Progress and tensions in modelling register as a semantic configuration
Halliday (1978: 111) defines register as “the configuration of semantic
resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation type.” Elsewhere, however, he stresses that when we
talk of “a register” this is a term of convenience: register is more properly theorised as continuous variation along many
linguistic dimensions. In this paper I review progress in our capacity to describe register and context of situation and ask
whether the tension between discrete and continuous models of register might hinder such progress. I then consider Hasan’s (1983, 2013) contextually-open networked model
of message semantics, arguing that in conjunction with context networks it has potential to map register variation but still needs
to be tested across a large and varied set of domains. Examples from healthcare interaction ground the discussion.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Halliday’s idea of register has always been one of continuous variation
- 2.1Register and sociolinguistics
- 2.2Variation and clarification in Halliday’s definitions of register
- 3.Illustrating some of the issues – from shopping to seeing the doctor
- 4.How does recent work on register orient to the idea of continuous variation?
- 4.1Favoured and foregrounded options
- 4.2System re-setting and blocking
- 4.3Registerial cartography
- 4.4Parameters of context
- 4.5Corpus and computational approaches
- 5.Semantic networks and register as continuous and multidimensional variation
- 5.1Hasan’s semantic networks
- 5.2Demonstrating the networked approach – surgical interaction
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Concluding remarks
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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