Critical Theory and Systemic Linguistics: Textualizing the Contact Zone

FRANCIS J. SULLIVAN

In the wake of postmodernism, composition studies' attempts to import various forms of critical theory for the analysis and transformation of discursive practices have been radically problematized. The postmodernist insistence on indeterminacy and de-centering-the play of difference-in the production of both meaning and subjectivity has cast doubt on the ability of projects such as that of the Frankfurt School or that of Foucault to address issues of agency and trans formative discursive practice. Indeed, it can be argued that these critical projects have raised the very issues that have undermined them. Foucault's analysis of the role of power in the production of discursive formations renders study of, much less intervention into, those formations impossible. Since power is not centered but dispersed, there are too many, and yet no, points of entry. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the inexorable logic of domination leads to only one result: the "servant remains enslaved in body and soul; the master regresses" (35). Examination of inequities in social relations either valorizes victimhood or retreats into identity politics. The possibility of agency is rendered a moot point.

This difficulty has especially problematized the place of linguistics, particularly the systemic variants of functional linguistics, within composi­tion studies. 1 Indeed, over the last five years, major scholars such as Crowley and Faigley have argued that the advent of postmodernism has eliminated any possible role within composition for linguistics. Given the fact that, since the work by Emig, Britton, and Gere in the early Seventies, composition studies has relied on the social constructionist perspective underlying func­tionallinguistics, the claims of Crowley and Faigley seem astonishing. It is not the case that linguistics in composition has died out. The last ten years have seen publication of articles and bOOk-length collections on such topics as linguistic methods for studying written texts (Cooper and Greenbaum; Colomb and Williams; Witte); academic texts and discourse (Jolliffe; Nash; Swales; MacDonald; Halliday and Martin; Barton); writing in the workplace (Odell and Goswami; Couture; Spilka; Parker and Campbell); the develop­ment of literacy in schools (Cope and Kalantzis); and the development of composition studies as a field (Nystrand, Greene, and Wiemelt). And one of

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the most popular (now in its fourth edition) textbooks on writing profession­al and academic prose, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (Williams), has been redesigned in a more academic version for the University of Chicago Press.

How do we explain this contradiction between the conclusion of Crowley and Paigleyand the veritable explosion of work in the very area whose demise they lament? Although some of the work cited above dismisses the questions posed by postmodernism and the concerns of critical projects (Williams, Colomb and Williams, Barton, MacDonald), and other work simply ignores those questions and concerns (Parker and campbell), a significant amount argues explicitly for the value of functional linguistics as a means of address­ing the issues of post modernism in pursuing critical projects (Couture, Cope and Kalantzis, Pan~ and Stuart (in Spilka), and Nystrand, Greene, and Wiemelt). Nystrand, Greene, and Wiemelt, for instance, claim that "recent work in linguistics, discourse studies, and literary criticism-especially re­search inspired by Halliday and Bakhtin," promises to restore linguistics' central place in composition studies (272). The recent collection of work edited by Cope and Kalantzis elaborate that argument. Utilizing an ap­proach to genre as "social action," the chapters offer an approach to text and discourse analysis and to pedagogical practice in which the principles of systemic linguistics provide an explicit and critical framework for reflective practice in the "literacies of power" (63).

To explain this contradiction, I suggest, we must examine the relation of systemic linguistics to the issues raised by critical projects and the difficulties posed by postmodernism to addressing those issues. Both systemic linguis­tics and theories of critique raise the same general question: how can we account for the ways that the organization of text features produces meaning and social identity? And both elaborate a similar kind of response: because of the social functions or purposes which that organization serves.2 Critical scholars' abandonment of linguistics results from conflicts in the focus of the two projects. Crudely put, whereas systemic linguistics problematizes the organization of text features in terms of their function in contexts of use, critical theory problematizes the organization of contexts in which those features are used. It is this complementarity that simultaneously divides systemic linguistics from critical projects and offers the possibility for their re-unification.

Critical Projects, Social Constructionism, Systemic Linguistics To clarify the dynamiCS ofthis conflict, I want to situate it within the broader context of composition studies as a scholarly field. Within a postmodernist framework, scholars such as Crowley and Paigley have continued to address the ways "textuality, the meaning and value of a text, is created in the reciprocal social relations that writers and readers construct in their lan­guage" (Brodkey 96). They explicitly connect this concern to those critiques

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of schools that implicate them in the reproduction of social inequity (Giroux; Aronowitz and Giroux). That is to say, these scholars examine whether, and ifso, how, social relations constructed in discourse undermine the democrat­ic goals of society . Understanding links between discursive practices, includ­ing those in the classroom, and larger social issues thus becomes central to the field's research and pedagogy. As Faigley articulates it, composition studies have, for the most part,

abandoned the modernist privileging of individual expression and mental processes and have turned to the examination of meanings and practices linked with certain discourses that are historically produced. This attention to the politics of writing has led to examinations of what systems of power are implicated in particular discursive practices and what exclusions are necessary to maintain these practices and meanings.

. (Fragments 22)

Given this definition of composition's goals, the value oflinguistics has been decidedly low. Because composition's use of linguistics largely favored formal models of generative grammar and text linguistics, scholars using linguistics were simply unable to confront the ideologicalissues of power and subjectivity that have become central to the field.

Despite this inability, the place of systemic linguistics in composition studies is not so clear cut. On the one hand, it is the road not taken. Had composition studies taken that route, Faigley suggests, systemic linguistics might well have led the field to its current concerns for questions of agency and subjectivity. The interactionist nature of systemiC linguistics implies a notion of ideology quite consistent with that developed by Foucault and a notion of discourse consistent with that of Bakhtin. On the other hand, because systemic linguistics also relies so heavily on formalization, Faigley remains pessimistic that it can address the indeterminacy of meaning inher­ent in postmodernist perspectives on language use. He fears that even critical linguistics will be unable to overcome its tendency to reify either language use orsocialcontext. Consequently, despite the substantial body of work that has proceeded from it, linguistics is "no longer a major contributor of ideas" to composition studies (80). For composition studies to connect writing to issues of social justice, Faigley concludes, it must instead turn to those, such as Lyotard, who advocate a notion of justice as situated practice that does not appeal to external criteria of the "true" (235).

Clearly, if a critical systemic linguistics is to explicate the ways that fine text structure functions in specific contexts of use, it must address the issue of reification. However, the source of the difficulty lies, not in systemiC linguistics, but in the unexamined ideology of social constructionism, an ideology that underlies the methodology employed by much, though not all, of the recent work in systemic linguistics. Though Faigley in "Competing Theories of Process" has argued that the emphasis by social constructionism on the role of discourse community is inherently poststructuralist, more recent examinations remind us that its reliance on community as a normative

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term simultaneously reifies the function of linguistic features and the orga­nization of social context (Lyon; Clarke; Kent; Ewald; Nystrand; Nystrand, Greene, and Wiemelt). Lyon, for instance, argues persuasively that the concept of community developed within composition studies by those such as Bruffee and Bartholomae has led to a "totalizing model of community and a static sense of discourse," because they have focused only on consensus and conventions as normative notions (281). Little orno attention is given, in her view, to the ways in which either students or practicing professionals manip­ulate conventions to achieve influence or to dissent.

Consequently, systemiC work employing social constructionist assump­tions is directly at odds with work proceeding from theories of social critique. Specifically, whereas constructionist work in systemic linguistics presumes a context always already organized toward the achievement of consensus and cooperation, critical theories examine the social uses of ambiguity and conflict necessary to maintain and disrupt cooperation and consensus. Whereas systemiC linguistics too often presumes that conventions explicitly reflect that achievement, critical theories explore how those conventions can deflect it. Whereas systemiC linguistics, as a structuralist project, examines what is explicitly said and done in a text, critical theories in a poststructuralist project examine the unsaid (Nystrand, Greene, and Wiemelt). Indeed, critical theorists would argue that research in systemic linguistics unwittingly reproduces the same relations of domination that critical theory seeks to interrogate.

I do not believe that this need be the case. In the remainder of this essay, I argue that key to re-uniting the two perspectives is understanding how Jakobson's notion of "hierarchy offunctions" reifies text-context relations in systemic linguistics. To develop this argument, I first outline the way systemic linguistics formalizes relations between text and context in the regulatory work done by the notion of functional hierarchy. Using the work of Mary Louise Pratt, I then critique that notion, to argue that it cannot account for the particular meanings that are produced on occasions when multiplicity and conflict are inherently structured into the situation. To illustrate, I apply this critique to the conclusions of one major study on teacher evaluation of student texts, completed by Rosemary Hake and Joseph Williams, that focuses on text interpretation. I conclude by outlining a framework that would reconfigure the notion of functional hierarchy within the postmodernist emphases on de-centering and indeterminacy. In doing so, I suggest that this reconfiguration need not abandon either the methodological concerns of systemic linguistics or the social concerns of critical theories.

Language Functions, Text Features, and Situational Context As an analytic method, the significance of systemic linguistics, especially as it has developed under the influenceofM.AK. Halliday, lies in the power and

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scope of its formalizations. It is not too much to say that it has taken as its goal the resolution ofthe central problem of modernism: namely, how, given the indeterminacy of text meaning, we achieve understanding. To say this is not to charge systemic linguistics with naivete. As Halliday remarks,

We have been reminded of "the impossibility of recovering a fixed and stable meaning from discourse." Of course this is impossible; it would be a very impoverished theory of discourse that expected it. But it is entirely possible-as we all do-to recover from discourse a meaning of another kind, meaning that is complex and indeterminate. The reason that it is hard to make this process explicit is that we cando so only by talking about grammar. ("Linguistics" 145; emphasis added)

For Halliday, this difficulty has its source in the fact that the development of any grammar, as a scientific "metalanguage," too easily reifies what is essentially a "dynamic open system," in which ''variability'' is seen as a defining characteristic (138). Though reification is an element necessary to the recovery of meaning, it is also an element to be resisted.

To recover the meanings represented through the organization of text features, linguists have relied on the twin notions of language functions and situational context. Features oftexts are organized as they are because their organization conventionally signals certain functional meanings. The orga­nization of text features thus becomes analogous to a set of instructions for constructing a text's meaning, instructions that are intelligible only when interpreted within a specific context of situation. In what follows, I elaborate the model that has been developed for explicating these instructions, focus­ing on three principles which, explicitly or implicitly, motivate the model:

(1) The organization of text features realizes, i.e. simultaneously enacts and reflects, multiple functional meanings.

(2) Functional meanings are organized hierarchically. Which function­al meanings are recovered depends upon their significance in asitua­tion type. Depending upon the situation, a particular function will be considered dominant.

(3) In all situation types, writers and readers are assumed to co-operate in the production and reception of textual meanings.

For the purposes of this article, I will focus chiefly on the framework developed by Halliday in "The Users and Uses of Language" and Learning How to Mean. Though his more recent work in An Introduction to Functional Grammar and his work with Fawcett refines and extends the power of the system, its basic assumptions about relations between texts and contexts remain the same.3

This framework identifies three elements of context or situation: the field, or "ongoing activity"; the tenor, or "role relationships involved"; and the mode, or "the symbolic or rhetorical channel" (Halliday, Learning 131).

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Each element of the context has a corresponding language function. The ideational or observer function is "language as a means of talking about the real world" including "the expression oflogical relations"; the interpersonal or intruder function is "language as a means whereby the speaker participates in the speech situation," including roles, attitudes,and judgments; the textual or text-creating function is that which distinguishes operational text from citational uses of language (17). Cohesion and distinctions between given and new information are included within the textual function. The three elements ofthe situation interact with the three language functions in a one­to-one, ifindirect, fashion. Elements in the field interact with the ideational, those in tenor with the interpersonal, and those in the mode with the textual. The lexico-grammatical system becomes the site for mediating these interac­tions, thus producing text. It is this systematic, yet indirect, connection between language functions and situational context that makes situated meanings recoverable.

Participants' choices of linguistic forms are thus constrained by their construction of a context, the components of that kind of social setting in which certain ways of speaking are considered appropriate. At the same time, however, the ongoing organization of linguistic forms itself constructs and enacts a context-that ongoing activity, writer-reader relationship, and channel of communication in which the text is intended to function. Consid­er, for example, the following two, very short texts, in which information is organized quite differently:

(1) 1 prefer life in the city. (2) My preference is for life in the city.

Both are grammatical; neither violates the underlying syntactic rules that form the basis for the production of well-formed sentences. Though the surface structure differs, both may be said to convey the same propositional content: in each the action is the same ("preferring"), as are the agent ("I") and the patient, or receiver ("life,,).4 Rather, the organization of the two utterances contrasts functionally. At minimum, the two contrast in terms of what is presumed to be the topic under discussion. The two also realize contrasting participant relations. The former is considered more direct, more assertive, suggesting more equal, if not also more intimate, relations between participants in the discussion. The latter is more indirect, suggest­ing more unequal, or at least more formal, relations between participants.

The model thus posits a dynamiC, interactive view of relations between text and context, rather than a static, deterministic one. Relations between elements oftext and context represent the simultaneous co-construction of both text and context by participants. Halliday illustrates this interactive relationship with the example of a mother reading a bedtime story to a small child. At one level, he points out, there is the context characterized by "the

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immediate environment, the interaction of mother and child under particu­lar circumstances that are associated with intimacy and relaxation" (Learning 125). At a wider level, there is the "fictive" context characterized by the text of the story being read, in Halliday's illustration an "imaginary world of wolves and woodcutters" (Learning 131). At the broadest level, context includes all the mutually acknowledged social conventions and presupposi­tions that are relevant to the utterance, including those pertaining to the particular type of linguistic behavior (telling a story, philosophizing, buying and selling, praying, writing a novel, etc.) in which participants are engaged.

It is because of this insistence on the multiplicity and situatedness of meaning that Halliday can assert that systemic linguistics is compatible with the postmodernist emphasis on indeterminacy. The organization of text features realizes multiple meanings. Yet, these meanings cannot simply be read offdirectly from text structure. Rather, texts are viewed as the products of complex multiple interactions between linguistic functions and social contexts. Contexts include not only multiple elements but multiple levels. That is, systemic analysis takes into account not only the immediate context in which the text is produced and received but also generic and cultural contexts. Indeed, the inclusion of levels associated with genre and culture makes this model compatible with postmodernist concerns with intertextuality. Consequently, this framework allows for the recovery of multiple meanings. In the example above, the organization offeatures in the text must function simultaneously to communicate ideational, interperson­al, and textual meanings at three levels of context-at minimum, nine parameters within which meaning can be recovered. In other words, precise­ly because this model is so powerful, the number of meanings with which it must contend proliferate.

To regulate this proliferation, systemic linguistics has relied on the notion of a hierarchy of functions (Jakobson; Hymes). In technical writing, for example, the field (the content) is seen as dominant; in advertising the tenor is perceived as dominant. These situational hierarchies are mirrored in the configuration oflanguage functions. If an orientation toward the field dominates the situation, the ideational component dominates the language functions. If the tenor dominates, so does the interpersonal function. If the mode dominates, so too does the textual function. In realizing these interactions, the lexico-grammatical system also realizes the functional hierarchy.

Hierarchy of functions thus becomes a mechanism for regulating both the production and reception of texts. In terms of production, hierarchy neither proscribes nor demands specific linguistic features for specific situ­ations. Technical writing does not forbid the presence of narrative features, nor does prose literature insist on only narrative features. Given that linguistic features realize all language functions simultaneously, such reduc­tionism would, in fact, be impossible within the systemic framework. Rather,

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hierarchy manages the deployment of those features-the probability of their occurrence, their textual location, their relation to each other, the ends they are to serve. Narrative features are likely to occur more often in a novel than in technical reports. By contrast, analytic features (e.g., generaliza­tions) are likely to occur more often in technical writing. Because, in technical writing, the ideational function dominates, narrative features relate to generalizations logically, as evidence for claims. In prose novels, because the textual function dominates, narrative features relate to general­izations analogically. Generalizations are the moral of the story.

In terms of reception, hierarchy of functions regulates text interpreta­tion and evaluation. Halliday remarks,

given an adequate specification of the situation ... we ought to be able to make certain predictions about the linguistic properties of the text that is associated with it. .. [including] the grammar and vocabulary, which are the realizations of the semantic options. (Learning 131)

In every situation, we expect particular organizations of linguistic features, and we comprehend a particular organization of linguistic features in terms of the situations that organization constructs. Implicit in this predictive formulation is the evaluative work done by the notion of hierarchy. The hierarchy warrants claims for the legitimacy or illegitimacy of particular organizations oflinguistic features in a text. Legitimate organizations realize the functional hierarchy that corresponds to the situation in which the text is intended for use. Illegitimate organizations realize a functional hierarchy that is at odds with the situation, thus misleading readers.

It has been well documented by William Vande Kopple, for instance, that in English, placing given or old information presumed familiar to readers before new information presumed unfamiliar results in texts in which infor­mation can be recalled more quickly and summarized more accurately than texts organized with new preceding old. In situations such as memo writing where efficiency is valued, appropriate texts organize the sequencing of old and new information to correspond to this organization of the situational context; placing new before old information would not be valuable because it would signal the wrong context. In a literary context, by contrast, sequenc­ing new before old information would not necessarily be deemed illegitimate, since efficiency is not usually considered a value in reading literature. On the contrary, such placement would have a great deal of value. In deviating from the norms of utilitarian prose, this organization utilizes the dominant function-the textual-to call attention to itself as text.

Production and reception function reciprocally and symmetrically be­cause the hierarchy is quite consistent with Grice's Cooperative Principle. As Couture points out, systemic models posit a correspondence between organizations of text features and context of situation to account for the ways in which "meaning in language arises out of speakers' and listeners' recogni­tion of conventional social situations which are associated with linguistic

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choice" (1). Given a social situation, the burden on the writer is to produce texts the features of which are organized to signal the context in which the text is intended to function. The burden on the reader is to interpret the organization oftext features accurately so as to arrive at a shared understand­ing of the text's meaning. Though the meaning of a linguistic choice may be intrinsically indeterminate, participants rely on their situated knowledge to disambiguate an utterance. At the supper table, family members can, without pausing, organize a request as "Can you reach the salt?" Only the perverse adolescent insists on answering, "Yes."

Ideology and Systemic Linguistics: The Perversity of Cooperation Despite systemic linguistics' avowed concern for the social and the historical, its reliance on cooperation leaves it vulnerable to charges of essentialism and utopianism. In particular, the notion of hierarchy of functions is simulta­neously deeply situated within socio-historical contexts, yet essentialist and ahistorical. On the one hand, particular hierarchies do not spring full-blown from the head of Zeus. As we have seen, they are dynamically co-constructed by participants. Nor are the hierarchies informing genres (what Halliday calls "situation types"), such as technical writing, realizations of some Platonic ideal form. Rather, hierarchies are learned on the basis of social experience with instances ofa given type oflanguage use. Writers and readers come to expect a certain organization of language in technical writing, not because technical reports are intrinsically constructed that way, but because past experience with the demands of this situation leads them to expect that organization. If their experience of the situation changes, that organization could be, and over time may well become, different.

On the other hand, what makes possible the very idea of hierarchy is the framework's reliance on Grice-like principles of cooperation. In other words, systemic analysis of text features is premised on the notion that participants always experience a situation, and so organize their linguistic resources, cooperatively in the production and reception of meaning. Any asymmetries in the situation are assumed to be benign, as with Halliday's example of the mother-child story-telling episode. Even those instances in which deviant organizations oftext features are analyzed as flouting conven­tions depend for that analysis on the premise that those deviations were intended to communicate meaning that could not be expressed explicitly. In Grice's famous example of the professor who includes only irrelevant infor­mation in the graduate student's reference, irrelevance functions coopera­tively, as a way to characterize the student as a poor candidate for the position. It is a tactic for communicating meaning within accepted norms of a situation; it is not a strategy for challenging those norms.

Because systemic linguists presume a cooperative search for mutual understanding within a situational context whose norms are already a given, what is at issue for them is how the organization of text features corresponds

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to the organization of the situational context. Researchers using systemic linguistics may study variation in the ways writers organize responses to an informative assignment. They may study variation in ways that readers respond to contrasting organizations oftextual material. But, they do not ask what positions writers or readers define for themselves in response to the roles they have been assigned. For systemic linguists, what is not at issue is how the elements of the situation came to be organized that way, whose interests are served by that organization, whether all participants experience that organization in the same way, or whether the organization is itself at issue among participants.

These issues are precisely those that interest critical theorists, however. That the organization of situations is conflicted, that participants may have multiple and contradictory purposes, that the speech acts available to partic- .. ipants may themselves be at issue, that participants are not fully in control of defining the situation-these are the starting points for theories of social critique. Pratt reminds us just how few situations are organized to offer participants a single, much less mutually compatible purpose ("Ideology"). In her critique of dominant accounts of speech-act theory, which privil egean essentialist, privatized, co-operative view oflanguage use, Pratt offers a more inclusive notion of speech acts, (and, by extension, oflanguage use in general) as social practice, one in which "people always speak from and in a socially constituted pOSition, a position that is moreover, constantly shifting, and defined ina speech situation by the intersection of many different forces" (9). The true self of participants is no longer reduced to the personal, but is extended to include those institutionally constructed identities (e.g., press secretary), in which "the intentions, beliefs, etc. behind the speech act attach to the office and not to the person who holds it" (9).

Pratt's work thus corrects the view that the construction of situational contexts rests entirely in the control of participants. This is not to say, however, that institutional discourse simply replaces the concept of the single, individually constructed purpose with that of the single, socially constructed purpose. As seen from Pratt's perspective, multiplicity and difference characterize discourse. Intersecting institutional forces define for participants multiple, even self-contradictory goals, as with "the underling required on the one hand never to correct superiors so they won'tlook stupid, and required on the other hand always to correct superiors so they won't look stupid" (9). In short, Pratt seeks to replace the notion of the unified self, not with that of the unified institution, but with the twin notions of multiplicity and conflict as fundamental elements of discursive practices.

In "Linguistic Utopias," she extends this critique to include what she terms "the linguistics of community," by which she intends not only systemic linguistics, including pragmatics and forms of conversational analysis, but also generative linguistics of the Chomskyan variety (49). The notion of community embodied in modem linguistiCS is analogous to that embodied in

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the rise of the modern nation-state, described by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. In both, community is imagined as "fraternal," "limited," and "sovereign" (Pratt, "Linguistic" 49). Linguistics' emphasis on cooperation among equals marks the community as fraternal. Its emphasis on interaction within the boundaries of community marks it as limited. Its emphasis on the way that that interaction excludes non-members from participation marks it as sovereign.

Linguistics' implicit definition of community, she argues, obscures so­cial hierarchies within linguistic hierarchies. Because the definition empha­sizes cooperation as prerequisite to all communication, analyses focus only on the orderliness of exchanges. In doing so, systemic analyses unwittingly adopt the perspective of those in authority, those in the position to rule on what counts as a "legitimate" meaning. Analyses of classroom discourse, like Malcolm Coulthard's, overwhelmingly begin with the premise that its dom­inant function is to "inform or instruct" (101). This hierarchy of functions, Pratt maintains, clearly reflects the teacher's perspective.S It does not take into account how classroom discourse functions from the perspective of students (Pratt, "Linguistic" 51). That is, because students are expected to conform to a hierarchy that represents only the perspective of authority, violations of that hierarchy are seen almost exclusively as breakdowns of order, failures of communication (51). Not surprisingly, responsibility for these breakdowns is located in a deficiency in the student. In the same vein, systemiC studies exclude from their analyses the perspectives of other groups dominated on the bases of race, class, and gender. Despite systemic linguis­tics' focus on heterogeneity, its notion of community marginalizes the possibility for interaction across communities (55-57). Because the hetero­geneous character of styles, registers, and repertoires (as well as of dialects) is premised on an underlying unity, language varieties simultaneously unify members within their boundaries and separate those members from others who use different varieties. In this sense, heterogeneity ultimately becomes only an obstacle to communication, rather than a factor that enters into communication. Like ignorance, linguistic difference is something to be overcome.

Because linguistics uses the notion of difference this way, even critical projects using various forms of systemic and, more generally, socio-linguis­tics often construct negative versions of the same linguistics of community (see Faigley, Fragments 99-104). In education, Pratt cites as examples work such as Bernstein's research into restricted and non-restricted codes and Labov's work on Black English Vernacular. The problem, epitomized in their work, is that the premises underlying the linguistics of community force researchers either to advocate the dissolution of the dominated group (as with Bernstein) or to criticize as "inauthentic" members of dominated groups who use the dominant discourse (as with Labov). Done within the framework of a linguistics of community, even critical projects view hetero-

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geneity as an obstacle-either to full social participation in the dominant group or to the construction of one's identity within the dominated group.

Ideology in Systemic Linguistics: Perverse Cooperation To illustrate both the power and the limitations of systemic linguistics for the recovery of situated meaning, I want to re-analyze one study done within composition studies. The work of Hake and Williams proceeds from the premises central to systemic linguistics-that language functions in context, and that production and comprehension of text features are regulated by that hierarchy specific to a particular context.6 That is, it relies on the social constructionist version of systemic linguistics. Though their work is not recent, it is almost unique in its use oflinguistics within composition studies, both because of the degree to which its use of formalization makes explicit the assumptions of the researchers and because it recovers a functional hierarchy organizing this situation that otherwise would have remained transparent-present, yet effectively invisible in its influence. Indeed, the hierarchy that they uncover directly contravenes that presumed to be oper­ating in the situation. Because their linguistic framework relies on the notion of functional hierarchy outlined above, however, their explanation precludes discussion of the issues raised by Pratt.

In this project, actually a series off our studies, Hake and Williams set out to discover whether in fact English teachers preferred the kind of "clear, direct" style of writing traditionally expected in expository writing courses. Each of the four studies had essentially the same structure. English teachers from various high schools, community colleges, senior colleges and univer­sities were asked to participate in studies of students' writing competency-either an exterior validity study or a proficiency examination. The format for evaluation was deliberately changed in each of the four studies. In two studies, raters were trained to use formal holistic scoring. In another, raters were given a 1-5 scale and asked to use their own judgments. And in one study, raters were trained to use an assessment instrument developed by one of the authors, an instrument that monitors raters' consis­tency by comparing the number of communication flaws they note in four categories to their overall holistic judgment of the essay.

Unknown to the raters, however, rewritten versions of previously rated student placement essays had been inserted into the essays the raters were to judge. The only difference between the two versions was in "the nominal vs. the verbal expression of a proposition" (e.g., "My preference is for life in the city" [nominal] and "I prefer to live in the city" [verbal]) (Hake and Williams 435). Otherwise, the essays were as identical as the researchers could make them: in the number of paragraphs and sentences; in organization, logic, and content; even in terms of handwriting, kinds, number, and placement of errors, and strikeouts. Only the number of words differed, and that slightly (Hake and Williams 435).

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Though Hake and Williams do not say so explicitly, in operationalizing their research question in terms of the contrast between nominal and verbal styles, they also presume a hierarchy of functions specific to situational contexts organized around what Halliday would term the "field." In such contexts (e.g., business and professional writing), effectiveness or appropri­ateness is generally defined primarily in terms of the contributions that differences in text organization contribute to the communication ofthe text's ideational content. In the utilitarian contexts presumed here, the most effective text organizations are the most "efficient," i.e., their messages are most quickly recalled and most accurately summarized.

Hake and Williams identify the use ofnominals, defined as "a noun that has an underlying expressible English verb," as a linguistic feature central to efficiency and accuracy (435). Habitual use of such structures characterizes a nominal style, in contrast to the verbal style, which expresses "in [its] subject-verb-object grammatical strings a corresponding agent-action-goal structure" (Hake and Williams 435). Empirical research has shown emphat­ically that readers experience texts written in a verbal style as much more efficient than those written in a nominal style. Because the relation of text features to situational context is so precisely operationalized, Hake and Williams can make clear predictions about how readers ought to evaluate overall text effectiveness. All things being equal, readers ought to prefer efficient, direct texts to inefficient, indirect versions, a preference that should be reflected in significantly higher evaluations of the former.

The results of their research showed decisively that, in this situation, all things were not equal. Teachers did not prefer to be addressed directly and efficiently by students in essay examinations. On four occasions, the re­searchers gave to teachers from different schools rewritten nominal and verbal versions of student texts that had previously received either high or low ratings in the same situation. The ostensible purpose of each occasion was either assessment of student competence or program assessment. Teach­ers' rankings showed no difference between scores for the nominal and verbal versions, however. On one occasion, when teachers were asked simply to record the reasons for their rankings (not asked to look for error or to classify the errors they found), they reported contradictory evaluations for the nominal and verbal versions ofthe "same" essay: "intelligent understanding" vs. "flippant and without purpose"; "logical organization" vs. "not well organized"; "relevant and well-presented" vs "grammar is poor though ideas good"; "clear and complete" vs. "middling, just middling" (Hake and Will­iams 437). Even more surprisingly, when teachers were directed to mark and classify errors they observed in the texts, college teachers reported more errors-especially in meaning, logic, and style-in the nominal versions, yet continued to evaluate the nominal more highly than the verbal versions overall (Hake and Williams 442). This difference was especially acute in the rewritten versions of student papers that had originally been awcm:led the highest ratings.

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To explain these seemingly perverse results, Hake and Williams specu­late that teachers' comments and marking "dialectically complete" their overall evaluations (444). In all cases, teachers were responding to the texts' "most salient feature" -the relative quality of their ideational content. Because readers misperceived the nominal versions as having higher quality, they consistently rated them higher overall. The differences in their com­ments reflect whether they had been directed to find positive or negative reasons for their judgments and the increased difficulty they had in process­ing the information from the texts. Because the nominal style is harder to process, readers observed more errors, especially those related to organiza­tion and coherence when they were asked to focus on error. Yet, because these "errors" also seemed the product of relatively mature writers, readers evaluated the text positively overall. By contrast, "if the paper seems to be the product of a relatively immature writer, then there is not much point in taking its intellectual content seriously" (Hake and Williams 444). In this situation, dari ty is not a virtue. W ri ters can find their voice only to lose their hearing.

Though this is a powerful study, Hake and Williams' explanation relies on a single functional hierarchy being at work in this situation. Because the field is that element ofthesituation presumed most important, the ideational function is deemed to be dominant. Thus, what is considered naturally salient is propositional content-the efficiency with which it can be processed, the level of abstraction at which that content is represented. Simultaneously, the role ofthe tenor is devalued; the interpersonal function becomes transpar­ent. That there exists an asymmetry between writers and readers is, at best, peripheral to the situation. Consequently, in focusing on the contrast between verbal and nominal styles solely in terms of their ideational func­tion, Hake and Williams define the situation from the perspective ofinstitu­tionalized authority, in this case how teachers represent writing to them­selves'? Because the possible explanations are thus confined to a single perspective, illegitimate moves, in this case, readers' preference for the indirect style, are discounted as simply a failure in communication. In a footnote, Hake and Williams argue that the kind of stylistic difference they are studying here does not significantly affect meaning, in that the difference does not alter the underlying propositional content (436). Since the under­lying propositional content of each version of the texts is the same, readers, by definition, are mis-perceiving style as substance. Of course, that propo­sitional content should be deemed salient here follows only within the logic of the notion of hierarchy of functions, which regulates the legitimate interpretation of functional differences.

Left unconsidered is how writers and readers might respond to the fact that the genre for this writing is the examination. In other words, at issue in this situation is as much the social identity of the writers as students as the ideational content of the text. Student writers construct texts in examina-

Textualizing the Contact Zone 425

tions knowing that representation of content is only one factor (and maybe not the most important) under consideration. Readers read as examiners, concerned more with determining competency than with engaging writers in any discussion of issues. Thus, the very structure of this situation relates writers and readers asymmetrically, and dictates different purposes for them as well.

The fact that these conflicts are not considered renders Hake and Williams' analysis incomplete. As we have seen, nominal and verbal styles also realize differences in the social relations presumed to be operating in the situation. The indirectness of the former is seen, generally, as marking asymmetrical social relations, whereas the directness of the latter is associ­ated with more symmetrical relations.8 Thus, the preference for the nominal style represents as much a preference for deference as for abstraction. Such an explanation is consistent with readers observing, yet forgiving, substantive problems in nominal texts. These texts appropriately represented not only information but also attitudes toward authority-their examiners. These are the texts of students who show "promise.,,9

What is unusual about the findings of this study is that it is not students but teachers who are in need of enlightenment, mistaken in their beliefs about good writing, unable to recognize good writing when they see it. Though Hake and Williams use these results to characterize the "double bind" that college students face, they do not consider that readers' responses may themselves be the products of a double bind (440). Consequently, the story told through this study dramatically reproduces Pratt's dystopian version of community-but one told from a liberal perspective. If only teachers were properly educated to evaluate only the intrinsic merit of a paper, they would not mis-communicate our values to those students.

Textualizing the Contact Zone: Studying Perversity It is Pratt's critique of community that Faigley finds so devastating to the project of a postmodern critical linguistics (Fragments 111). I hope that I have demonstrated, however, that the object of her critique is not linguistics per se but the operationalizing of social constructionism within linguistiCS' use of hierarchy of functions. To date, however, Pratt's work has primarily been programmatic with respect to the linguistic analysis of fine text struc­ture. She offers an incisive critique, but she does not elaborate a method for doing this kind of analysis , at least not within a systemic framework. If! have read her critique correctly, the problem with the way that functional hierar­chy formalizes text-context relations is, in Halliday's terms, that the notion fails to resist the reification of those relations. Bysuppressing some function­al meanings in favor of that function deemed situationally dominant, hierar­chy simultaneously suppresses the process through which that domination was produced. For systemic linguists as well as for critical theorists, the question is how we make contested organizations of the situation available

426 JAC

for discussion, rather than simply presume utopian, or dystopian, versions as normative. That is, if we are to recover afuller range of situated meanings that reflect the multiple purposes and perspectives of participants, we need not to abandon, but to unpack the hierarchy. While a full description of such unpacking lies beyond the scope of this article, I want to outline how such work might proceed and raise some of the issues that it must address. In particular, I suggest that the most promising direction is one that views systemic linguistics and theories of social critique in dialectical, not opposi­tional, terms. The formalization essential to systemic linguistics becomes a tool to address the postmodernist concern with indeterminacy, not a rem­nant of modernism to be abandoned.

As we have seen, Halliday intends systemic linguistics to address indeter­minacy' not to eliminate it. Nor does postmodernism necessarily object to formalization. Even Derrida acknowledges that

Formalization is a fruitful, useful activity. The mastery it provides is its first if not its only justification. So the effort towards formalization of such codes is indispensable. One can never give up this task without running the risk of giving up rationality, scientificity itself in its most classical concept. ... Science and linguistics must never give up ... the necessity, the desire, to formalize, to exhaust the analysis of codes. (252-53)

What is productive about scientific formalization is precisely the fact that it attempts to close a system that is dynamic and open. These attempts are enabled only through the methodological precision available through for­malization, and they enable the kinds of challenges mounted by critical theories. Linguistic formalization thus becomes a method for making visible the oppositions that are "in play."l0 Specifically, the formalization of text­context relations in the notion of functional hierarchy mediates the connec­tion between the organization of text features and the organization of social relations.

Put another way, formalization allows us to textualize the dynamiCS of an encounter. Colin MacCabe argues that like theories of social critique, systemiC linguistics is also concerned with ways in which socially constructed meanings are the products of processes of "differentiation," the ways in which relations of multiplicity and difference are realized discursively as relations of opposition and hierarchy (300). Despite (or rather, because of) its utopianism, systemic linguistics' formalization of text-context relations has enabled it to construct an extraordinarily powerful method for describing these processes. And, as Pratt comments, utopian projects have their uses ("Linguistic"). But, the usefulness of utopian projects lies not in their ability to legitimate or delegitimate the truth of an account by contrasting it to a predetermined ideal. Viewed dialectically, formalization proceeds, by nega­tion, to construct alternative accounts-utopian and dystopian versions if you will. The intersection of these counter/actual versions creates a critical space in which the processes of differentiation can be examined from multi­ple perspectives.

Textualizing the Contact Zone 427

Conceived this way, critical analyses of texts address the concerns of those who have criticized social constructionists' definitions of community as reified and psychologized. That is, we need not appeal to cognitive notions; rather, we dramatize the encounter as its dynamics are represented in the organization of text features.ll The kind of critical analysis described here examines the textual dynamics of borderland encounters, where the terms of community membership are defined and even contested. At the conclusion to "Linguistic Utopias," Pratt calls for a "linguistics of contact" that would begin with

the operation of language across lines of social differentiation, a linguistics that focused on modes and zones of contact between dominant and dominated groups, between persons of different and multiple identities ... that focused on how .such speakers constituted each other relationally and in difference, how they enact differences in language. (60)

Such a linguistics would enable study of the dynamics of the "Contact Zone," those borderlands on the margins of communities in which it is conflict and difference that bind, but do not unite, participants. For instance, because the essay examination-especially placement and proficiency tests-construct the boundaries of the academy, these examinations represent borderland encounters, the product of which is the writer's identity as student: compe­tent/incompetent, pass/fail. That is, the essay examination is a genre that defines the discursive terms on which students and teachers may relate to each other. And though the examination genre dictates its own hierarchy-thus regulating the subject positions deemed legitimate in the zone-it cannot regulate how writers or readers respond to the positions assigned to them. These responses are enacted in and through language. They have their basis in the intimate knowledgeofthe other that results from repeated contact, not from the ignorance that results from their supposed separation. As students, writers know what it means to be examined; as teachers, readers know what is expected of them as examiners. Both groups know that their purposes, though reciprocal, are not identical. Writers organize their linguistic re­sources to "pass" (Goffman); readers organize theirs as "gatekeepers" (Erickson and Shultz). In this sense, the discursive practices ofthese groups are related dialectically-they cannot be understood apart from each other, and their relations can be understood only through difference.

Yet, a linguistics of contact need not valorize any single perspective. Rather, the point of unpacking functional hierarchies is to examine and relate multiple perspectives. In the Hake and Williams study, readers did not reward writers who simply knew how to speak indirectly-deferentially. The substantive content of the texts was also important to readers' evaluations. But the two could not be separated. In systemic terms, the ideational and the interpersonal functions-the writers' simultaneous representation of ideas and social relations-were inescapably tied to readers' judgments of writers'

428 JAC

competence. The explicit demand that writers represent their ideas efficient­ly and concisely contlicted with the demand that they represent their rela­tions to their readers indirectly and deferentially. The texts became the site ofthat contlict. Readers' misjudgements enacted it. Their preference for the indirect over the direct style narrated it.

In this light, Hake and Williams' work can be understood as suggesting principles for textualizing the dynamics ofthe contact zone. I see three such principles as critical to future work in this area. First, analyses must focus on what Pratt terms "borderland encounters," such as the essay examination. Second, analyses must construct and relate contrasting text-context rela­tions. Within a taken-for-granted hierarchy offunctions structurally inher­ent in borderland encounters, the process by which one's social identity is produced becomes transparent. The precision with which systemic linguis­tics can formalize multiple functional hierarchies, however, makes the process visible. For example, in constructing alternative versions of texts, Hake and Williams also constructed alternative contexts, ones which directly contrasted in the ways that they valued the representation of both informa­tion and social relations. I do not mean that researchers must actually re­write texts, but this principle is intended to emphasize that analysis is unavoidably interventionist. In constructing contrasting text-context rela­tions, researchers acknowledge their own involvementin the situation-their beliefs about what is at issue-an acknowledgement that makes their conclu­sions more open to critique.

Third, analyses must relate both production and interpretation so as to account for the actual experience of writers and readers in contexts of use. By experience, I do not mean mental processes or states, but the textual representation of social experience, what Brodkey calls textuality. Again, the construction of contrasting text-context relations is necessary here. But, it is important to go beyond that. For instance, in relating text organization to reader comments, marking, and scores, Hake and Williams forced them­selves to address the actual consequences of contrasting forms of represen­tation for readers' evaluations. And, even though their study primarily illuminates readers' experiences, the fact that the rewritten versions were produced from actual student texts allowed them to say something about writers as well as readers. Consequently, their use oftextualization makes it possible to talk about how the contlicts and incoherencies structured into the situation affect the deployment of and responses to linguistic features in texts. 12

In a textualized model of the Contact Zone, the limiting case is "unso­licited oppositional discourse, parody, critique" because it foregrounds the issue of agency as a textual representation (pratt, "Arts" 39). In Hake and Williams' studies, for instance, how do we know that readers' responses weren't themselves a parody of a situation seemingly primed to evoke it? More generally, how can we talk about what writers and readers are accom-

Textualizing the Contact Zone 429

plishing, if those accomplishments are always enacted through texts whose functional meanings are always multiple and conflicted? This is the issue Faigley raises in his discussion of the powers and limitations of critical linguistics. Using two texts on school policy that he received while teaching in Singapore, he compares and contrasts the ways that linguistic structures are deployed either to mask or to legitimate authority. Yet, he concludes his analysis by saying, of one text, "there is no way of being certain, for example, that the headmaster who wrote the dress code newsletter is not parodying the discourse of educational authority while at the same time deploying it" (Fragments 110). In at least two senses, this is of course, true: (1) critical linguistics does not purport to give us access to mental states; and, (2) if the deployment of educational discourse in that text mimics it so completely that no one experiences the text as parody, then the issue is moot.

Recent work within a systemic framework-Cope and Kalantzis' work on genre approaches to teaching literacy-has examined this issue of parody. Anne Cranny-Francis has similarly defined parody as "the contradictory task of operating within generic conventions in order in part to subvert them (90). Genre is here both a discourse form and a socio-historical practice, each of which informs the other. Using genre as a literary category, Cranny-Francis examines ways feminist writers of science fiction use stock situations such as the human-alien encounter simultaneously to highlight the genderedness of the genre and to recast it in a different key. In contrastto Cranny-Francis, the linguist J. R. Martin begins by examining grammatical features of a policy document on whaling management in terms of the genres which those features instantiate (116-36). What is significant in Martin's description is the ways that the paper's author must position himself discursively as a biologist simultaneously addressing scientists and non-scientists, moving back and forth between the counter-intuitive classifications of biology and the commonsense descriptions of the particular species he is discussing. In so doing, Martin locates the discursive means through which the text manag­es these conflicting positions and so influences its readers.

It is in this connection between genre and text features, then, that the projects of critical theorists and systemic functional linguists are comple­mentary. Whether analysis begins with genre or with text features, both approaches offer a way to examine how, within conventionally accepted practices, texts deploy linguistic features to challenge as well as to conform to their norms. It is a truth universally acknowledged, for instance, that evaluators of essay examinations routinely reward over-elaboration, a phe­nomenon usually explained in terms of reader "misjudgments." A systemiC linguistics of contact allows us to examine the deployment of over-elabora­tion in terms of its interpersonal and ideational functioning. One study of placement-test essays (Sullivan) found that certain patterns ofover-elabora­tion functioned to identify the writer as the kind of student who knew and valued the same kinds of information as his readers. For instance, in an essay

430 JAC

on "Censorship in the Public Schools," writers of highly rated essays were more likely to discuss plays by Sophocles than novels by Judy Blume, even though the latter were more relevant to the topic. And, in representing that information, the writers were more likely to have spelled out the information unnecessarily. That is, over-elaboration functioned simultaneously as a way for writers to discuss substantive ideas, to display deference, and to exhibit "cultural capital" (Bourdieu).

The formulation of the Contact Zone outlined in this essay should, I believe, allow us to address questions of agency from both critical and linguistic perspectives.B Reframing the logic of domination as socially situated activity operating across lines of social difference substantially alters the possibilities for discussing the discursive moves participants can make within a contest marked by language games. In a textualized Contact Zone, moves are definable "tactically" -in terms of what is at stake in the game-and "strategically" -in terms of the rules that constitute the terms of the overall contest (Robinson). If style of elaboration is a key discursive feature that marks the terms on which student writers and teacher readers relate to each other in essay examinations, over-elaboration may function tactically, as a way to engage substantively the issue raised by a prompt without calling into question the social relations structured into the examination genre itself; conversely, under-elaboration may function strategically, to call into ques­tion the taken-for-granted genre of the examination itself. Thus, through reuniting the theorizing power of critical theory and the methodological power of systemic linguistics, we can analyze the discursive tactics and strategies of those whose encounters constitute and remake the Contact Zone.14

Notes

Temple University Philadelphia, PA

1 The term "systemic" applies specifically to that school of functional linguistics that builds upon the work of M.A.K. Halliday. According to Halliday, however, the work of this school is consistent with and extends that of others, including the Prague School and work in functional sentence perspective, and the development of speech acts and pragmatics in the work of Austin, Gricei and Searle. Following Halliday, I will use this term to include work in those schools as well.

For this insight, I am indebted to Daniel Liston's Capitalist Schools: Explanation and Ethics in Radical Studies of Schooling.

3 More recent formulations of the relations between text and context have grown consid­erably more complicated as the project of systemic linguistics has developed. The number of and relationship among functions is under debate as is the definition of context. See Gregory for a summary. Still, within composition studies the majority of applications of systemic grammar have used the earlier formulation outlined here.

4 Whether the two utterances convey all and only the same propositional content is a matter of considerable debate among linguists, philosophers, and literary theorists.

5 Or at least the way that this perspective is institutionalized within schools. It may well be that an individual teacher opposes, resists, orwishes to subvert this perspective; nevertheless, she still must contend with it.

Textualizing the Contact Zone 431

6 It may be objected that the linguistic model developed by Williams differs from that of Halliday. Williams' model relies on the narrower view of text-context relations found in functional sentence perspective. It adapts the case grammar of Fillmore to that perspective. And, it contains a much smaller number of grammatical categories. However, both models rely on the same notion of functional hierarchy, and both stress the importance ofnominalization to writing, which elements are the focus of my analysis.

7 See Brown and Herndl for a review of the textbook advice on writing in the professions. Their ethnographic studies of corporate writing showed results very similar to those founll here. What they also found, however, was that the relative job status of writers and readers was a significant factor influencing the use of nominalization.

8 The two styles are associated, for instance, with the distinction between elaborated and restricted codes and with differences between dominant white dialects and Black English Vernacular. Whether the use of nominalization is used to justify or critique class differences, its relation to asymmetrical social relations remains the same.

9 See Swain, Freedman, Marvin and Sullivan for reports on ways that indirectness is salient in examination situations. See also Brown and Hernd!.

10 Couture (1-10) also synthesizes recent work in literary studies, lingUistics, and compo­sitipn studies. She argues, however, that the relationship among these three is complementary rather than dialectical. The knowledge produced in each field, in this view, tends to confirm that produced in the others. Merging the three fields, therefore, "We can hope to solve writing problems in school, in business, and in government ... if we design research with the aim of resolving the communication dilemmas of those whom language serves" (6). The synthesis presented by Pratt ("Linguistic"), however, stresses that language does not serve the interests of all parties in the same fashion.

11 Though my focus is on analyzing the organization of text features, the framework I am proposing is, I think, similar to that of Clarke, who calls for "an alternative mode of relation characterized by attitudes and actions of a kind of provisional deference ... a discourse ... that acknowledge[s] [difference] and that measure[s] the distance that divides its participants" (65).

12 These principles are surprisingly consistent with those outlined in later work of Williams (Colomb and Williams). What differs is what we think we can do with those principles. Williams' work remains true to structuralist notions, focusing on what can be said. Though it acknowledges that the point is only part of the story enacted in discourse, it concludes that "on the rest of the story this grammar must remain silent" (94). This silence, 1 have been arguing, is a choice of the theorists, not an element of the theory.

13 See Paul Smith,Discemingthe Subject, for a discussion of both the ways that subject and agency have been conflated within critical and postmodernist theories, and of the ways that we might reconfigure relations between these theories to make agency available for discussion once more.

141 especially want to acknowledge Arabella Lyon, who read innumerable drafts of this article, and without whose help I would probably still be drafting. Despite deep misgivings about postmodernist projects, Donald C. Freeman generously offered excellent suggestions for sharpening the article's arguments. Susan Wells and Linda Brodkey offered advice and support throughout. And the anonymous reviewers at lAC helped me to improve both the introductory and closing sections. Remaining problems are, of course, all mine.

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