作者：(英)韩茹凯
出版社：外语教学与研究出版社
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韩茹凯应用语言学自选集试读：
Preface
It is a pleasure to introduce this selection of papers by a distinguished linguist whose published work has extended over the past forty years. Throughout this time, Ruqaiya Hasan has always maintained the essential continuity between theoretical and applied linguistics. She sees linguistics as theory that is in principle designed to be applied—because it is from its application that one gets to try out, to modify and to improve the efficacy of the theory. Hence 'applied linguistics' means using a theory of language to engage with problems of any kind where language is a critical factor. It is a way of thinking about language in all its various contexts of use.
In recent decades the term 'applied linguistics' has often been thought of as equivalent to language in educational contexts—or, even more narrowly, to the teaching of English as a second or foreign language. Professor Hasan has never adhered to this very limited view. Not that she excludes, or undervalues, the application of linguistics to educational problems and practices; far from it. But the linguist's contribution, in her view, is to offer and to formulate an account of language that is theoretically powerful while at the same time capable of being adapted to the needs of the learner; and that means it must be accessible, and acceptable, to the teacher, since it is the teacher who mediates in, and gives structure to, the learning process.
The domain of applied linguistics, in Hasan's work, includes both practical and research applications. The two volumes Continuing Discourse on Language, which she edited together with Christian Matthiessen and Jonathan Webster, illustrate the very broad range of activities where functional linguistics has been usefully applied; and in doing so they bring out the significance of her own contribution, since many of the papers in those two volumes have been written by her former students, those that she taught and supervised during the almost twenty years of her tenure at Macquarie University. These include discussions of teaching grammar in schools, of the linguistic study of literature, of linguistics and scientific method, of analyzing the contexts of language use, of models of discourse, of multimodal texts, and of language disorders and clinical linguistic practice. All these topics are explored by different scholars who were once students of Ruqaiya Hasan.
In addressing topics such as these, both in training other scholars and in pursuing her own research, Hasan has had to address a variety of issues all of which will be seen reflected in the present volume. One of these issues is the importance of everyday talk, both in developing a child's mode of learning, in the home and subsequently in the school, and in establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships at all ages and all levels in society. Another issue is the relation between text and context: between what is said, or written, and the verbal and material environment within which it is produced and interpreted. Understanding the nature of that relationship, in Hasan's view, is fundamental to the successful deployment of linguistic theory in almost all its domains of application. A third issue is that of the nature of text itself. The underlying system of language is manifested, or instantiated, in the form of text; but a text is not simply an array of interconnected sentences; it is characterized by the two features of structure and texture: structure in the sense of configurations of functional elements selected from the GSP ('Generalized Structure Potential') of the register in question, and texture in the sense of a semantic profile—an orientation towards a particular mode of meaning and the forms of expression from which the meanings are to be extracted.
For Hasan, the analysis of a text, or discourse analysis as it is now generally known, is not an application of linguistics; it is a necessary and indeed central component of 'doing linguistics'， and as such it is likely to have a place in most of the activities that would be thought of as exemplars of applied linguistics. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the linguistic study of literature, traditionally known under the name 'stylistics'. Hasan likes to characterize literature by Mukařovský's term 'verbal art'， and three of her studies in this field make up the final section of the present volume.
She brings to the study of verbal art a unique blend of literary and linguistic experiences. Her own intellectual formation began with the study of English literature in Pakistan, first as a postgraduate student and then as a university teacher, at different colleges of the University of the Punjab, Lahore. Moving to the U．K. she took up linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, where she did her Ph.D. in linguistic stylistics, undertaking a detailed textbased comparison of the work of two contemporary English prose writers, William Golding and Angus Wilson; and she has continued to carry out studies of different writers in English poetry and prose. But at the same time she has always cherished the poetry of her own language, Urdu, and has recently been analyzing some of the work of an outstanding twentieth century poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, of whom she is a great admirer. This background gives her a manydimensioned approach to the study of verbal art: combining both literary and linguistic ways of thinking, about both mother tongue and second language literary texts, and with the awareness of both European (especially English) and Asian (especially Persian) criteria of evaluation and canons of criticism.
As a co-author of Cohesion in English, a study of what makes a text in English hang together, which was originally published in 1976 and is still maintained in print, Ruqaiya Hasan has always been very conscious of the role of cohesion—semantic relations above the sentence, construed in the various patterns of grammar and lexis—in contributing to the overall texture of the text. In using the categories of cohesion as a resource for discourse analysis in various fields of applied linguistics, she found that she needed to extend the scope of cohesion analysis so as to include the type of regularities in experiential meaning, especially (but not limited to) patterns of transitivity in the clause. She referred to this as 'cohesive harmony'， and it has proved to be extremely valuable in bringing out the essential character of a text—the source of energy, so to speak, for its logogenetic progression.
Much of the impetus for this aspect of her work came from her close association with one of the outstanding sociologists of the twentieth century, Basil Bernstein. Bernstein was Professor of the Sociology of Education in the University of London, and in the 1960s he was conducting research into the nature and causes of educational failure, at a time when this could no longer be brushed aside as an inherent deficiency in some children's aptitude for learning. Bernstein had identified language as a major contributory factor, showing that there was a certain section of the population where the modes of verbal interaction were such as to militate against successful learning in an educational context—in other words, they were not oriented towards the linguistic demands of the school. But not being a linguist, Bernstein lacked the specialized understanding of language to be able to formulate the theory in sufficiently explanatory terms. Hasan worked with Bernstein for several years, and was able to develop her own ideas about language—specifically about lexicogrammar and semantics—to the point where she could transform Bernstein's insights into a testable hypothesis about a particular kind of variation in language, that which Bernstein referred to as 'code' (explained in his terms as 'sociolinguistic coding orientation')．
The central concept here is that of variation: a language as an inherently variable system. This has always been familiar to linguists (and everyone else) in the sense of dialect: dialectal variation is variation among different sublanguages which are typically mutually intelligible and share the same semantic system. The distinction between 'different languages' and 'different dialects' is blurred, and is often drawn on political and/or ideological grounds: thus Spanish and Portuguese are said to be different languages, while Pekingese and Cantonese, which are much further apart—more like Portuguese and French—are said to be different dialects (of the Chinese language). Work in Britain in the 1950s had led towards the recognition of another kind of linguistic variation, variation in 'register'— that is, variation according to the functional context in which the language is being used. All the variations that speakers become aware of in level of formality, in the kind and degree of technicality, or in the relative social status and social distance among interactants, would constitute variation in register. Whereas with different dialects, the speakers were using their language to do essentially all the same things, with each different register the language was being used for doing something recognizably different.
The traditional definition of a dialect was of course regional: it was a variety of language that was spoken in a particular locality. But class societies—those with a clearly delineated social structure—also evolve social dialects, varieties spoken by different social classes. Bernstein's concept of code was not a form of social dialect; but it was being widely misunderstood as if it was. Hasan recognized that the critical distinction between code and social dialect needed to be made clear if the notion of variation in language was to be of any value to educators, and other workers in applied linguistics; she sawthat language had to be understood to be an inherently variable system, with variation built in as a central element in a general linguistic theory. Labov's work in variation theory was coming into prominence at just this time, and provided sufficient underpinning for the conception of dialect as a socioregional phenomenon in complex urban societies. But Labov failed to take account of coding orientation; in fact, he explicitly ruled it out, because he had no place for variation at the semantic level, being convinced that the patterns of meaning remained the same across all populations within a speech community. Hasan sawthat they don't.
Hasan had read widely in sociolinguistics, and also in theoretical aspects of sociology; she had found sources of insight in Whorf, in Malinowski, and most of all perhaps in Vygotsky. With this background, together with her own ongoing research in systemic functional linguistics, she was able to develop Bernstein's code into a major research tool, introducing the category of 'semantic variation' as the critical organizing concept. The principle behind semantic variation is this: different groups within a society may select different ways of meaning in what are otherwise identical contexts of situation. The 'groups' in question might be men versus women, or rural versus urban, or working class versus middle class, or younger folk versus older folk; they are speaking the same language, even the same dialect, but they deploy its semantic resources in different ways. In a major research project at Macquarie University in the 1980s, using statistical techniques of principal components analysis, Hasan found that there were highly significant differences in the semantic patterns favored by a population of Sydney mothers interacting with their threeandahalfyearold children: in some contexts the differences were between mothers of sons and mothers of daughters (that is, there was considerable variation between the ways mothers talked to boys and the way they talked to girls), and in other contexts the differences were between mothers from the working class and mothers from the middle class (with class status defined in terms of the kind of job held by the main breadwinner of the family). Following these children into their first year of schooling, she could already begin to see how these different habits of meaning in the home were reflected in the educational performance of their children: some children came prepared to meet the demands of learning in school; others did not.
The papers in this volume illustrate the many sides of Ruqaiya Hasan's interests and concerns with language. If there is one motif that runs throughout these chapters, it is this: that in linguistics, as in any other field of scientific study, successful application will always depend on combining accurate observation and description with a robust, taskoriented theory. In other words, there have to be some ideas, and some methods, available for being applied. But the movement of ideas goes both ways: the theory will continue to evolve with the insights deriving from its application—to problems of all kinds, both practical and theoretical, where the critical factor is whatever phenomenon it is that is under focus, which in the case of Hasan's work is language. This means language in any of its multiple aspects and functions, but particularly language as the predominant mode of interaction among human beings as denizens of society. We are obsessively meaningmaking creatures, and the task of the linguist, in any of the fields of application, is to explain how we do it—how we make meaning, collectively and individually, or, in one of Ruqaiya Hasan's favorite quotations from Firth, how we use language to live.
M. A. K. Halliday
Sydney
March, 2011A Timeless Journey: On the Past andFuture of Present KnowledgePreamble
I have been asked to write an account of my intellectual life by way of introducing the chapters in this volume. On the face of it, this should have been easy: after all, having undertaken the work deliberately, even the most modest of us would admit to knowing its history better than that of any one else's work. It should, therefore, be simple to say why I chose the directions I did; and, with some effort, it might be possible to even distance myself enough from my work to speculate dispassionately on its impact either at the present moment or possibly some time in the future. But these things simply appear simple; the fact is that the history of human knowledge, no matter how humble, neither has a simple beginning nor a simple route to development: the humbler the knowledge, the truer this observation. Unless one is able to work from a reasonably detailed diary—and I was never a diarist—one is somewhat liable to seeing the remembered past with the eyes of present preoccupations, adjusting events with a view to positions that are favored here and now; and so far as the present is concerned, it seems to possess a protean quality—you can make of it what you will —which means that ideas about the future of present knowledge are likely to rest on somewhat shaky grounds. Faced with these realizations, only one possible solution presents itself to me, and that is: leaving the issue of any impact of my work aside, I should turn to the context of this volume searching for a starting point for what led me to work of the kind included here and continue the story from that point. This, most probably, will not prevent the present from coloring the events recounted in this 'autobiography'， but at least it will avoid having to say anything about the usefulness of 'the deeds done' either now or in the future.
From this perspective, the most important element of that context is surely the use of linguistics in attempting to solve linguistic problems. This thought takes me to September 1960 when I first arrived in Edinburgh to do a postgraduate diploma in Applied Linguistics. At that time I had only a vague idea of linguistics as something that might help in solving problems which concern doing something where language plays a central role. As a teacher of English language and literature in Pakistan I had naturally encountered some of these—which is why I was grateful to the British Council for enabling me to do some linguistics at Edinburgh. Two problems engaged me particularly at that time: one, how to teach English to nonnative speakers so as to enable them to cope successfully with what we now call 'curriculum genres' following Christie (1987a, 1987b); and, secondly, how to conceptualize the 'teaching of literature' at the university level so as to enable the students to produce their own reasoned analysis of a literary work; this was essential if they were to free themselves from simply following renowned critics, whose unquestioned reputation for taste rendered their literary taste unquestionable. As it happened, to qualify for a Diploma in Applied Linguistics, I focused on the problem of teaching literature for my independent research: to me the learning of English as a second language was simply a politically imposed requirement—whereas literature had seemed more important—socially, morally, and pedagogically.Challenging linguistics with literature
As an academic, this was the most important decision of my life. I had, of course, no inkling of the many aspects of language which I would have to explore from a state of considerable ignorance in pursuit of this problem, so at that stage, the complexities of the problem seemed not very complex. This was perhaps a stroke of luck, for, otherwise, I might have been intimidated from rushing in quite so readily. Plunging headlong into my chosen problem—how to teach literature to enable the learner to produce an independent reasoned 'reading' of some existing work in literature—opened unimagined
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