Relevant here is that Ruqaiya always took pains to situate her work as
'a' systemic functional approach (not an asystemic approach LOL) - ie
one of several if not many ways of elaborating
on/applying/examining/questioning some shared core principles within the
community. And as Annabelle says often quite different from Halliday's
position.
By contrast I keep hearing lately how such and such a new model
'subsumes' so and so, where 'so and so' is often a key plank of
Halliday's position, but where there has not been any agreement outside
those immediately working on the new model that the relation between the
various old and new views in play is best described as subsumption.
I would rather encourage/acknowledge the diversity in our
temporo-spatio-socio-ideational matrix of views, instead of seeing
ourselves engaged in a linear progression that cleanly gathers up the
'correct' views making them no longer statements in their own right.
The views I don't always agree with (including Halliday's and Hasan's)
but the diversity I greatly value.
Best to all,
Alison
On 17/06/22 01.03 PM, Geoff Williams (geoffshould) wrote:
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
