Ruqaiya Hasan
Encyclopedia
Ruqaiya Hasan is a professor of linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 who has taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England, America and Australia. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career she has researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues.

Biography

Hasan took her undergraduate degree at the University of Allahabad, in 1953, in English literature, education and history. From 1954 to 1956, she was a lecturer at the Training College for Teachers of the Deaf, in Lahore, in Pakistan. In 1958, she completed an M.A. in English Literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 at the University of the Punjab
University of the Punjab
University of the Punjab , colloquially known as Punjab University, is located in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. The University of the Punjab is the oldest and biggest University of Pakistan. The University of the Punjab was formally established with the convening of the first meeting of its...

. From 1959 to 1960 she was Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Lahore's Queen Mary College. With a British Council scholarship, Hasan went to Edinburgh where she completed a postgraduate diploma at the University of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

 in Applied Linguistics
Applied linguistics
Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems...

. In 1964 she completed her Ph.D in Linguistics, also at the University of Edinburgh. The title of her thesis was 'A Linguistic Study of Contrasting Features in the Style of Two Contemporary English Prose Writers'. The writers were Angus Wilson
Angus Wilson
Sir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson, CBE was an English novelist and short story writer. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and later received a knighthood for his services to literature.-Biography:Wilson was born in Bexhill, Sussex, England, to...

 and William Golding
William Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies...

. She drew on Halliday's early work, in particular, his 'Categories of the Theory of Grammar' paper, which had been published in 1961.

Between 1964 and 1971 she held various research fellowships, first with the Nuffield Foreign Languages and Teaching Materials Project, at the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...

, where she directed the Child Language Survey. Between 1965 and 1967 she was Research Fellow with the Nuffield Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching, at University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...

. From 1968 to 1971, she worked in the Sociological Research Unit, with Basil Bernstein
Basil Bernstein
Basil Bernstein was a British sociologist and linguist, known for his work in the sociology of education.-Biography:...

, where she directed the Nuffield Research Project on Sociolinguistic Aspects of Children's Stories. Following this she went to the Department of Linguistics and Anthropology, at Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

 in Illinois, before returning to England and taking up a position as Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, at the University of Essex
University of Essex
The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...

. She migrated to Australia in 1976, and was appointed as Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University
Macquarie University
Macquarie University is an Australian public teaching and research university located in Sydney, with its main campus situated in Macquarie Park. Founded in 1964 by the New South Wales Government, it was the third university to be established in the metropolitan area of Sydney...

. She retired from Macquarie in 1994 as Emeritus Professor. She has held numerous visiting appointments in America, Kenya, Japan, Singapore, Denmark and Hong Kong.

Contributions to linguistics

Hasan has worked in her over 50 year career in linguistics around a number of central concerns, but all have set out from a basic conviction concerning the 'continuity from the living of life right down to the morpheme'.

Her early PhD research began her long interest in language and verbal art. In the 1960s, she worked at the Sociolinguistic Research Centre with Basil Bernstein, on issues concerning the relation of language and the distribution of forms of consciousness. This engagement spawned both her later work on Semantic Variation, and provided the impetus and data for her early studies of what underpins text unity, in her terms: texture and text structure. in 1976, with M.A.K. Halliday she published what remains the most comprehensive discussion of cohesion in English. In their further co-authored book, Language Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective, Hasan sets out the inter-relationships of texture and text structure (i.e. her notion of "generic structure potential" or "GSP").

In all these endeavours, language as a social semiotic (following the account of language developed by M.A.K. Halliday over many years) has served as the point of departure.

The specific type of connection she sees between language and social context has meant her work has been concerned with many important problems in linguistics, such as the relations between language and culture, language and social class, language and learning [see list of Collected Works below]. What distinguishes her contribution is that she has worked on many of these larger questions at the same time that she attends to matters of detailed linguistic description.

She divides linguistic theories into two categories: 'externalist' or "internalist". She applies the term 'externalist' to those theories where language is assigned a 'subsidiary role' in the creation of meaning. In such theories, language plays no role in bringing about the existence of the thing to be understood or expressed. In the externalist approach, 'language is reduced to a name device: it becomes a set of 'names' that label pre-existing things, properties, events, actions, and so on. It is a condition of naming that the phenomena should exist and be recognisable as having specific identities quite independent of the 'names' that the speakers of the language choose to give them.'. She has urged linguists to abandon the externalist view. She argues instead for a linguistic model ‘that is capable of doing two seemingly disparate things at once: first, we need to show that meanings are the very artefact of language and so are internal to it; and secondly, that these linguistically created meanings nonetheless pertain to our experience of the world around us and inside us’.

Studies in context

Hasan has followed but extended the model of linguistic context set out by Michael Halliday going back to the 1960s, in which he proposed that linguistic context must be seen as a 'semiotic construct' with three essential parameters: field, tenor and mode Hasan has argued that context is essential to resolving Saussure's dichotomy of 'langue' and 'parole'.

Hasan makes a theoretical distinction between 'relevant context' [aspects of context encapsulated in the text], and what she called in 1973 the 'material situational setting'. 'Relevant context' she defines as 'that frame of consistency which is illuminated by the language of text' and 'a semiotic construct'. Since relevant context is a 'semiotic construct', she argues that it should be 'within the descriptive orbit of linguistics'. Further, since systemic functional linguistics
Systemic linguistics
Systemic functional linguistics is an approach to linguistics that considers language as a particular kind of system, a social semiotics system. It was developed by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of system from his teacher, J R Firth...

 is a social semiotic theory of language, then it is incumbent on linguists in this tradition to 'throw light on this construct'.

Hasan has critiqued the typical application of Halliday's terms 'field', 'tenor' and 'mode' by systemic linguists, on the basis that the terms have been applied as if their meaning and place in the theory was self evident. She has argued for the application of the system network as a mechanism for the systematic description of the regularities across diverse social contexts.

Studies in semantic variation

While working at Macquarie University in Sydney, Hasan undertook ten years of research into the role of everyday language in the formation of children's orientation to social context. She adopted the term Semantic Variation to describe her findings from this research, a term first coined by Labov and Weiner. Having proposed the concept, the authors explicitly rejected the possibility of semantic variation as a sociolinguistic concept, except as possibility a function of age.

Hasan's work is an empirical investigation of semantic variation. Her findings represent linguistic correlates of Basil Bernstein
Basil Bernstein
Basil Bernstein was a British sociologist and linguist, known for his work in the sociology of education.-Biography:...

's conception of 'coding orientation'. Hasan collected 100 hours of naturally occurring discourse in families across distinct social locations. She used the terms 'higher autonomy professional' and 'lower autonomy professional' to distinguish social locations, the latter describing professionals who have discretion over the way their working time is organized, as distinct from those whose time is at the discretion of others higher up in a workplace hierarchy. Her findings are significant and substantial, and are set out in Hasan 2009, the second volume of her collected papers.

Studies in verbal art

Hasan's studies of verbal art are a linguistic extension of the Prague School, and in particular the work of Jan Mukařovský
Jan Mukarovský
Jan Mukařovský was a Czech literary and aesthetic theorist.He was professor at the Charles University of Prague. He is well known for his association with early structuralism as well as with the Prague Linguistic Circle, and for his development of the ideas of Russian formalism...

. According to Hasan, of the Prague School linguists Mukařovský has produced “the most coherent view of the nature of verbal art and its relation to language”. Mukařovský argued that poetic language cannot be characterised by reference to a single property of language. The aesthetic function is instead a mode of utilizing the properties of language. From Mukařovský, Hasan takes the notion of foregrounding
Foregrounding
Foregrounding is the practice of making something stand out from the surrounding words or images. It is “the ‘throwing into relief’ of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language.” The term was first associated with Paul Garvin in the 1960s, who used it as a...

.
]
The process of foregrounding, or making salient, depends on contrast: an aspect of the text’s language, or a set of textual features, can only be foregrounded against a patterning which becomes the ‘background’. This is the notion of a figure and ground relationship. Foregrounding, for Hasan, is contrast with respect to the norms of the text. However the idea of contrast is not self-evident. We need to be able to specify under what conditions a pattern in language is significant such that we consider it to be foregrounded, and, therefore, can attribute to it some of the responsibilities for conveying the text’s deeper meanings.

A pattern draws attention to itself, i.e. is foregrounded, when it displays consistency. There are two aspects to this consistency: consistency in terms of its ‘semantic drift’ (Butt 1983) and consistency in terms of its textual location. ‘Semantic drift’ refers to the manner in which an ensemble of features take the reader toward “the same general kind of meaning” (Hasan, 1985a: 95). Consistency of textual location refers not to any gross notion of location, such as every other paragraph or every five lines. Rather, consistency of textual location refers to “some significant point in the organisation of the text as a unity” (ibid: 96). The process of attending to the foregrounded patterns in the text is the means by which we proceed from simple statements about the language to an explication of the ‘artness’ of the text.

Ultimately, Hasan describes the patterning of language patterns as 'symbolic articulation'. 'Symbolic articulation' is the means by a process of 'second order semiosis' emerges, that is the process by which 'one order of meaning acts as metaphor for a second order of meaning”.

Selected works

  1. Hasan, Ruqaiya, 2005. Language, Society and Consciousness. Volume One in the Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan. Edited by Jonathan Webster. London: Equinox.
  2. Hasan, Ruqaiya. 2009. Semantic Variation: Meaning in Society and Sociolinguistics. Volume Two in the Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan. Edited by Jonathan Webster. London: Equinox.
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