Le Registre, ou la sémantique en situation

Un registre est une variété linguistique (un sous-ensemble d'une langue) appropriée à une situation sociale particulière. Un registre particulier de la langue est caractérisé par un certain nombre d'écarts (par rapport à la langue standard), de variations spécifiques — qu'elles soient lexicales, syntaxiques, phonologiques, morphologiques ou pragmatiques — et réservé à des situations circonscrites. Par exemple le registre enfantin qu'on utilise en s'adressant à des enfants dans ce qu'on appelle en anglais le motherese ou le registre foot qu'utilisent les commentateurs pour exploiter une connivence avec leurs auditeurs en construisant des énoncés impossibles dans tout autre contexte.

Excellent article dans la WikipediA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(linguistics)

C’est l’étagement des différents registres de la langue ou «niveaux de langue» que désigne l’expression superposed variation dans le célèbre article de John Gumperz sur La Communauté de parole.

John J. GUMPERZ (1968). The Speech Community. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (pp. 381-6). New York : Macmillan. Repris dans Alessandro Duranti (Edited by), Linguistic Anthropology. A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 43-52.

Michael Halliday distingue trois paramètres déterminant un registre de la langue: le champ (le sujet du discours), la teneur (les participants et leurs liens) et le mode (ou canal de communication).

Michael [Alexander Kirkwood] Halliday
Language and Social Semiotic
The social interpretation of language and meaning
Baltimore, University Park Press, 1978

pp. 221-224:

However, for many purposes it is enough to record the 'register' that is being used; and here the concepts of 'field', 'tenor' and 'mode' provide a valuable framework for giving information about language use in as succinct a way as possible.

1 / Field [le champ du discours]

The kind of language we use varies, as we should expect, according to what we are doing. In differing contexts, we tend to select different words and different grammatical patterns — simply because we are expressing different kinds of meaning. All we need add to this, in order to clarify the notion of register, is that the 'meanings' that are involved are a part of what we are doing; or rather, they are part of the expression of what we are doing. In other words, one aspect of the field of discourse is simply the subject matter; we talk about different things, and therefore use different words for doing so. If this was all there was to it, and the field of discourse was only a question of subject matter, it would hardly need saying; but, in fact, 'what we are talking about' has to be seen as a special case of a more general concept, that of 'what we are doing', or 'what is going on, within which the language is playing a part.' It is this broader concept that is referred to as the 'field of discourse'. If, for example, the field of discourse is football, then no matter whether we are playing it or discussing it around a table we are likely to use certain linguistic forms which reflect the football context. But the two are essentially different kinds of activity, and this is clearly reflected in the language: if we are actually playing we are unlikely to waste our breath referring explicitly to the persons and objects in the game. This difference, between the language of playing football and the language of discussing football, is also a reflection of the 'mode of discourse'; see below.

The 'field', therefore, refers to what the participants in the context of situation are actually engaged in doing, like 'buying-selling a newspaper' in our example above. This is a more general concept than that of subject matter, and a more useful one in the present context since we may not actually be talking about either buying and selling or newspapers. We may be talking about the weather; but that does not mean that the field of discourse is meteorology — talking about the weather is part of the strategy of buying and selling.

2 / Tenor [la teneur du discours]

The language we use varies according to the level of formality, of technicality, and so on. What is the variable underlying this type of distinction? Essentially, it is the role relationships in the situation in question: who the participants in the communication group are, and in what relationship they stand to each other.

This is what, following Spencer and Gregory (1964), we called the 'tenor of discourse'. Examples of role relationships, that would be reflected in the language used, are teacher/pupil, parent/child, child/child in peer group, doctor/patient, customer/salesman, casual acquaintances on a train, and so on. It is the role relationships, including the indirect relationship between a writer and his audience, that determine such things as the level of technicality and degree of formality. Contexts of situation, or settings, such as a public lecture, playground at playtime, church service, cocktail party and so on can be regarded as institutionalized role relationships and hence as stabilized patterns of the tenor of discourse.

3 / Mode [le canal ou la longueur d'onde]

The language we use differs according to the channel or wavelength we have selected. Sometimes we find ourselves, especially those of us who teach, in a didactic mode, at other times the mode may be fanciful, or commercial, or imperative: we may choose to behave as teacher, or poet, or advertiser, or commanding officer. Essentially, this is a question of what function language is being made to serve in the context of situation; this is what underlies the selection of the particular rhetorical channel.

This is what we call the 'mode of discourse'; and fundamental to it is the distinction between speaking and writing. This distinction partly cuts across the rhetorical modes, but it also significantly determines them: although certain modes can be realized through either medium, they tend to take quite different forms according to whether spoken or written — written advertising, for example, does not say the same things as sales talk. This is because the two media represent, essentially, different functions of lan­guage, and therefore embody selections of different kinds. The question underlying the concept of the mode of discourse is, what function is language being used for, what is its specific role in the goings-on to which it is contributing? To persuade? to soothe? to sell? to control? to explain? or just to oil the works, as in what Malinowski called 'phatic communion', exem­plified above by the talk about the weather, which merely helps the situation along? Here the distinction between the language of playing a game, such as bridge or football, and the language of discussing a game becomes clear. In the former situation, the language is functioning as a part of the game, as a pragmatic expression of play behaviour; whereas in the latter, it is part of a very different kind of activity, and may be informative, didactic, argumentative, or any one of a number of rhetorical modes of discourse.

It will be seen from the foregoing that the categories of 'field of discourse', 'tenor of discourse', and 'mode of discourse' are not themselves kinds or varieties of language. They are the backdrop, the features of the context of situation which determine the kind of language used. In other words, they determine what is often referred to as the register: that is, the types of meaning that are selected, and their expression in grammar and vocabulary. And they determine the register collectively, not piecemeal. There is not a great deal that one can predict about the language that will be used if one knows only the field of discourse or only the tenor or the mode. But if we know all three, we can predict quite a lot; and, of course, the more detailed the information we have, the more linguistic features of the text we shall be able to predict.