Describing Language: Form and Function - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 5 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Chapter 4: A View of Pragmatics in a Social Semiotic Perspective [2012]
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
Taking issue with the more mainstream view of pragmatics that accepts the validity of competence as universal syntax, Hasan instead argues for a pragmatics with social semiotic perspective which attends to systemic features of the phenomena it seeks to describe. From the social semiotic perspective, linguistics is concerned with the study of language as defined in relation to its users.