M.A.K Halliday. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press, 1978.
Language as Social Semiotic consists of a series of essays that extend Saussure's observation that "Language is a social fact." For Halliday, "Language as social semiotic" means "interpreting language within a sociocultural context, in which the culture itself is interpreted in semiotic terms -- as an information system" (2). Language consists of exchanges of meaning in various interpersonal contexts. Language, as Halliday explains, "does not consist of sentences; it consists of text, or discourse" (2). People in their everyday linguistic exchanges "act out the social structure, affirming their own statuses and roles, establishing and transmitting the shared systems of value and knowledge" (2). How these processes occur, for Halliday, can be seen in the work of Basil Bernstein, who has demonstrated how a culture's semiotic systems vary in their accessibility given different social groups, and in the work of William Labov, who has demonstrated how variation in the linguistic system expresses variation in social status and roles. Halliday specifies these variations in language use in his discussion of dialect and register:
...dialect variation expresses the diversity of social structures (social hierarchies of all kinds), while register variation expresses the diversity of social processes -- what we do is affected by who we are...the division of labour is social....(2)Language both expresses and actively symbolizes social structures and systems. This "twofold function" of language empowers modes of meaning as diverse as "backyard gossip to narrative fiction and epic poetry."
In the collection of essays that constitues Language as Social Semiotic, Halliday views language from the outside rather than as an "elegant self-contained system." Halliday's orientation departs from the view of language as formal logical relations and the idealized speaker/sentence paradigm of Chomskyan linguistics. In a linguistics focused on functional exchange of meaning "the conceptual framework is likely to be drawn from rhetoric rather than from logic, and the grammar is likely to be a grammar of choices, rather than of rules" (4).
The perspective developed in Language as Social Semiotic originates, as Halliday explains, in the ethnographic-descriptive tradition in linguistics that includes Saussure, Hyelmslev, Mathesius and the Prague school, Malinowski, Firth, Boas, Sapir, and Whorf.
The contents of Language as Social Semiotic (by chapter) include: