Ruqaiya Hasan (3 July 1931 – 24 June 2015) was an Indian linguist and professor who held visiting positions and taught at various universities in England and Australia. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University in Sydney, from which she retired as emeritus professor in 1994. Throughout her career she 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 In 1964 Hasan completed her PhD in linguistics 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 and William Golding. She drew on Halliday's early work, in particular, his "Categories of the Theory of Grammar" paper, which had been published in 1961.
Contributions to linguistics Hasan worked in her career of more than 50 years 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 a 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 MAK Halliday she published what remains the most comprehensive analysis of cohesion in English. In their further co-authored book, Language Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective, Hasan set out the interrelationships of texture and text structure (i.e. her notion of "generic structure potential", or "GSP"). She divided linguistic theories into two categories: "externalist" and "internalist". She applied 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 urged linguists to abandon the externalist view, arguing 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 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 argued that context is essential to resolving Saussure's dichotomy of 'langue' and 'parole'. Hasan made 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 argued that it should be "within the descriptive orbit of linguistics". Further, since systemic functional linguistics is a social semiotic theory of language, then it is incumbent on linguists in this tradition to "throw light on this construct". Hasan 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 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 10 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 was an empirical investigation of semantic variation. Her findings represent linguistic correlates of Basil Bernstein's conception of "coding orientation". Hasan collected some 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. The findings are set out in Hasan 2009, the second volume of her collected papers. Of this work on semantic variation, Jay Lemke, adjunct professor of communication at the University of California, writes:
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