Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics - Grammar, Text and Discursive Context - Donna R. Miller

Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics - Grammar, Text and Discursive Context - Donna R. Miller

10. Registerial hybridity: Indeterminacy among fields of activity

Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics - Grammar, Text and Discursive Context - Donna R. Miller

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen [+-]
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Christian Matthiessen is Chair Professor and Head of Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. He is the editor and author of a number of books, most recently Introduction to Functional Grammar (co-authored with Michael Halliday, Hodder Arnold 2004), Construing Experience Through Meaning (co-authored with Michael Halliday, et. al., Continuum 2006), Key Terms in Systemic Functional Linguistics (co-authored with Kazuhiro Teruya & Marvin Lam, 2010).
Kazuhiro Teruya [+-]
Kazuhiro Teruya is the author of several systemic functional books: two volumes of description of Japanese, co-authored books on key terms in SFL and a complete guide to systemic functional linguistics, an introduction to SFL in Japanese (edited and co-authored) and an edited series of Matthiessen’s collected works. Previously he taught at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, PRC and at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He was also involved in the Language-based Intelligent Systems project at the Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, in Japan.

Description

Christian Matthiessen and Kazuhiro Teruya clarify their theoretical and analytical position with their very title – Registerial hybridity: indeterminacy among fields of activity – and continue to do so throughout their chapter. They focus on the mixture of functional varieties of language working in diverse institutional domains, making use of a typology of registers that has been created by Matthiessen and other members of The PolySystemic Research Group at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and which are, as they put it, ‘seen “from above”, from the vantage point of context’. Their interpretation of ‘hybridity’ stems from the idea of indeterminacy that was proposed in Halliday and Matthiessen (1999:547--562) as a way of getting at and teasing out ‘fuzziness’, ‘vagueness’, ‘ambivalence’ etc.. Indeed the authors distinguish, discuss and exemplify a wide range of indeterminacy types: ambiguities, overlaps, blends and neutralizations. In closing, they return to the context-based register typology for the purpose of locating the cases of indeterminacy that have been examined within it, and consider still other kinds of register mixing, including satire as employing ‘effective registerial strategies for bringing features of commonly accepted views into critical relief’.

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Citation

Matthiessen, Christian ; Teruya, Kazuhiro. 10. Registerial hybridity: Indeterminacy among fields of activity. Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics - Grammar, Text and Discursive Context. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 205-239 Mar 2016. ISBN 9781781790649. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=24298. Date accessed: 23 Apr 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.24298. Mar 2016

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