Towards a grammar of power and solidarity - developments in the linguistics of evaluation, inter-subjectivity and ideological position
10th Euro-International Systemic Functional Workshop (Appraisal session). P.R.R. White, University of Birmingham (p.r.white@bham.ac.uk)
In this paper I will present a remodelling of the semantics of inter-subjective positioning. Within the evolving theory of appraisal, this broad semantic space is termed engagement, and includes values traditionally analysed under the headings of evidentiality (for example Chafe and Nichols 1986), modality (for example Palmer 1986) or hedging (for example Brown and Levinson 1987) - that is to say, values of probability, usuality, reality phase (it seems, apparently), projection and other attributing or speech reporting resources. In addition, engagement includes values not typically included in evidential/modality analyses, namely various resources for negation or denial, causality and counter-expectation.
The remodelling I propose is inspired and shaped by Bakhtin's inter-connected notions of heteroglossia and dialogism (for example Bakhtin 1973 or Bakhtin 1981) - notions which have widely been influential in Critical Discourse Analysis, for example, but which have only relatively recently been taken up within SFL. Jay Lemke's paper 'Interpersonal Meaning in Discourse: Value Orientations' has been particularly influential in this regard. I will return to heteroglossia and dialogism belw.t
This remodelling has been shaped by the specific research objectives of the projects out of which appraisal theory emerged. I has been shaped by projects which shared a concern for what we might term the rhetorical potential of texts - with exploring how texts are organised not only to persuade explicitly but also to influence, and ultimately to naturalise attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions by more indirect, more implicit means. It is also directed to describing and explicating certain patterns or strategies of preference for particular sets of interpersonal values - specifically appraisal values - which had been observed to operate recurrently in particular registerial domains.
Under his notions of heteroglossia and dialogism, 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)
I believe this heteroglossic approach is very much in keeping with the spirit of Halliday's conception of mood as being fundamentally concerned with negotiating meanings and with setting the terms of that negotiation. The heteroglossic approach develops the SFL formulation, however, by emphasising the socially-determined and ultimately ideological status of that negotiation. Under this approach, we reject those analyses which confined themselves to truth-functional, epistemological accounts in favour of a model which understands these meanings in terms of interactions between social positions and points of view.
