Kress - from S. to Critical Sociolinguistics

Notes from class:

correlational approaches
vs. choice approaches
"individuals know how to speak given a certain situation"appropriateness (normative - grammar)

CHOICE - trying to achieve something in language - TRYING TO ACHIEVE A KIND OF FUNCTION (Halliday - syntagmetic/ paradigmatic systems)

Critical perspective -- we can look at choices and trace back "traces" of production context (social environment of what it comes out as)

29
turn to  - what are we turning from?


social view of language
language as system


Western thought - Indo-European basis - language - creation of principles - family

30
 what does language look like? Freeze it

structuralist (frozen)
"Saussure himself gave a complex
answer in which the focus was on the sign, and on the all-encompassing entity
in which signs exist, language as such or langue. I will return to the latter in a
moment."
-internal -relations outside of sign
axis of  association (signs) - axis of combination (outward) paradigmatic and syntagmatic planes

you sit on:paradigm
paradigm combined to styntagmatic -  easy chair, coffee table
Bizarre structuring of things...

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types of chairs - meaning - and possibilities
"A second kind of meaning arises
from the fact that different types of chairs are, in fact, cultural encodings of
different possible forms of behaviour: A stool asks me to sit differently to an easy
chair. Setting up the room for a job interview with a stool for the interviewee and
easy chairs for the interviewers - to make a ridiculous example - would set the
tone decisively. "

 signifier (form)/ signified (meaning) - expression

"A connection is made between an
element in the system of language, and an element in the system of culturally
salient values. The former 'refers' to the latter."
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"convention. Given the power of convention the
individual is unable to exett any influence on this arbitrary relation: the sign is
there to be used, but cannot be altered. In Saussure's schema, this is so, both for
the individual sign and for the collection of signs, for language as a whole." Interesting, in terms of grammar

Individual cannot change language

 "However, the
significant point here is that Saussure's views on the characteristics of systems,
structure, signs, on langue and parole, shaped the development of mainstream
and non-mainstream linguistics in the twentieth century. In the mainstream these
views allowed emphasis to be placed on relations within the system rather than
on reference; on structure rather than on function; on arbitrariness, thus
eliminating the force of individual agency, whether from the individual sign or
from the system of signs, the langue; and to treat langue as a phenomenon not
directly connected to the social. After all, if individual action in and with the
system has no effect, then how can there be connections to the minutiae of social
life, or of its organization in larger systems?"

surface structure/ performance/ deep structure/ competence
 
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Potential for individual:

"If, like Saussure, we think that what speakers do parole - has no effect
on the system, then we have no serious reason for investigating it If, however,
we think that what people do needs to be understood, then we have a series of
questions. These are, as I said earlier, questions around the role of the social,
about the possibilities of real action by an individual acting in social
environments. Here I will outline three relatively distinct approaches to such
questions. I will characterize them as that of correlation, that of choice, and
that of critique."

"The first approach is the correlational. It points to the fact that certain forms of
linguistic behaviour can be shown to correlate quite clearly with certain aspects of
social organization."
Labov --looked at this in reading class - bird

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communicative competence Dell Hymes - static?
Choice - Halliday
ideational function
interpersonal function
textual function
"Speakers choose simultaneously from options in each of these functions. So
for example, I might choose, within the ideational function, to have a clause-type
which highlights agency [rioters burn ten cars]; within the interpersonal
component of the grammar I might choose a statement, so that the speaker has
the role of someone who gies  information (rather than asks a question or gives
a command) which would make a quite  different social relation between the
people interacting within the textual component; I might choose"
different than correlational - individual selecting range of options!!

Halliday - critique - speakers actions - choice by options

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Power
 social, individual choice, power
(seems a bit..clunky ...did romantics do this much more elegantly long ago?)


choice/ power
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This makes me laugh: "Critical linguistics has been subjected to much criticism, and this has been, in
my view, one of the telling critiques."

"begin to answer this by a brief recapitulation of my argument so far. For Saussure
the system was all-powerful, individual action was confined to usage which had
no effect on the system. For sociolinguists, such as Gumperz and Labov, the
linguistic is linked with, yet autonomous from, the social. The individual has the
knowledge of codes including codes which link the social and the linguistic. For
Halliday, the linguistic is a socially shaped resource, organized as a system of
choices, in which the action of the individual in making choices produces
meaning. In critical linguistics the social is prior; it is a field of power; and power
(and power differences) is the generative principle producing linguistic form and
difference. Individuals are located in these fields of power, but the powerful
carry the day, and the forms which they produce are the forms which shape the
system."
text - social
"Let me give a very brief example. In Australia the issue of relations between
the indigenous population and the British and others who arrived after 1788 has
been enormously contentious. Notice that in the sentence I have just written, I
avoided the term 'the British settlers' as that implies the innocuous act of 'settling'
in a, presumably, vacant, empty bit of space. I also avoided the term 'the British
invaders' because that assumes yet another view, entirely opposed to that of
'settler'."  - very interesting!
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 social in the sign - invasion

"In a plausible social view of language, sign-makers transform the cultural/
linguistic resources available to them in their social environment and always
within fields of power. 'Interest' factors in the power of the sign-maker in relation
to the power of those who are the imagined audience/recipients of the sign-asmessage
(or utterance). Yet emphasis on 'interest' ensures that there is real
agency, transformative action, work agency in relation to and working with
historically shaped resources."
"The sign, the linguistic utterance (and this is the case for signs in all modes,
whether image, gesture, music or 3D object) is the carrier of the meaning of the
environment in which it was made; the meaning which represents the interest
(social and personal) of the sign-maker. Once we adopt this position we have a
social view of language in its fullest sense: the meanings of signs and the signcomplex
are open to view as a hypothesis about the environment in which a
sign was made, the structurings of power which obtained, and the interest of
the sign-maker."
critique - taken for granted stance towards language