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Ideology in a Socio-semiotic Linguistic Theory

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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

To understand the extraordinary power of language, we must understand the semiotic machinery which produces it. This chapter shows, using Halliday’s linguistic framework with extensions from Hasan’s work, how and why language is the engine-room of ideology. The ideological potential of language is a by-product of the semiotic “big bang”, the process through which a multidimensional human semiotic emerged out of protolanguage. Human language is characterised by realisational, stratification and metafunctional complexity, and each of these dimensions is a part of the ideological power of language. While all language use is ideological, Halliday’s concept of register explains why some uses of language are more open to ideological contestation than others. Ideological variation is defined in Hasan as the “orderly variation in constellations of semantic features”. In other words, she argues that ideological variation is semantic variation; and its prosodic nature explains how ideologies constitute a form of invisible semiotic mediation.

In itself the power of language is simply a potential; its semiotic energy requires the ideological spur of the speaker to be activated; the active principle is always the socially positioned speaker(Hasan 2003, 447).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Halliday argues that other modalities of meaning are “sometimes thought of as being independent of language, but most of the time they are parasitic on language” (Halliday 2013d, 49).

  2. 2.

    Matthiessen estimates that the emergence of semiotically modern human language was roughly 132,000 years ago. This is “when the full multidimensional complexity of semiotically modern language emerged – involving a far greater neural inter-connectedness in the brain than before. This form of high-order semiotic organization made possible a much higher degree of variation in language in relation to context: it would have marked the beginning of a gradually accelerating expansion of the range and richness of registers ”(Matthiessen 2004, 81).

  3. 3.

    “Sortal predicate” is a term from positivist philosophy, associated with philosophers such as Frege, Quine, Strawson and others. A “sortal” in philosophy “delimit[s] that object from other objects” and “provides a principle of countability” (Nicholas and Jiyuan 2008, 651).

  4. 4.

    While human language has distinct properties, it is none-the-less part of an evolutionary process, and naturally has continuities with meaning-making systems of other animals. See De Waal (2016)) for a view of these continuities from the perspective of ethology.

  5. 5.

    Following Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), the names of grammatical systems are indicated in small caps.

  6. 6.

    Halliday argues that “realisation “, together with “instantiation”, are the two fundamental abstractions in linguistics. Both remain under-acknowledged and under-developed within linguistic theory.

  7. 7.

    Durkheim’s concept is also translated as “collective consciousness”. I have used Simpson’s translation, as in Durkheim (1933).

  8. 8.

    E.g. “Chomskyan ‘competence ’ is simply another name for Saussure’s ‘langue ’ (Bourdieu 1991a, 44).

  9. 9.

    This claim is an interesting echo of Gramsci , who argued that “personality” was similarly a composite of human experiences: “The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history” (Gramsci 1971, 627).

  10. 10.

    Mair and Leech use the Brown and LOB corpora, constituted from texts published in 1961, and the Frown and F-LOB corpora from texts published in 1992 and 1991, respectively. Each corpora is c. one million words of English (Brown/Frown are corpora of American English, while LOB and F-LOB are corpora of British English). The corpora are 500 text samples of c. 2000 words from 15 different written genres.

  11. 11.

    Mair and Leech note that, although the increase appears small, it is statistically highly significant with a log-likelihood value of 350 (Mair and Leech 2006, 333), which means the chance of the difference being random variation is less than 1%.

  12. 12.

    Hasan acknowledges Bernstein (1990a, 1996) in the conceptualisation of these relations.

  13. 13.

    Hasan writes: “Over the years, admirers of Labov including myself have been frustrated by the underlying contradictions in his not explicitly articulated sociolinguistic theory” (Hasan 2009a, 61)

  14. 14.

    “Social class” is distinguished by Hasan on the basis of the occupation of the family’s main breadwinner. Two groups were recruited to her study, one where the breadwinner was a “higher autonomy professional” (e.g. banker, doctor), and one where the breadwinner was a “lower autonomy professional ” (e.g. truck driver, contract brick layer, etc.) (Hasan 2009c).

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

    Annabelle Lukin

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Lukin, A. (2019). Ideology in a Socio-semiotic Linguistic Theory. 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_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0996-0_3

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