Describing Language: Form and Function - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 5 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Chapter 2: Directions from Structuralism [1987]
Describing Language: Form and Function - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 5 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Ruqaiya Hasan† [+]
Macquarie University
Ruqaiya Hasan, who died in 2015, was a professor of linguistics who taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where 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.
Read her obituary here
Description
This paper shows the variation, the potentiality, the synchronic oscillation, of the sign structuralism. Following Firth in rejecting Saussure’s langue/parôle dichotomy, Hasan argues that potentiality in language is always limited by who we are, how others see us, what rights we enjoy, what obligations we carry. In other words, the potentiality of the sign is actualized within a social context.