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The development of a linguistics of text: a review of the main studies
The main studies leading to the emergence of a linguistics of texts have been conducted by a number of scholars such as Van Dijk (1977), Halliday and Hasan (1989), Beaugrande (1980) (1984), Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), Hatim (1984a, 1984b), Hatim and Mason (1990) (1997).
In this section, however, special attention will be given to the works of M.
K. Halliday, R. Hasan and Beaugrande and Dressler.
Language, context and text
The main concern of Halliday and Hasan’s (1989) work, Language Context and Text: Aspects of Language in Social-Semiotic Perspective is with the description of the major features of context which are relevant to the study and interpretation of texts. For Halliday, any piece of text will show traces of its context, since both text and context are “so intimately related that neither concept can be enunciated without the other” (R. Hasan 1989: 52).
According to Halliday (1989: 5), “the notion of context goes beyond what is said and written; it includes other non-verbal goings-on, the total environment in which a text unfolds”. He further states that contexts are prior to text and that a theory of context has always preceded a theory of text (Ibid).
This theory of context, according to Halliday, was pioneered by Malinowski (1923, 1925) who, in the midst of his anthropological work with the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific, had to describe the “total environment” of their texts in order to enable English- speaking readers to understand these texts properly. The way he went about this consisted in giving a commentary which situated the text in its environment. To refer to this environment, Malinowski used the phrase Context of Situation which subsumes not only the “verbal environment”,
i.e. “the words and sentences before and after the particular sentence that one was looking at” but also “the situation in which the text was uttered” (Halliday 1989: 6). In addition to this, he also invented the phrase Context of Culture in order to situate the context of situation within a much broader context.
According to Halliday (Ibid: 8), Firth, a British linguist, adopted the notion of Context of Situation in his own linguistic theory but had to refine it so as to be more abstract, i.e. more general. Firth’s description of the context of situation covers the following elements:
x the participants in the situation
x the action of the participants: what they are doing, including both their verbal and non-verbal action
x other relevant features of the situation: the surrounding objects
x the effects of the verbal action
Another proposal for the description of the Context of Situation is that put forward by Dell Hymes who identifies the following elements in a given context of situation:
x the form and content of the message
x the setting
x the participants
x the intent and effect of situation
x the key
x the medium
x the genre
x the norms of interaction (Ibid: 9)
Without dismissing any of these suggested models for the description of the context of situation of a text, Halliday suggests that it is possible to determine the most appropriate model for the description of the context of situation which could be used for the study and interpretation of texts (Halliday 1989: 9). Such a model would enable one to account for the ease with which one communicates despite all kinds of obstacles (or noise) in the communicative environment. For Halliday, this ease in communication is due to the predictions that we make from the context:
The situation in which linguistic interaction takes place gives the participants a great deal of information about the meanings that are being exchanged and the meanings that are likely to be exchanged. (Ibid: 10)
In short, the best model for the description of context should explain the mechanism of how these predictions come about and are responded to. According to Halliday, when language users come to a situation, they construct in their minds a model of that context of situation; firstly, they note what is going on and assign a field to this context; secondly, they note the personal relationships at play and assign a certain tenor to it; and finally, they note the role that is being played by the language and assign a mode to it.
Halliday’s main contribution to the linguistics of text is thus to have introduced the features field, tenor and mode which relate a text to its context. According to Halliday, these features have the following characteristics:
Field: it refers to what is taking place; i.e., what the participants are doing and how this is reflected in their language.
Tenor: it refers to the participants themselves; i.e., their social statuses and their roles.
Mode: it refers to the medium of language used, spoken or written, and the role that language is playing such as arguing, describing…
These contextual domains impose their own constraints upon language users. With this regard, Hatim and Mason (1997: 25) maintain that
producers and receivers of texts operate within constraints imposed by the particular use to which they put their language: field, mode, tenor.
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