REVIEWS

Language and situation is brief, readable,' and scholarly and thus meets
the general editor's goals. In terms of the author's stated purposes, it is
reasonably explicit about the matches between language varieties and social
situations and about how we may talk about them, but unfortunately these
two purposes have not been clearly distinguished.
I found the book too misleading to comfortably serve as a textbook,
although its length, price, and scope are otherwise suitable for an introductory
language or sociolinguistics course. All aspects of the field are at least
touched on: pidgins and Creoles, for instance, under temporal dialects,
language riots under geographical dialect, and language learning and bilin-
gualism under idiolect.
Language and situation is more successful as an introduction to a concep-
tual framework "developed in the past fifteen years or so, particularly by
British scholars" (2). The origins of this framework are found in Wegener,
Biihler, Malinowski, and Firth, and its recent developers include Abercrom-
bie, Catford, Bernstein, and Halliday. Giles, Powesland, and Trudgill are not
mentioned.

REFERENCES
Catford, J. C. (1965). A linguistic theory of translation. London: Oxford University Press.
Todd, L. (1974). Pidgins and Creoles. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Reviewed by BRUCE C. JOHNSON
Department of Linguistics and
Non- Western Languages
University of North Carolina
(Received 21 March 1979) at Chapel Hill

M. A. K. HALLIDAY, Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation

of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. Pp. 256.
I assume by definition that a review of a good book, and this is one, cannot
adequately cover in depth the same material as the book. Thus I shall outline
briefly its structure and purpose, discuss a few of the theoretical notions and
terms - enough to give some notion of the flavor of Language as social
semiotic (hereinafter LASS), as well as suggest in particular some of the
ways it displays, without ever saying so explicitly, the richness of M. A. K.
Halliday's (hereinafter MAKH) view of language versus the sterile poverty of
our present day taxonomic dissectionists, the transformationalists. (I will also
note ways in which transformational grammar has fostered valid linguistic
research that MAKH seems to ignore.) MAKH is far from being a neostruc-
tural behaviorist, but he is also far more interested in people as social, hence
linguistically interacting, creatures, than in the structure of cognition, a

[1] There are a handful of typos. Only + for i (19) and a replaced line (19) are at all
bothersome.

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theoretical pursuit he finds uninteresting and, perhaps, unnecessary (51-2). I

am glad to be a linguist at a time when both sides of the coin are well
represented and argued in the literature of the discipline; I am equally glad,
because MAKH is persuasive on this issue, that the two are pursued
independently.
LASS is composed of 12 essays and an interview. Most of the pieces have
been published elsewhere; chapters Eight and Ten are new, and there has
been some revision in the reprinted pieces to make them cohere better here.
As a result of its form, the book tends to be somewhat repetitive, but this is all
to the advantage of Americans unfamiliar with neo-Firthian thought and the
terminology of modern British anthropological/sociological linguistics in
general, and of MAKH in particular. LASS promotes a favorable view of,
and serves as a good introduction to, Bernstein's work, as well as to the nexus
of concerns that link Labov, Hymes, Bernstein, and, of course, MAKH. The
final chapter contains suggestions for pursuing various aspects of MAKH's
thought with students in the classroom; the tenor implies that LASS is
directed at school teachers of what is called in America 'Language Arts'. My
feeling is that most American primary and secondary school teachers would
be hard pressed to understand much of LASS (I shall find out more about
that next quarter), but it is clear that they would gain a lot by trying to do so.
This paragraph implies some confusion in LASS as to organization and goal;
it also represents virtually the sum total of my negative remarks about the
book - and even this cloud has a silver lining.
I think one of the most succinct ways to summarize the basic difference in
MAKH's orientation towards language is to cite his use of the verb 'mean.'
He makes this verb an active one: hearing people mean the way deaf people
sign: '. . . to mean, linguistically, is at once both to reflect and to act . . .
(125)';'. . . any instance of language in use 'means' in these various ways .. .
(129)'; 'A person is what he means (160)'; '. . . what is likely to be being
meant (189)'; 'Only people can mean (207)'. 'Meaning' then becomes
something people do, rather than an abstract entity, quantity or construct
that inheres in acts of a different kind. 'Meaning is a social act . . . (160)'.
Meaning in this sense has semantic value by virtue of representing a whole
complex of choices at various levels of social, semantic and linguistic
organization. This paradigmatic element of the significance of systematic
choice constitutes the largest conceptual distance between MAKH and
transformational grammar.
Most of LASS deals with the various aspects of social context that are
involved in these choices.
The text is the linguistic form of social interaction. It is a continuous
progression of meanings, combining both simultaneously and in succession.
The meanings are the selections made by the speaker from the options that
constitute the meaning potential... (122).
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A text is embedded in a context of situation. The context of situation of any

text is an instance of a generalized social context or situation type. The
situation type is not an inventory of ongoing sights and sounds but a
semiotic structure . . . (122).
The semiotic structure of a given situation type, its particular pattern of
field, tenor and mode, can be thought of as resonating in the semantic
system and so activating particular networks of semantic options. .. . This
process specifies a range of meaning potential, or register: the semantic
configuration that is typically associated with the situation type in question
(123).

The specification of the register by the social context is in turn controlled

and modified by the code: the semiotic style, or 'sociolinguistic coding
orientation' in Bernstein's term, that represents the particular subcultural
angle on the social system (123) [author's italics throughout].
Text is a nexus of interaction between register and social dialect; register in
turn is a nexus of interaction between code and a union of situation type and
the linguistic system.
The system does not first generate a representation of reality, then encode
it as a speech act, and finally recode it as a text, as some writing in
philosophical linguistics seems to imply. It embodies all these types of
meaning in simultaneous networks of options, from each of which derive
structures that are mapped onto one another in the course of their
lexicogrammatical realization. The lexicogrammar acts as the integrative
system, taking configurations from all the components of the semantics and
combining them to form multilayered, 'polyphonic' structural compositions

The situation type is to be analyzed in terms of field, tenor and mode.

The semiotic structure of a situation type can be represented as a complex

of three dimensions: the ongoing social activity, the role relationships
involved, and the symbolic or rhetorical channel. We refer to these
respectively as 'field', 'tenor' and ' m o d e ' . . . (110).

The linguistic system is analyzed in terms of three primary functions:

The ideational function represents the speaker's meaning potential as an

observer. It is the content function of language, language as 'about
something' (112).

The interpersonal component represents the speaker's meaning potential as

an intruder. It is the participatory function of language, language as doing
something (112).
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The textual component represents the speaker's text-forming potential; it is

that which makes language relevant. . . . It expresses the relation of the
language to its environment, including both the verbal environment - what
has been said or written before - and the nonverbal, situational environ-
ment (i 12-3).
The ideational component is further subdivided into an experiential function
and a logical one. The experiental component affects the semantic/syntactic
structure vis-a-vis the content of the utterance; the logical component affects
the logical relations between clauses (parataxis and hypotaxis). The interper-
sonal component largely determines the 'modal' element of a sentence. The
textual component manipulates the theme and rheme, which are very like
topic and comment, or old and new information in the American context.
Field interacts largely with the ideational function; tenor, with the interper-
sonal function; and mode, with the textual component.
Some might object to particular aspects of these concepts or to the whole
system as merely a different taxonomy, but in MAKH's usage every element
adds layers of depth of interpretation not seen before. I feel that looking at
texts from these different vantage points yields for each new insights into why
that text exists. Language acts are multi-dimensional, or polyphonic in
MAKH's terms, not the result of a one-shot generative process. Another
example of discrete fuzziness shows up in MAKH's description of the
language system as composed of three strata: semantic, lexicogrammatical
('the wording, i.e. syntax, morphology and lexis' (128)) and phonological.
MAKH conceives of the lexicogrammatical stratum as differing from the
large scale (clause) to the fine (lexis) only in size - the lexicon is just delicate
grammar. This makes sense out of the increasingly complex art of defining
appropriate contexts (categorical, subcategorical, selectional) for individual
lexemes.
While LASS stays on an abstract level of discourse for the most part, a few
tidbits of MAKH's analytical prowess here and there amply demonstrate the
very sophisticated explanatory and predictive insights he is able to attain with
his intellectual apparatus. These are most in evidence in the passages where
MAKH shows how the child acquires this richly integrated system of
functions - how the child's system evolves from the prelinguistic (universal?)
functions of infant utterances. An example or two of my own may show how a
Hallidayan approach might enrich our understanding of how speakers mean.
Transformational grammars typically contain question and negative trans-
formations. The various combinations of application and non-application
yield four sentence types with the same ideational content:
1) a) John went.
b) Did John go? (T-Q)
c) John didn't go. (T-NEG)
d) Didn't John go? (T-Q + T-NEG)
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Why does d) stand out from the rest? In part, I think, the answer must lie
outside the grammar in a way that cannot be expressed by T-Q + T-NEG. In
a) and c) the speaker asserts or gives information; in b) the speaker seeks it.
Aside from the logical difference, there is also the interpersonal one in the
anthropological sense - giver versus receiver (MAKH discusses language as
giving (140)). D) is anomalous because the speaker is acting as both giver and
receiver simultaneously, asserting the information he or she expected to
receive but doing so in the guise of acting as a receiver. (In a real situation,
my seven-year-old daughter reacted to my use of, a form like d) with the
sentence: 'he didn't come' with a rising intonation; she couldn't understand
why I was asserting information at that point in the conversation.) Similar
analyses can be rung on
e) did John go or didn't he?
and
f) John did go or he didn't go.
Aside from whatever else is true, these sentence forms also express distinct
roles of social interaction that the speaker projects onto the speaker/hearer
relationships. (Note that the first verb in f) cannot be went, not because of
some features of experiential grammar, but for reasons of textual coherence -
a different function.)
The passive transformation(s) present similar problems, especially when
they interact with T-NEG:
2) a) The superintendent fired John.
b) John was fired by the superintendent.
c) John was fired.
d) The superintendent didn't fire John.
e) John wasn't fired by the superintendent.
f) John wasn't fired.
In a) - c) John is definitely unemployed; in d) and f), in a normal,
noncontrastive reading, John is still gainfully employed (in my usage). The
negative seems only to affect the meaning of the verb. But oddly in e) John is
not still employed and it is difficult to see why agent retention would so
change the 'scope' of the negative. I feel the only way we can make sense of
such matters is by analyzing the system of options available to the speaker;
the meaning is then determined by that choice as much as by the token
chosen. In context, e) would presumably be chosen when it had already been
established that John was fired and the only question that remains is who did
it. Thus the choice among d) - f) is determined by the textual function.
MAKH rightly (but only implicitly) criticizes transformational grammar
for this lack of selectional determination, i.e., for its total abstraction from
 REVIEWS

real contexts of social interaction. (I am not speaking here of the process

speakers go through, i.e., their performance, but of what they know their
choices mean, i.e., their competence. Though these terms are totally alien to
MAKH, he does express a distaste for the transformationalist's extreme
idealistic abstraction from reality). However, I do feel that MAKH under-
rates certain assets of transformational theory that in my mind cannot
reasonably be denied. Transformational theory (via the base component and
the transformations) constitutes an inventory of sentence types; as such it
provides us with two very valuable tools: i) a set of surface structure
constraints on well-formedness; and 2) a heuristic device for probing syntactic
inquiry. These caveats aside, MAKH's comments on variation nicely show
why, for example, Labov's work is theoretically flawed in that he starts with
an invariant base and categorical rules and only adds variable ones.

But this is not to imply that there is no variation in the system. Some
linguists would deny this, and would explain all variation institutionally.
Others (myself among them) would argue that this is to make too rigid a
distinction between the system and the institution, and would contend that
a major achievement of social dialectology has been to show that dialect-
like variation is a normal feature of the speech of the individual, at least in
some but possibly all communities (190) [author's italics].
It's variables, i.e., choices, all the way down.
Anyone with a taste for the organic reality of language acts in social
contexts needs to be acquainted with, and will be greatly stimulated by, the
material in this book; those with a bias towards exclusive concern with the
formalistic vivisection of their own ideal intuition will find little to attract
them. I have strongly urged several of my best friends to read this book.
Reviewed by WILLIAM L. BALLARD
Department of English
Georgia Stale University
(Received 20 February 1979) Atlanta, GA JOJOJ

JOEL SHERZER, An areal-typological study of American Indian languages

north of Mexico. (North-Holland Linguistic Series 20.) North-Holland
Publishing Company, Amsterdam & Oxford; American Elsevier Publish-
ing Company, Inc., New York, 1976. Pp. xiv + 284 + 11 maps. [With a
comparison to Colin Masica, Defining a linguistic area: South Asia
(1976)].
This volume, a considerably revised version of the author's University of
Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation, takes its cue from statements made by
Jakobson and Hymes pointing out the need for systematic world-wide or
region-wide studies of the spatial distribution of linguistic structural proper-
89