Paul Thibault Social Semiotics as Praxis
From class: 
 question: text (like a tax form - filling it out) - what is "realized"
* relation between context and text
process of realization - texts "realize" meanings constructed by particular social situations
(Halliday
 field (what is going on, activity)/  
tenor (social roles of ppl involved, statuses-relationships/
node -role that language is playing.
Given these configurations -  meanings "realized" in text

Halliday - fairly deterministic.
Text is a thing - is also a process - helps to shape meaning!!!

11
"These textual products and records are always immanent
in the patterned discursive exchanges and interactions that enact them." - inherent - necessary relationship

" The textual products and records of these transactions occur,
as Lemke (1984b: 79-80) points out, in some relation of homology to the dynamic
social semiotic processes that enact them." - relationship of similarity
relationship - connection vs. equation - expectations about what will happen in certain situations

one way fixed relationship - DO NOT HAVE certainty (Makes me think of medical studies - or forms students fill out to get them to think about revision - our expectations aren't always mapped up)

12
"Nevertheless, the notion of
some relation of homology between the two levels reminds us that both the type
and the extent of this homologous relation are productive and nonarbitrary, therefore
not totally fixed or determinate in their effects. This is because textual
products and records and the copatterned meaning selections realized in them are
always functionally related to the social semiotic processes and relations in and
through which they are constituted and used." So...certain functions performed gives language shape. Not "anything goes".
Dr. - asks questions - functional w/in a certain type of model (physical vs. emotional)
SOAP heuristic - for nurse practitioners - other functions that need to be served (stress etc doesn't fall into mind/ body construction).

system:  paradigmatic (limited range of how to view things - Puritan paradigm) meaning potential of social semiotic
Language - meaning POTENTIAL - range of options to make meaning
construct sentence: subject (agent) -verb (action) -object (affected)
Kent State Shootings: how are we going to represent the fact that students got shot on campus by national guard?
13 seconds of rifle fire/  left / 4 students dead...
Realization --
Kent State (as context) - tries to neutralize "left dead" instead of "gunfire killed" realizes this!
so:
" The concept of realization is thus ambivalent in an important and
suggestive way, which can be related to a further distinction Hjelmslev ([1943]
1961) makes between system and process. Here I draw on Michael Halliday's development
of the original Hjelmslevian distinctions in his systemic-functional
theory of language. The concept of system refers in this theory to the paradigmatic
(systemic) meaning potential of the social semiotic, or some part of it. Systems
are formally represented in systemic theory as networks of interrelated options
in meaning, seen as a resource for the exchange of social meanings in
specifiable semiotic environments (see Halliday, 1978: 17, 52, 192)." (13)
Not always top down (social determines language - we have an effect on the system - other readings ... dynamic
Certain patterns used more often w/ some types of messages
Copatternings

Process
" Here I draw on Michael Halliday's development
of the original Hjelmslevian distinctions in his systemic-functional
theory of language. The concept of system refers in this theory to the paradigmatic
(systemic) meaning potential of the social semiotic, or some part of it. Systems
are formally represented in systemic theory as networks of interrelated options
in meaning, seen as a resource for the exchange of social meanings in
specifiable semiotic environments (see Halliday, 1978: 17, 52, 192). Hjelmslev's
process is interpreted in systemic-functional theory as text insofar as texts are the
instantiation of this systemic meaning potential in the way described above. However,
Hjelmslev's concept also incorporates the insight that textual meanings are
made in and through the specific copatternings of meaning selections that they
realize in their lexico-grammar." (13)
"
The ambivalence that is built into Hjelmslev's
concept of text-as-process serves to remind us that textual meanings are not simply
the outcome of a one-way determinism, leading from an abstract systemic
meaning potential to the actualization of this potential in specific texts. Realization
is, then, a productive dialectic in which the copatternings of formallexicogrammatical
selections in texts both realize, enact, produce, and index their situational
contexts and their higher-order social semiotic by virtue of occurring just
as much as they are realized or produced by these." (dialectical)

"Textual productions, viewed
as forms of social action, can be either accommodative to or creative of their social
situation-type (see Lemke, 1984b: 69). They may either maintain or creatively
alter the ~ituation by virtue of their occurring rather than some potential
alternative social act from a structured system of alternatives." (13)

 11
"In this book, I argue that
the dynamics of social meaning making practices cannot adequately be separated
from the analysis of the textual products and records that are made and used in
and through these practices. These textual products and records are always immanent
in the patterned discursive exchanges and interactions that enact them."

Homology (biology - same organ - evolutionary?)

"The textual products and records of these transactions occur,
as Lemke (1984b: 79-80) points out, in some relation ofhomology to the dynamic
social semiotic processes that enact them"
 12
semiosis - social meaning making practices

"This is because textual
products and records and the copatterned meaning selections realized in them are
always functionally related to the social semiotic processes and relations in and
through which they are constituted and used. The dialectically dual nature of this
relation has two important consequences for the conceptual framework of social
semiotics. This entails a dual concern with both dynamic and formal analytical
and theoretical criteria in our attempt analytically to reconstitute the functional
relations between dynamic social semiotic processes and the formal patterns of
realization of meaning selections in texts." Text related to social construct - has impact in way we analyze something.
 "Meanings do not inhere in these formal patternings, but are made,
produced, and construed in and through them in regular, systematic, and contextdependent
ways. The latter refer to the productive discursive procedures and
practices that enact specific, socially recognizable context-types. However, much
recent work on these has taken place in ways that remain quite disjoined from the
analysis of formal patterns of realization in texts. Threadgold (1986a: 28) has
shown how the now widespread gap between semiotics and poststructuralist theories
of discourse and discursive practice on the one hand and the detailed
microanalysis of the patterns of realization of textual meanings on the other has
arisen out of the suspicion on the part of the poststmcturalists that such analysis
in formal linguistic theory necessarily reproduces or is complicitous in the ontology
of representation"
Critiques - Derrida/ Foucault - language and "real world out there"  & "totalization of social sciences/ l3
Structuralist - doesn't necessarily mean "either a representationalist or a totalizing account of meaning."
Concept - "Realization" - "textual productions in the sense that these textual productions are both the realization of something as the finished product and the process that enacts or realizes
this product."

"Systems
are formally represented in systemic theory as networks of interrelated options
in meaning, seen as a resource for the exchange of social meanings in
specifiable semiotic environments (see Halliday, 1978: 17, 52, 192). Hjelmslev's
process is interpreted in systemic-functional theory as text insofar as texts are the
instantiation of this systemic meaning potential in the way described above. However,
Hjelmslev's concept also incorporates the insight that textual meanings are
made in and through the specific copatternings of meaning selections that they
realize in their lexico-grammar. The ambivalence that is built into Hjelmslev's
concept of text-as-process serves to remind us that textual meanings are not simply
the outcome of a one-way determinism, leading from an abstract systemic
meaning potential to the actualization of this potential in specific texts. Realization
is, then, a productive dialectic in which the copatternings of formallexicogrammatical
selections in texts both realize, enact, produce, and index their situational
contexts and their higher-order social semiotic by virtue of occurring just
as much as they are realized or produced by these. Textual productions, viewed
as forms of social action, can be either accommodative to or creative of their social
situation-type (see Lemke, 1984b: 69)"

 "Hjelmslev's dual focus on
system and process requires the higher-level dialectical synthesis of the two
former terms in ways that hypostatize neither the notion of system (cf. Saussure's
langue) nor the semantics of the text."

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 "in the Saussurean and
Hjelmslevian conceptions of the sign is itself the result of what Whorf (1956) has
called a "referential objectification" of the lexico-grammar of Standard Average
European languages. Thus, the nominalizations signifier, signified, expression,.
content, and realization in the metasemantics of Saussurean and Hjelmslevian lin-guistics
are "referentially projected" and objectified in such a way that they are
perceived to correspond in a straightforward way to real entities "out there""

Signs:
"While, according to the first view, the sign is an expression that
points to a content outside the sign itself, according to the second view
(which is put forward in particular by Saussure and, following him, by
Weisgerber) the sign is an entity generated by the connexion between
an expression and a content."
15
" sign function, posited between two entities,
an expression and a content. On this basis we shall be able to determine
whether it is appropriate to consider the sign function as an external
or an internal function of the entity that we shall call a sign."

 Expression/ content - function/ functives
solidarity

"The functional nature of the relationship between the two planes is one of realization,
which we can avoid interpreting as a static, one-way determinism if this
notion is dialectically reintegrated with the two key Hjelmslevian concepts of system
and process. In this way, the ambivalence I spoke of earlier in the verbprocess
noun realization can help us to restore a much needed self-reflexivity to
our own social praxis as semioticians. Words like signifier, signified, expression,
content, and realization are not facts about language, just as they do not simply
exist "in" language. They correspond to our ways of talking about language,
which is itself no more than an act of semiosis, productive of these as meanings
in specific, yet shifting, relations with other meanings"