Language and Society, Context and Text: the Contributions of Ruqaiya Hasan

Abstract

The principle that language is responsive to its context of situation is, to borrow an unfortunate metaphor, deep in the ‘DNA’ of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL). From Halliday’s early writings on grammar, the concept has been at work: first in a relatively non-technical sense, then in a mostly Firthian way, before Halliday articulated a conception of context much more his own, albeit with a very strong echo of Malinowski’s ideas (Halliday et al., 2007). From Malinowski came not only the crucial early conceptualization of ‘context of situation’ and ‘context of culture’ but also, and just as importantly, an intuitive feel that function must be encapsulated in the form and structure of language. For someone who was not actually a linguist, this was a remarkable observation; other later linguists have resolutely failed to notice the symbiosis between form, meaning and context that was, so to speak, right under their noses. For Halliday, Malinowski’s observation was the kernel of his metafunctional hypothesis, to which his conception of context is inextricably tied. What humans do with language in our social lives, and how language is itself organized, are two sides of the same social-semiotic coin. As Halliday is fond of saying, language is the way it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve.