GRAMMATICALISING ECOLOGY: THE POLITICS OF BABY SEALS AND KANGAROOS

Abstract

1. Linguists and ideology. Depending on where you are coming from, ideology means a number of different things. The point of departure in this paper is linguistics, as it has developed out of the work of Firth, Hjelmslev and Halliday. These linguists in particular have always adopted a rather transcendent view of language and its relation to the living of life. And they have developed contextually oriented models in order to explore the relations between language and use. Here we will be asking how ideology might be fitted into models of this kind, where work on register and genre has already been proceeding for some decades. 

2. Assumptions. One of the main problems in dealing with ideology is that one is forced to work at a very high level of abstraction. This means that in a short paper a great deal must be assumed. The arguments in this paper depend on a particular model of language and context which is currently being developed at the University of Sydney. The principal assumptions of this model will be briefly presented before moving on to the proposals in Section 3.