Noel,Dirk, 1986 Towards a Functional Characterization of the News of the BBC World Service Antwerp Papers in Linguistics 49 Univeriteit Antwerp
This monograph is a revised version of Noel's licentiate thesis, it is no small article. The word "functional" in the title is significant, it places Noel within the camp of linguists who seek to understand how language is used (to accomplish goals), as opposed to the "structural" linguists, who seek to capture and describe regularities of abstract language, but without concern for actual application.
Noel begins with a very quick survey of approaches to the functional side of language. A number of schools that have approached this structural/functional split, including Saussur, Havránek and the Prague school, the London (neo Firthian) school (Crystal, Davy, and Halliday), the "text linguistics" of Beaugrande and Dressler, the Text-Type linguistics of Lux (who apparently writes only in German), and the tagmemics approach of Kenneth Lee Pike. Of these, Noel prefers to employ the approach of Halliday.
warning: The following account should not be relied upon too closely, as it is my summary of Noel's summary of a large theory. The examples are mine, not Noel's
Halliday defines two sets of categories, the semiotic structure and the "functional" (my label, not his).
| semiotic | |
| |
| field | The social action the participants are doing. |
| tenor | The roles of the participants, both relatively permanent and specific to the situation. Thus eg in a particular dialog A might have the role of teacher, and B of student, but at one moment A could be questioner, and B responding, or vice versa. And A might or might not be superior to B in the "social hierarchy" (think of the prince's tutor). |
| mode | The symbolic status of text within situtation, e.g. didactic, persuasive, descriptive. |
| functions | |
| |
| ideational | To convey content/propositions |
| interpersonal | to establish and maintain social relations |
| textual | "for making links with itself and with features of the situation in which is it used" |
Noel analyzes the BBC news using Halliday's three concepts of Field, Tenor, and Mode. Newsreading is probably about the simplest situtation one can have, since there's no interaction between reader and hearer, and because the style is both impersonal (no references to any attributes of the reader or header) and objective (no evaluations of the events are expressed). Moreover the newsreading is both necessary and sufficient. There is no other accompanying activity (as opposed to, say, chatting in a bar while trying to pick up a date) and without the talk there would be no activity.
Noel also has a brief discussion of Werlich's taxonomy of Text Grammar. According to Noel (p 48) Werlich's categories are
| |
| Descriptive | presents facts in a spatial context |
| Narrative | presents facts in a temporal (and perhaps sometimes also causal?) context |
| Expository | either analysis into components or synthesis of components |
| Argumentative | focuses on the relations between concepts (I suppose the term "argument" is being used not in the sense of debate or disputation, but as in input to a function.?) |
| Instructive | (how-to) focus on composition of future behavior |
There's also a brief nod to Searle's Speech Act theory. In this case, the newsreaders's utterances are mostly classified as Assert statements (when one makes an Assert, one is claiming that at proposition P is true, that one has evidence for P, and that one believes the hearer H does not (or may not) already know P. The essential force of an Assert is that the speaker is committed and accountable for the truth of P.)
It's interesting that at the time Noel wrote this (1986), the RST theory had only 15 relations, and Noel invented a few not in Mann's list.