Intertextuality, heteroglossia, and systemic functional linguistics: a framework for analysing ideology

This study is concerned with presenting a framework for the analysis of ideology. Ideology is seen as a symbolically articulated phenomenon, understandable through a detailed description of the intertextual and heteroglossic relations that a text enacts in tandem with analysis of the patterns of foregrounding within the text. Through the investigation, this study aims to map significantly relevant elements of the context of culture (Malinowski 1935; Halliday and Hasan 1985) for a particular text. It adopts the systemic functional linguistic model both for lexicogrammatical analysis and for defining the context-text relationship (e.g. Halliday and Hasan 1985; Hasan 1995, 1999; Matthiessen 1993). -- In order to exemplify the framework one central text is analysed in the context of its relevant intertexts - the realizations of the meanings put forward by the various social groups which significantly 'frame' that text. The central text is an Australian New South Wales Government advertisement for NSW Forest Agreements (hereafter NSWFA text). Corresponding texts, realizing and instantiating intertextually significant Discourses, are positioned for analysis using the 'issues as ideological systems' model (Martin 1985,1986). Lemke's conception of intertextual semantics (e.g. Lemke 1995a) is used to show how meanings in the NSWFA text construe meanings in two competing Discourses (those of the timber industry and of conservationism). Examination of the meaning-making choices in the lexicogrammar, rhetorical structure, appraisal, visual modality and multimodality is carried out on the NSWFA text in order to realise the consistently foregrounded patterns of meanings (Hasan 1985; Halliday and Hasan 1985). Based on these findings, discourse formations, which can be understood as the lexicogrammatical semantic relations in which a participant is enmeshed together with its intertextually derived meanings, are constructed for the core participants in the NSWFA text. These are then compared with discourse formations in the texts of the surrounding Discourses to reveal the heteroglossic relations that the text enacts. By analysis of the instantiation of meanings made in the surrounding texts - the Discourse voices of social groups in the community - and of the heteroglossic value-orientations constructed towards these social groups, the framework is able to put on display the ideology of the text.