Thibault:
119
"In the conceptual framework of social
semiotics, language is not a formal, rule-bound system but a resource for making,
realizing, and enacting context-dependent social meanings. Patterns of social action
and interaction are related to each other in regular, limited ways according
to the demands of specific social situations."

"Language is a resource for getting things done by enacting both the social activity-structures and the thematic
formations that work to define and maintain a particular social formation or some
part of it."

" In systemic-functional linguistics, text is seen as the realization of some
higher-order social semiotic (Halliday, 1978: 130). Halliday defines text in
semantic rather than formal terms as "language in operation." It is a semantic unit,
which is realized by patterned lexica-grammatical selections at the level of its formal
organization. Halliday draws on the Hjelmslevian concept of realization to
define this principle: "A text is to the semantic system what a clause is to the
lexica-grammatical system and a syllable to the phonological system" (1978:
135). Text, defined semantically, is, in turn, the realization of some higher-order
social semiotic."

Realization
120
"Text is a record or a product
of the social semiotic processes in and through which it is made and used. It is
both the realization of some social semiotic process or processes as well as existing
in a relation of homology to these (see chapter 3). Text is the realization of
(typically) a plurality of social discourses. Discourse is defined as fully contextualized
social action and interaction. It refers to the social practices in and through
which textual meanings are made. Social discourses are patterned, limited ways
of meaning and ways of doing that function both to regulate and deregulate human
social activity and the social formation itself. The higher-order social semiotic is
itself constructed and maintained by the relations between the various social discourses
in a given sociodiscursive formation. The concept of realization does not
entail any isomorphic or one-to-one fit between text and discourse. A particular
text is, generally speaking, the material site of a plurality of heteroglossically
related social discourses and their voicings. Specific texts, therefore, both instantiate
and realize the heteroglossic relations of alliance, conflict, opposition, and
co-optation among discursive positioned-practices in the social formation."

fascinating:
"The text/discourse distinction, I would argue,
is at least implicit in the work of Bakhtin and Volosinov. Their notion of the
multiaccented "word," defined as a unit of social action (or utterance) rather than
a formal linguistic token per se, indexes a plurality of overlapping contextual domains
and ideological and axiological positions, which are "voiced" in the word.
The concept of the word in Bakhtin and Volosinov runs parallel to the concept
of text that I defined earlier. The interplay of voices in the word can be aligned
with the present account of the distinction between ltext and discourse. The insights
of Bakhtin and Volosinov help to clarify the notion of text as a socially
made product in which lived, often antagonistic relations between social discourses
are enacted. The text is a social site, which is overdetermined by a plurality
of social discourses, each with their own specificity, which are articulated in
and through specific social meaning making practices"
121
Bahkitin
novel:
" The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes
even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices,
artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national
language into social dialects, characteristic group behaviour, professional
jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age
groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various
circles and of passing fashions that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes
of that day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its
own vocabulary, its own emphases)- this internal stratification present
in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the
indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre. The novel orchestrates
all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted
and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech
types (raznorecie) and by the differing individual voiCes that flourish
under such conditions."

"The concepts of heteroglossia and dialogicity suggest ways in which the
problematic of ideological conflict and struggle in discursive practice can be a
starting point for a critical study of the ways in which texts and social discourses
work to mailntain and change the social semiotic system. This would be different
from a modlel ba"

disjunctions: (Lemke?)
" The system of disjunctions imposes limits on the kinds of meanings and
practices typically enacted by social agents. It ensures that certain regular, systematic
connections and patterned relations are typically made between different
social discourses, while other potential patterns and relations are typically not
made, or not recognized when they are. This ensures the overall metastability of
the social semiotic system as a dynamic, open, goal-seeking system. Yet, it is important
not to reduce this concept to yet another structural-functionalist account
of the contradictions of the system. Such a reduction can be avoided by an analysis
that relates these to the differential access of social agents to the material and
semiotic resources of the social semiotic system. This further entails the differential
and conflicting power-knowledge interests and relations that are articulated
by specific heteroglossic relations among discursive positioned-practices and
their textual voicings. This general perspective is important for correcting the
tendency in much of sociolinguistics to conceptualize a one-to-one fit between
text and context"
Watch determinative
123
"I have argued elsewhere (Thibault, l986f: 103) that the Hjelmslevian
concept of realization does not entail a simple, one-way determination from the
top down, from the social situation to the text. It is, rather, a productive, two-way
dialectic in which texts enact, create, and produce their contexts of situation as
much as they are determined by them. Texts cannot be reduced to the necessary
properties of an a priori social situation. This would imply that texts are no more
than the mere appearances of an underlying (social) reality that they "represent"
or "refer to." Both the systems of social heteroglossia and the plurifunctional
character of textual meanings emphasize the overdetermined nature of all social
meaning making. Its overdetermined nature means that the meaning potential of
the social semiotic system is never reducible to a single, determinate, or unifunctional
textual meaning. This does not preclude the fact that there are regular and
systematic meaning making orientations that work to fix and articulate the social
formation in specific, historically contingent ways. These cannot, however, be
reduced to some explanatory cause in terms of, for instance, determination in the
last instance by social class."

" What is needed is a functional explanation
based on the distribution and copatterning of meaning relations in their contexts
of situation. These are then linked to determinate material social practices in the
wider social formation. This requires that we look at the discursive situation as
a social process and at the part played by language in it, rather than reifying language
in the way accounts based on structural-functionalist sociological premises
do (see Thibault, 1986c: 32). The work ofBakhtin and Volosinov helps us better
to understand that textual and discursive practices are also social practices. Texts
and social occasions of discourse are always constituted and overdetermined in
relation to some still wider social formation. A particular text is constituted by
the determinations arising from potentially all the processes and relations that enact
a given social formation."

"The concept of
overdetennination is also important for the way in which it connects texts to
specific social practices as well as to their determinate material relations of
production. Texts, as the work of Bakhtin and Volosinov demonstrates, are not
reducible to static determinations of, say, particular class values and interests."

124
Critical theories of textual intervention account for the ways in which specific domains
of social practice either are enacted in and through their textual productions
or else constitute the gaps, disjunctions, the missing registers, or the "yet-to-bevoiced"
(Bernstein, 1982) in texts and intertextual formations. An important
dimension of such a textual politics is a reading strategy that can reconstitute the
intertextual formations and the social meaning making practices that are instantiated
in particular textual productions. Such a reading strategy enables us analytically
to reconstruct and approximate the kinds of relationships texts have with
other texts, the heteroglossic relations that are articulated in and through these
intertextual formations, and their particular intersections and voicings in a given
textual production.

" A critical intertextual analysis is a means of challenging the autonomous, objectlike
status of texts. It is more than merely positioning the text in its context of
situation. This would tend to fix or naturalize the text in terms of an allready given
social situation. Such a naturalizing function suggests a seamless, unproblematic
relation between a text and its context, masking the gaps, disjunctions, incoherencies,
and potential sites of intervention in texts and still wider intertextual formations."

"Critical analysis aims to relate the text to the social meaning making practices
in and through which texts and their meanings are made, used, intervened
in, and changed. Texts are not autonomous objects among other spontaneously
arising objects. Instead, they are instantiations of the intertextual relations and
processes out of which they are made. The dominant ideology functions to
naturalize these processes by reifying these processes as textual objects and
products."

"The patterned relations between texts and social meaning making practices are
constructed and construed by social agents in and through the meaning making
resources of the social semiotic system. This emphasis on the active, constructive
role of social agents helps to refocus attention on the productive labor whereby
social meanings are made. Textual meanings are not simply given in texts, but
are made and transformed (recontextualized) out of specific intertextual copatternings
of meaning relations and their context-dependent uses in determinate
social and historical situations."

125
"Intertextuality is not adequately defined
as the mediation between Lolita as the anterior text and Ada as the final product
of this process. The patterned meaning relations that we can construe between the
two texts are assembled through processes of syntagmatic juxtaposition and transformation
in relation to still wider and more abstract intertextual formations."