Modelling context and register: the long-term project of registerial cartography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5902/2176148520205Keywords:
Registerial cartography, Context modelling, Discourse analysis, Field, Tenor, ModeAbstract
This paper presents the outlines of a long-term project concerned with the modelling of context and register along the lines originally drawn by M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) — thus with “register” in its original sense of a functional variety of language, i.e. the meanings at risk in a given type of context. The topic of this project can be characterized as register cartography. Section 1 presents the background to work on the modelling of context and register, noting different uses in SFL of the term “register” locating the notion of register as functional variation in terms of the two semiotic dimensions of the hierarchy of stratification and the cline of instantiation. Section 2 sets out alternative models of context and register, identifying the key semiotic dimensions involved in these models. It then compares and contrasts the models. Section 3 adds to this account of work on context and register by summarizing work that has been done in computational linguistics informed by SFL — important work that has sometimes been overlooked by researchers concerned mainly with manual discourse analysis. Based on the background sketched in Sections 1 through 3, Section 4 then reports on the long-term project of registerial cartography, giving a general account with examples of findings such as differentiation of registers in terms of relative text frequency of terms in certain major systems. Section 5 focusses on one aspect of the long-term project — viz. the description of different fields of activity: eight primary fields of activity, each differentiated into more delicate subtypes — illustrated by means of variation in the deployment of pictorial resources. The more delicate subtypes are then used to related the field-based cartography to the genres identified and described within the “Genre Model” of the “Sydney School”, in the work led by J.R. Martin. Field of activity is compared and contrasted with genre in the sense of goaloriented social process. Building on the account of fields of activity, Section 6 adds tenor and mode consideration, illustrating how fields of activity can be intersected with tenor and mode values. Section 7, the Conclusion, summarizes the presentation, and relates it to considerations of institutions as domains of culture consisting of arrangements of situation types, and of persons as aggregates of personae operating in different relationships in different social groups — including a reference to Gu Yue-guo’s work on discourse geography.Downloads
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