Social Semiotics - MAK Halliday and The Social Semiotic in Language

MAK Halliday and The Social Semiotic in Language

Linguistic theorist, Michael Halliday, introduced the term ‘social semiotics’ into linguistics, when he used the phrase in the title of his book, Language as Social Semiotic. This work argues against the traditional separation between language and society, and exemplifies the start of a 'semiotic' approach, which broadens the narrow focus on written language in linguistics (1978). For Halliday, languages evolve as systems of "meaning potential" (Halliday, 1978:39) or as sets of resources which influence what the speaker can do with language, in a particular social context . For example, for Halliday, the grammar of the English language is a system organised for the following three purposes (areas or "metafunctions"):

• Facilitating certain kinds of social and interpersonal interactions (interpersonal),
• Representing ideas about the world (ideational), and
• Connecting these ideas and interactions into meaningful texts and making them relevant to their context (textual)(1978:112).

Any sentence in English is composed like a musical composition, with one strand of its meaning coming from each of the three semiotic areas or metafunctions. Bob Hodge, in the Semiotics Encyclopedia Online, suggests that the following points sum up the major premises of Halliday’s social semiotics:

1. ‘Language is a social fact’ (1978:1)
2. ‘We shall not come to understand the nature of language if we pursue only the kinds of question about language that are formulated by linguists’ (1978:3)
3. ‘Language is as it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve in people’s lives’ (1978:4).
4. There are three functions, or ‘metafunctions’, of language: ideational (‘about something’), interpersonal (’doing something’) and textual (‘the speaker’s text-forming potential’)(1978:112).
5. Language is constituted as ‘a discrete network of options’ (1978:113)