Halliday’s model of register revisited and explored

Aziez

2019

RILL

This study aims at investigating gender differences in written texts using Halliday’s framework about the functions of language. Halliday claimed that females’ writing style is, what he described as, ‘involved’ while males’ writing style is more ‘informative’. The results of the study do not confirm Halliday’s assumptions about gender differences in writing. No significant differences were found between males and females in the frequencies of the use of nouns, prepositions, numerals and modifiers. The only significant difference that was found is the use of pronouns, which is not enough to account for the assumptions. This paper also aims to investigate the differences between Arabic and English in the average sentence length, lexical density, and readability. To measure readability, the Gunning-Fog index formula was used. The results show that there was no significant difference between Arabic and English in the average sentence length, but there were significant differences in lexical density and readability.

Section: Writing Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

A Study on Gender and Language Differences in Written Texts

Aziez

2019

RILL

“…Thus, the communicative context will influence the language employed while the language will influence aspects of the context, through the activation of lower levels during linguistic production and the construal of higher levels during linguistic reception (Lukin et al 2011). There are similar notions hypothesised with regards to influence, realisation, and metaredundancy (see Matthiessen et al 2010), but what is vital to establish Halliday and Matthiessen (2013);Eggins (2004) here is the bidirectional interaction that occurs between the contextual and the linguistic strata.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an understanding of contextual features that influence the linguistic formality of British Sign Language users

Rudge

2015

Functional Linguist.

This paper seeks to understand linguistic formality through the identification and measurement of contextual features. Using an adapted sociometric methodology to combine systemic functional linguistics and sign linguistics, a survey identifies the elements of context that have an effect upon the level of linguistic formality employed by British Sign Language users. The responses of 51 participants are analysed in order to ascertain (i) the level of linguistic formality that would be employed in certain communicative scenarios, and (ii) the contextual features of these scenarios that have an influence on linguistic formality. The results obtained from this study posit that there is an overall agreement shared between British Sign Language users when choosing levels of linguistic formality based on broad contextual description alone. The people involved in the communication and their interpersonal relationships tend to be the biggest influence on the level of formality employed, whereas the topic of the interaction appears to show no significant influence upon linguistic formality on its own. This work contributes further evidence to the importance of studying language within communicative contexts and the importance of formality as an influential factor in linguistic production. It is hoped that this will encourage future studies to derive linguistic data of British Sign Language users, or indeed users of other sign languages, to corroborate these findings.

“…Hasan 1973;Halliday 1994); but here I will be concerned with the registerial part of the range -with variation according to the context of use (e.g. Halliday et al 1964;Halliday 1978;andcontributions to Ghadessy 1988, 1993): for a recent review register studies, see Lukin et al (2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Register in the round: registerial cartography

Matthiessen

2015

Functional Linguist.

Registerial cartography is the activity of systematically describing the registers that make up a language — with register in its original sense of a functional variety of a language, i.e. of the adaptation of the meaning-making resources of a language according to context of use. A register map of a language would thus show its composition of registers — of meanings at risk in the various cultural domains that constitute a culture. This variation according to use — register variation — is located along the cline of instantiation between the overall meaning potential of a language operating in the context of culture and the instantiation of this meaning potential unfolding as texts in contexts of situation.In this paper, I will report on a long-term register cartography project concerned with the analysis and description of the registers that collectively constitute the meaning potential of a language. The maps produced as part of the project are based on context in the first instance, since register variation is precisely variation according to context of use. Thus registers can be located within the map according to the “longitude and latitude” of context, i.e. according to the contextual parameters of field, tenor and mode. Here I will focus on a field-based map, more specifically one based on a typology of fields of activity — a characterizations of different goings-on in context. This typology differentiates eight primary types of field of activity, ‘expounding’, ‘reporting’, ‘recreating’, ‘sharing’, ‘doing’, ‘enabling’, ‘recommending’ and ‘exploring’, and their secondary and tertiary subtypes. I will then illustrate how texts operating in contexts characterized by these different fields of activity are organized semantically in terms of logico-semantic (rhetorical) relations (based on a version of RST, Rhetorical Structure Theory), showing that different relations are “at risk” depending on the nature of the field of activity. I will round off the paper by discussing how field-based maps of registers have and can be used in different areas of application.