comparatively new genres.

3 – Dialects as varieties of English

Linguists use the term variety when describing variations in language based on actual use. According to Halliday,

language varieties fall into two main groups:

one group relates to reasonably permanent characteristics of the user in language events, and come under

- the language variety of dialects;

the other relates to the user’s use of language in such events, and comes under the language variety of

- diatypes (or registers).

The main difference between dialects and diatypes (or registers) is that dialects are saying the same thing

differently while registers are saying different things. So dialects tend to differ in phonetics, phonology (so-called

“accents”), vocabulary and grammar, but not in semantics; while registers tend to differ in semantics and

therefore in grammar and vocabulary (as expression of meaning) but rarely in phonology.

Dialect refers to characteristic features of language which are related to different users of language. They refers

to the speaker’s place in relation to his/her individuality, dimension of time, place, social class and speech

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community. t eras of birthplace, class, education, age. This includes geographical varieties, regional variety, social

varieties, temporal varieties and user-specific varieties called idiolects.

1. Geographical varieti