It's relevant to recall Bernstein's perspective on Hasan’s contribution after
Cohesion in English in 'Sociolinguistics: A personal view”, Pedagogy, symbolic
control and identity: Theory, research, critique, (1996: pp.132-133).
… Ruqaiya Hasan joined the Sociological Research Unit in 1964 and provided an
exciting, theoretically driven, expansion of the research beyond cohesion
analysis. We have kept up a correspondence since, and her theory of semantic
variation opens up new vistas in our understanding of the role of language in
the construction of consciousness and its power positioning. ‘My claim is that
as Saussure limited the domain of linguistics, so also Labov limits the domain
of sociolinguistics, which is reduced to social diagnostics, ignoring deeper
issues in the role of language in the creation, maintenance, and change of
social institutions’ (Hasan, 1992, p.8). Thus the Halliday/Hasan contribution
to my development is incalculable.
See also pp. 132-133 of this book for a more detailed citation of Hasan’s
semantic variation research, but there’s nothing about 'cataloguing of
messages’.
Geoff