Karen Malcolm
What Communication Linguistics has to Offer Genre and Register Research
In Communication Linguistics the words genre
and register are used interchangeably. Genre or register
reflects what we know about, and do with, language in specific situations in a
particular culture. We talk about genre/register as a potential
in terms of the ways it encodes the relationships involved in the situation
(Generic Situation) and culture (Communicator’s Communicating Context). Register
encodes the representational (field), interactional (personal tenor), medium
(mode) and functional relationships at risk in the generic situation, by means
of the systems of language that realize experiential, interpersonal and textual
meanings in the discourse. We know how to encode various registers in particular
situations in a given culture because we have knowledge of both the
relationships and purposes involved in such communicative situations and the
codal resources that are available to encode them. Both types of knowledge,
available to us through personal experience and secondary accounts of such
experience, are stored in our gnostology. In this sense, language is both a
social and cognitive phenomenon. It is socially and culturally appropriate (or
not, as the case may be), and cognitively informed.
Although communication linguists talk of register as
non-instantial, or potential, in terms of the relevant
knowledge available to them as encoders which enables them to interact in a
great variety of communicative situations, they also use register to describe
the discourse in instantial, or actual, communicative
situations. Once they have analyzed a text multi-stratally (lexically,
semologically, syntactically etc.) and tri-functionally (experientially,
interpersonally and textually), they are able to describe the text as an
instance of a particular register with its predictable reoccurring patterns.
When the analyst has completed an analysis of a specific text, she compares it
to the expectations she held of its register, based on those generalizations
stored in her gnostology. This enables her to discuss whether the text under
consideration is a predictable unmarked instance of the register
or an unpredictable marked instance of the register. It also
enables her to refine her understanding of the particular register, which she
subsequently adds to her gnostological awareness for future comparison. Further
analyses increase the sophistication with which the analyst understands the
intricacies of registerial configurations.
The form of analysis introduced by communication
linguists Gregory and Malcolm in the eighties, called phasal analysis, has
proven of great value in probing the linguistic composition of both literary and
non-literary discourse (1981/95). Phases describe the dynamic instantiation of
registerial consistency on a micro-level. Over years of exploration, Malcolm has
used phase and phasal analysis to come up with a replicable and exhaustive
approach to mapping the discoursal structure that results from the continual,
albeit intermittent, fluctuations of such polyregisters as casual conversation
(1985, 1986).
In the last few years she has redefined a traditional
tool with which to investigate complex registers: rhetorical
strategies. In her exploration of literary discourse she found that authors
seemed to alternate passages of description, narration, dialogue and interior
monologue in various ways, and to various degrees, depending on the particular
genre they were encoding e.g. science fiction, romances, thrillers etc.
Multi-stratal and tri-functional analyses reveal that the character of each of
these rhetorical strategies is quite distinct. Such linguistically-specific
strategic identities enable the analyst to see very clearly how an author
develops one register differently than another. Elements of description and
narration, for instance, are kept quite separate (pages apart) in some genres of
literary discourse, while they are intertwined in others, even within the same
sentence.
The value of using rhetorical strategy as a tool to
probe the nature of literary genres has motivated her exploration of the
rhetorical strategies that develop non-literary discourse. There are, of course,
many more rhetorical strategies used in non-literary discourse: comparison,
classification, cause and effect, problem-solution, to name a few. And these are
not necessarily as stylistically distinct, nor as consistent, as those used in
literary fiction. Some seem to operate more in broader structural ways than the
consistent linguistic combinations of the literary strategies. However, it would
appear that rhetorical strategies offer the analyst a valuable tool, in addition
to phase, with which to explore the intricacies of register.
Folia Linguistica, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0165-4004
Volume: 39, 06/2005
Pages: 57 - 74
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