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The Quest for Meaning in Twentieth Century Linguistics

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War and Its Ideologies

Part of the book series: The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series ((TMAKHLFLS))

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Abstract

Linguistic theories are ideologies about the nature of language. They vary in their capacity to bring out the ideological potential of language. This chapter explores a selection of key linguists – Vološinov, Saussure, Firth and Whorf – whose ideas are fundamental for understanding why ideology is dependent on language. Vološinov produced the first semiotic account of ideology and argued for the complete interpenetration of language and ideology. Saussure’s understanding of the primordial characteristics of the sign – its arbitrariness, its linearity, its systemic nature – makes visible the complexity of wording and its dependency on society and culture, other signs and co-text. Firth puts meaning at the centre of linguistics. He develops a contextual theory, the basis on which the concepts of collocation and colligation rest. Whorf shows why languages embody a theory of experience, and how grammar works beneath our conscious threshold. The anthropologist Malinowski is also discussed, since it is from him that Halliday draws his general metafunctional hypothesis, and more specifically the interpersonal function of language, as well as the concepts of context of situation and of culture. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Basil Bernstein’s concepts of power and control, classification and framing, and code .

A theory is only as good as the principles of description to which it gives rise.(Bernstein 1996a, 93)

… linguistic theory is no substitute for descriptive insights.(Halliday 2003d, 39)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Grammatical terminology used in this book is taken from Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). Following Halliday, functional labels such as these have capitalized initials.

  2. 2.

    Whorf attributes to the French linguist Fabre d’Olivet (1768–1825) the origins of ideas about “rapport-systems, covert classes, crypotypes, psycholinguistic patterning, and language as part and parcel of culture” (Whorf 1956h, 74).

  3. 3.

    Bernstein writes, “it is worth pointing out that the theory of ideology I have found the most congenial, in the sense of resonating with the problems addressed, is that of Althusser: the imaginary subject” (Bernstein 1996a, 128).

  4. 4.

    See Diaz (1984) for a discussion of the relations of Bernstein’s work to Foucault . See Bernstein (1990a) for a discussion of Bernstein’s work in relation to Bourdieu.

  5. 5.

    In this account of cultural reproduction, Bernstein has a number of influences, including Sapir, Whorf , Firth , Hymes, Halliday, Durkheim , Weber, Mead, Malinowski, Vygotsky, and Luria. See e.g. Bernstein (1970).

  6. 6.

    In the context of media reporting of war, there was a shift between the First and Second Gulf Wars in relation to the enactment of control over the message, from overt censorship by military officials during the 1992 war, to the widespread use of embedded reporters free, within a small and clearly established set of constraints , to write news without reference to official censors (Knightley 2004). At the same time, the US Defence Department oversaw a covert public relations campaign in which former military officials with contracts to promote defence companies were briefed by the Pentagon and then appeared as “military experts” in the American media (Barstow 2008).

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Annabelle Lukin

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Lukin, A. (2019). The Quest for Meaning in Twentieth Century Linguistics. In: War and Its Ideologies. The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0996-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0996-0_2

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