Under the model developed here, however, I adopt an approach to these values which gives a greater role to the audience, or at least to the way texts can be seen to negotiate meanings with actual and potential audiences. As well, I construe meaning making in social rather than individualised terms and will not give priority to ideational content and its associated truth value.
In this I am reflecting general systemic functional assumptions about language and language use. I am, however, more specifically influenced by Bakhtin's notions of `heteroglossia' and `intertextuality' (1973, 1981, 1986) Under these notions, Bakhtin insists upon the intertextual nature of all texts, observing that all texts necessarily reference, respond to, and to greater or lesser extents incorporate other texts both actual and prospective.
The desire to make one's speech understood is only an abstract aspect of the speaker's concrete and total speech plan. Moreover, any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe. And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances-his own and others'-with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another (builds on them, polemicizes with them, or simply presumes that they are already known to the listener). Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances. (Bakhtin 1986: 69)
Thus we might say that no utterance is an island, as it were.
The heteroglossic perspective emphases the role of language in positioning speakers and their texts within the heterogeneity of social positions and world views which operate in any culture. All texts reflect a particular social reality or ideological position and therefore enter into relationships of greater or lesser alignment with a set of more or less convergent/divergent social positions put at risk by the current social context. Thus every meaning within a text occurs in a social context where a number of alternative or contrary meanings could have been made, and derives its social meaning and significance from the relationships of divergence or convergence into which it enters with those alternative meanings. As Lemke observes, in his interpretation of Bakhtin,
Lexical choices are always made against the background of their history of use in the community, they carry the `freight' of their associations with them, and a text must often struggle to appropriate another's word to make it its own. (Lemke 1992: 85)
Thus texts are `heteroglossic' - they directly address or at least implicitly acknowledge a certain array of more or less convergent and divergent socio-semiotic realities. They address those alternative realities as expressed in previous texts and as they are expected to be realised in future texts. As a consequence, every meaning within a text occurs in a social context where a number of alternative or contrary meanings could have been made, and derives its social meaning and significance from the relationships of divergence or convergence into which it enters with those alternative meanings.
(This notion of heteroglossia is also reflected in Foucault's account of intertextuality. Thus Foucault states, `there can be no statement that in one way or another does not reactualize others' - Foucault 1972: 98 /d. This notion is also fundamental to Fairclough's analysis of intertextuality and orders of discourse. See for example Fairclough 1989, 1992)
When informed by this view of text as heteroglossic, our approach to these linguistic resources will be rather different from the individualistic approach exemplified by Lyons' definition. Rather than seeing these values as necessarily oriented to coding a speaker's individual position or attitude, I will see them as operating to reflect the process of interaction or negotiation within a text between alternative socio-semiotic positions.
Under the individualistic (what Lemke terms `social interactionist') model, a modal value such as `maybe' or `I think that ..' is seen as acting to indicate uncertainty or lack of commitment to, or confidence in the truth values by the individual speaker - it is seen as epistemological, as a reflex of the speaker's current state of knowledge with respect to some propositional content. Under the heteroglossic perspective, rather than necessarily reflecting the speaker's state of knowledge, it can additionally or alternatively be seen as signalling that the meanings at stake are subject to heteroglossic negotiation. It may have no connection at all with doubt or vagueness, being used, instead, to acknowledge the contentiousness of a particular proposition, the willingness of the speaker to negotiate with those who hold a different view, or the deference of the speaker for those alternative views.
The terms of that negotiation will vary according to the context of situation and, in particular, the social relationships between speaker and audience. Thus, within academic discourse, the speaker may use a modal of probability to acknowledge the contentiousness or novelty of a given meaning, thereby coding a willingness to recognise and negotiate with divergent heteroglossic positions over that meaning. Such functionality is exemplified below by an extract from an article in which the writer seeks to advance the novel, contentious proposition that Marx was a precursor of contemporary anthropological theories of culture. In the course of this opening paragraph, the writer goes from characterising the proposition as extremely improbable, to asserting it forcibly. The movement is not from actual doubt, vagueness or epistemological unreliability to certainty. It is a rhetorical move designed to deal with the novelty and contentiousness of the author's primary proposition. (I have firstly underlined the various wordings which characterise various meanings in these modal terms, and then the final affirmative statement, where the author declares his position without qualification.)
This consideration of Marx as a precursor, though a largely unacknowledged one, of the modern anthropological theory of culture is situated on somewhat improbable terrain. It lies in a no-man's-land between two rather unlikely propositions: first, that there can be anything much new to be said about Marx; and second, that, having been enthusiastically cited now for a century by those who would entirely conflate human history with natural history and culture, into its occasioning circumstances, Marx had anything at all of value to say to his contemporaries - still less has anything to offer us about culture. Yet such a consideration is neither absurd nor untimely, as Raymond Williams' recent discussion cited above demonstrates. (Kessler 1987: 35)
In other contexts, the same general semantic resources may be used towards rather different rhetorical ends. For example modals of probability may function to enable speakers to avoid indicating a firm preference for one heteroglossic position, not because they entertain genuine epistemological doubt over the issue or because they wish to show deference to alternative positions, but because they choose, for whatever interpersonal reasons, to resist being positioned in this way. The following extract from the stage play, Educating Rita, illustrates such a strategy. (The character Rita is a mature age university student from a working class background. Frank is her university tutor. The pair are engaged in a one-to-one tutorial session.)
Rita: That's a nice picture, isn't it Frank?
Frank: Uh yes, I suppose it is.
Rita: It's very erotic.
Frank: Actually I don't think I've looked at this picture in 10 years, but, yes, it is, I suppose so.
Rita: Well, there's no suppose about it.
The extract demonstrates a clash in the interpersonal styles (what we might term codes, following Bernstein 1970) between Rita's monoglossic and Frank's heteroglossic rhetorical strategy. Presumably the audience doesn't interpret Frank's lines as indicating that the character has a great deal invested epistemologically or interpersonally in the painting. Rather, the Frank character here seems to be using values of probability (I suppose, I don't think etc), not out of either doubt, deference or a desire to save Rita's `face', but as almost a passive aggressive tool for insisting upon his heteroglossic mode and for denying or seeking to suppress the Rita character's monoglossic mode. Rita, of course, is alive to this strategy and confronts it through what amounts to a rejection of heteroglossia in this particular context - `Well, there's no suppose about it.' (See Martin to appear to appear/c for an extended discussion of interpersonal positioning in Educating Rita.)
A crucial feature of these values, therefore, is their context-dependent polysemous functionality. In a sense, this multi-functionality can be seen as analogous to that of the smile as a communicative device. In one context, a smile may act or be read as genuinely signalling a mental state of happiness or pleasure in the person smiling. In other contexts the smile is a politeness marker, exchanged between acquaintances as they pass in the corridor, for example, as an indicator of recognition or acknowledgement, and thus carrying no affectual value at all. Similarly, a modal value of probability may, in one context, signal genuine epistemological doubt in the speaker. Equally, it may have no connection at all with doubt, being used, rather to acknowledge the contentiousness of a particular proposition, the willingness or unwillingness of the speaker to negotiate with those who hold a different view, or the deference the speaker wishes to display for those alternative views.
From this Bakhtinian perspective, therefore, I characterise as too narrowly-based those formulations which would construe such values exclusively in negative terms as `hedges', as deviations from `straightforward' factuality, or as points of epistemological unreliability. We should, rather, see them as acting to open up, or to extend the semantic potential available to the text - in some contexts enhancing the possibility of a continued heteroglossic negotiation between divergent positions, and in others acting to forestall or fend off that negotiation.
