the ISFC39 Proceedings - International Systemic-Functional ...

Papers from the 39th ISFCfacilitating the eating and drinking relegated to a secondary status. This, we would suggest,is defining the ‘dinner party’ notion. As Lewis Carroll said, ‘That which chiefly causes thefailure of a dinner-party, is the running short—not of meat, nor yet of drink, but ofconversation’.Hasan argues that [relation-based] activities are ‘sensitive to the ideological orientation ofthe speaker’ (Hasan, 1999: 289), an ideological orientation which, according to Bernstein isan aspect of code, and which Hasan has shown to be expressed in patterns of semanticbehavior (Hasan, 2009b). Bernstein argues ‘different speech systems or codes create for theirspeakers different orders of relevance and relation’ (Bernstein 1971: 124), and the acquisitionof one’s orientation to relevance and relation is a function of a speaker’s social positioning.What Mansfield is wording in the dialogue of the dinner party is a distillation of features ofthe code associated with the English upper middle class, the language of the people whichBertha aspires to call ‘friends’ (modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets orpeople keen on social questions - just the kind of friends they wanted), because they constitutepart of what it means to ‘have everything’. When the dinner party is considered from theperspective of both tenor and field, the characters’ social positioning is being expressed.Hasan has argued that mode is also responsive to this vector in social experience:‘Social positioning is relevant to the management of mode…the co-presence of interactants alwaysimplies some specific social relation between the social groups to which they are affiliated. Not justany member of a society can be in the same place with just any other member of that society aproposthe same social activity’ (Hasan, 1996: 47).In this light, we ought to note that neither Mary, the maid, nor ‘Nanny’, sit down for thedinner. These characters are, obviously, symbolic of the family’s social position. Socialpositioning, Hasan argues, subsumes social class as well as ‘its far reaching consequences forsocial agents, such as their family, friends, social network, range of expertise, belief systemsand experience of living with others’ (Hasan, 2009c: 28). As such, one’s position with respectto social hierarchy is ever present. Mansfield’s dialogue captures this ‘reciprocity of languageand society’ (Hasan, 2009c: 26).The dinner party is not just one context of situation on display. Viewing context ofsituation as an instantiation of culture is central to (Halliday’s) SFL; Halliday’s clinetheorises the two entities presented by Malinowski. Thus, the social context of the dinnerparty is redolent with meanings, as a bearer of culture. In Mansfield’s representation of it, thecontext of the dinner party becomes amenable to being read as telling us something over andbeyond the playing out of a single instance of human interaction. Thus, context is itself a unitsubject to the principle of ‘double articulation’, or a ‘double layering of symbolisation’, anecessary principle of verbal art which permits some set of represented experiences to serveas ‘extended metaphor’ (Hasan, 1971, etc). Literary texts are the environment, then, wherethe linguistic construal of the values of field, tenor and mode is a kind of ‘raw material’ withthe potential of creating verbal art; yet as ‘values’ they are already social and semiotic. Wecan extend Mukařovský’s analogy here: ‘Stone, metal and pigment enter art as mere naturalphenomenon which gains semiotic nature only in art; they begin to ‘mean’ something.Language is its very essence is already a sign’ (Mukařovský, 1977: 9). Hasan has made thispoint, when arguing that verbal art relies most on ‘two indispensable matrices as its sourcesof energy – the powerful semiotic system of language and the intricately woven fabric of thesemiotically shaped culture’ (Hasan, 2011: xvii; see also Hasan, 1996). In a related claim,Halliday has argued that one effect of sociosemiotic approach is that from a certain point ofview ‘all language is literature’ (emphasis in original), in that all texts ‘involve many ordersof cultural values, both the value systems themselves and the many specific sub-systems thatexist as metaphors for them’ (Halliday, 1977[2002]: 60).125