The code model of communication: a powerful - SIL International

2. Model as Metaphor 19
• M. A. K. Halliday (1978)
“‘Code’ became a buzzword in sociolinguistics in the late 1960s and 1970s following
the controversial work of Bernstein (1971, 1973) on the relationship between educational
development and social class” (Wales 1994:577). Bernstein’s two types of code, the
‘elaborated’ and the ‘restricted’, replaced earlier notions of ‘formal’ and ‘public’
language (Bernstein 1971, 1973, 1987). Halliday then developed a theory of social
semiotic much influenced by Bernstein, wherein various types of code are posited. The
codes are “types of meaning or cultural values, generated by the social system, which are
actualized in language varieties and transmitted by different social groups and in different
social situations: semiotic styles, in short” (Wales 1994:577). Halliday writes: 14
In the development of the child as a social being, language has the central role. Language
is the main channel through which the patterns of living are transmitted to him, through which
he learns to act as a member of a ‘society’ … and to adopt its ‘culture’, its modes of thought
and action, its beliefs and its values. … The striking fact is that it is the most ordinary
everyday uses of language … that serve to transmit, to the child, the essential qualities of
society and the nature of social being. (Halliday 1978:9)
In order for language to be a means of learning, it is essential for the child to be able to
encode in language, through words and structures, his experience of processes of the external
world and of the people and things that participate in them. (Halliday 1978:21)
• Andrew Ellis and Geoffrey Beattie (1986)
The code model has also had a strong role within psycholinguistics. For example,
having introduced The Psychology of Language and Communication with examples of
communicative acts, Andrew Ellis and Geoffrey Beattie write:
What do all these examples have in common that qualifies them to be grouped together as
acts involving communication? Can we capture those common features in a working definition
of communication? All of these acts clearly involve the transmission of a signal from one
organism to another. The signal carries information from a transmitter organism to a receiver
organism. Having decoded the signal, the receiver is now in the position to make an
appropriate response should one be required.
Drawing all of these threads together we can formulate a working definition of
communication which asserts that communication occurs when one organism (the transmitter)
encodes information into a signal which passes to another organism (the receiver) which
decodes the signal and is capable of responding appropriately. (Ellis and Beattie 1986:3)
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It should be noted that, in contrast to many linguists employing the code model, Halliday is very interested in the
importance of context. He writes:
Now one important fact about speaking and understanding language is that it always takes place in a
context. We do not simply ‘know’ our mother tongue as an abstract system of vocal signals, or as if it was
some sort of grammar book with a dictionary attached. We know it in the sense of knowing how to use it;
we know how to communicate with other people, how to choose forms of language that are appropriate to
the type of situation we find ourselves in, and so on. All this can be expressed as a form of knowledge: we
know how to behave linguistically. (Halliday 1978:13)