Frontiers in International Communication: Context and Register variation

This International Graduate Summer School is concerned with "Frontiers in International ... Communication Theory and Research Methods". This theme clearly invites and involves contributions from different disciplinary starting points. These contributions will naturally be an academic collage or quiltwork, and they may turn out to be interpretatable in terms of one or more of the initiatives that have begun to be introduced in the last few decades in attempts to transcend our traditional disciplinary boundaries: thus they may conceptualized as inter-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary — partly overlapping but complementary conceptions.

The "frontiers" are advancing on at least two levels —

1. the level of phenomena themselves, "communication" in the title of the summer school, thanks in large part to recent technological advances centred on channels of communication, as part of the syndrome of changes constituting what has been called the 4th industrial revolution — which is essentially focussed on systems of meaning, semiotic systems, although meaning has also been discussed under the headings of "information" (as in the "information age") and, in a cognitive interpretation, "knowledge" (as in "knowledge societies, industries"); and
2. the level of the study of these phenomena, pursued in a spectrum of computer-enabled disciplines that began to emerge around the middle of the 20th century.

The second level is a meta-level, and it is also enhanced by technological developments, which have a long history going back to the 1950s, when scholars like John McCarthy, Alan Newell and Herb Simon first formulated the notion of "artificial intelligence", but which have increasingly become part of public awareness and engagement in many (but not all!) communities around the world with the dramatic mainstream introduction of different variants of "chatbots". But, at the same time, this level has also been enhanced by the development of theories of language and other semiotic systems and by the descriptions of particular languages and particular semiotic systems.

In my contribution to the summer school, I will draw on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to interpret the movement of the frontiers and then to focus on a central aspect of "communication". I will interpret the movement by reference to the ordered typology of systems operating in different phenomenal realms explored in SFL: physical systems < biological systems [+ "life"] < social systems [+ "value", or social order] < semiotic systems [+ "meaning"] (e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2006; Halliday, 2005; Matthiessen 2007; Matthiessen, 2023; Matthiessen & Teruya, 2024).

Having framed the movement in this way, I will then focus on one central aspect of language (and other semiotic systems) in context — viz. functional variation: the variation of language and other semiotic systems according to the contexts of use that they operate in. Such functional variants are known as registers, and are associated with ranges of settings of contextual variables (e.g. Halliday, McIntosh & Strevens, 1964; Halliday, 1978; Ghadessy, 1993; Lukin et al. 2008; Matthiessen, 1993, 2019; Moore, 2017). In other words, registers are adaptations of language and other semiotic systems to the semiotic environments they operate in, i.e. their contexts of use. Consequently, particular languages are simply aggregates of registers at any point in time; and we can describe languages by developing maps of the registers that they are composed of — registerial cartography (e.g. Matthiessen, 2015). Such maps need to be "histo-maps": languages change over time in their registerial compositions (as do other semiotic systems) as their contexts of use change, well-known examples being the emergence of the registers of science, of news media and or marketting — characteristic aspects of the registerial composition of standard languages.

Thus as part of semohistory (the study of the evolution of language and other semiotic systems), we can monitor changes in language and in other semiotic systems ongoingly in terms of their changing registerial compositions (including but going far beyond the kind of lexical monitoring envisaged under the heading of Culturomics by Michel et al., 2011) — and in this way, we can trace changes associated with new platforms of the channel of communication but also related new contextul uses (cf. Halliday, 2010), like those characterized by terms relating to the tenor parameter of context (roles, relations, values) such as "identity", "othering", "polarization", "hate speech" or to the field paramters of context (field of activity and subject matter) such as language and the environment ("ecolinguistics"), e.g. "sustainability", "global warming", "food insecurity".

By theorizing and modelling languages and other semiotic systems as aggregates of the registers (functional varieties) that they are composed of, we are actually in a very strong position to conceptualize and investigate two central aspects of the "frontiers in international communication ...", viz. registers & multimodality, and registers & multilinguality. Both have a long history in "communication", and are affected by technological advances, including (but not limited to) automatic inter-semiotic translation and intra-semiotic inter-lingual translation.

Returning to the title of the summer school — "Frontiers in International ... Communication Theory and Research Methods", I will also make some obversations concerning "research methods". While research methods based on automated computational analysis of increasingly large corpora of text have now become possible (as part of the motif across disciplines of "big data" and deep learning strategies) and desirable (as part of fact checking, scam detection and other varieties of quality control), I will argue that we need to develop and use a model of the complementarity of automated analysis of large volumes of text and manual analysis of selective necessarily small passages of text. (In other words, research methods absolutely need to transcend the distinction between "corpus linguistics" and "discourse analysis" based on a theoretically informed account of the complementarity of these two broadly characterized methodological approaches.)

References

Halliday, M.A.K. 1978. Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M.A.K. 2005. "On matter and meaning: the two realms of human experience." Linguistics and the Human Sciences 1.1: 59-82.

Halliday, M.A.K. 2010. "Language evolving: some systemic functional reflections on the history of meaning." Manuscript of plenary given at ISFC 37, UBC Vancouver, Canada, July 2010. Chapter 12 in Halliday, M.A.K. 2013. Halliday in the 21st century. Volume 11 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, edited by Jonathan J. Webster. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Halliday, M.A.K., Angus McIntosh & Peter Strevens. 1964. The linguistic sciences and language teaching. London: Longman.

Halliday, M.A.K. & Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. 2006. Construing experience through meaning: a language-based approach to cognition. London & New York: Continuum.

[Halliday, M.A.K. & Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. 2022. 通过意义识解经验——基于语言的认知研究 [Construing experience through meaning: A language-based approach to cognition] (Trans. Juyuan Li [李桔元], Haiye Chen [陈海叶], Zhihui Shang [尚智慧] & Hongyan Li [李鸿雁]). 杭州 [Hangzhou]: 浙江工商大学出版社 [Zhejiang Gongshang University Press].]

Lukin, Annabelle, Alison Moore, Maria Herke, Rebekah Wegener & Wu Canzhong. 2008. "Halliday's model of register revisited and explored." Linguistics and the Human Sciences 4(2): 187-243.

Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. 1993. "Register in the round: diversity in a unified theory of register analysis." Mohsen Ghadessy (ed.), Register analysis: theory and practice. London: Pinter. 221-292.

Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. 2007. "The "architecture" of language according to systemic functional theory: developments since the 1970s." In Ruqaiya Hasan, Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen & Jonathan Webster (eds.), Continuing discourse on language. Volume 2. London: Equinox. 505-561.

Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. 2015. "Register in the round: registerial cartography." Functional Linguistics 2(9): 1-48.

Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. 2019. "Register in Systemic Functional Linguistics." Register Studies 1(1): 10-41.

Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. 2023. System in Systemic Functional Linguistics: a system-based theory of language. (Key Concepts in Systemic Functional Linguistics) Sheffield: Equinox.

Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. & Kazuhiro Teruya. 2024. Systemic Functional Linguistics: a complete guide. London: Routledge.

Michel, Jean-Baptiste et al. 2011. "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books." Science 331: 176-182.

Moore, Alison Rotha. 2017. "Register analysis in systemic functional linguistics." In Bartlett, Tom & Gerard O'Grady (eds.). The Routledge handbook of systemic functional linguistics. Milton Park: Routledge. Ch. 26, 418-437.