Registerial Cartography: Context-based Mapping of Text Types and their Rhetorical-relational Organization

This paper is concerned with one of the three types of variation inherent in language — viz. register variation, or variation in meaning according to context of use. It reports on a long-term research programme designed to map the registers that collectively make up a language using one parameter within the context of use as the starting point — the field of activity characteristic the context in which a text of a given register unfolds. I present a typology/ topology of fields of activity, and go on to show how different types of activity favour different logico-semantic relations in the global organization of texts instantiating different registers. I then also illustrate registerial variation in the lexicogrammatical realization of logico-semantic relations. The part of the long-term research I focus on here is thus concerned with registerial variation relating to the chain of realizations from context (field of activity) to semantics (logico-semantic relations), and from semantics (logico-semantic relations) to lexicogrammatical realizations (with particular attention to congruence, i.e. congruent vs. incongruent realizations). At the end of the paper, I suggest that registerial cartography is an integral part of the development of appliable linguistics, a synthesis approach to language transcending the thesis and antithesis pair of theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics. Inherent variability of language Language is inherently variable, languages are inherently variable: variability is part of the power of language — the power to adapt to socially very diverse and ever-changing contexts, at the same time contributing to the constant change. As languages evolve, they tend to remain stable because they are inherently variable, adapting to changing conditions of use; their stability is of a higher order: languages are metastable. The inherent variability of languages poses a fundamental problem for any theories based on the assumption that languages are uniform and homogeneous; but it was recognized by Halliday and others in Systemic Functional Linguistics from the start of the development of the theory in the early 1960s; Halliday and others continued the Firthian tradition of conceiving of languages as polysystemic, as systems of systems. Firth (1935/ 1957: 29) had warned against conceiving of language in terms of unity: The multiplicity of social roles we have to play as members of a race, nation, class, school, club, as sons, brothers, lovers, fathers, workers, churchgoers, golfers, newspaper readers, public speakers, involves also a certain degree of linguistic specialization. Unity is the last concept that should be applied to language. Unity of language is the most fugitive of all unities whether it be historical, geographical, national, or personal. There is no such thing as une langue une and there has never been. In early work, Halliday and his colleagues developed Firth’s insight into language as a system of variation (e.g. Halliday, 1978: 156), in a sense providing a synthesis of the thesis of the unity of language and Firth’s antithesis, his argument against this kind of unity (cf. Matthiessen, 1993: 222). According to this synthesis, languages are inherently variable, shading into one another just as dialects Copyright 2014 by Christian M.I. M. Matthiessen 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 5–26