The Contempt of Ritual. II

Extract

Ritual is pre-eminently a form of communication. Let us turn therefore to a modern sociologist who conducts research among ourselves into different patterns of communication. Professor Basil Bernstein says that

different speech systems or codes create for their speakers different orders of relevance and relation. The experience of the speakers may then be transformed by what is made significant or relevant by different speech systems. As the child learns his speech, or, in the terms I shall use here, learns specific codes which regulate his verbal acts, he learns the requirements of his social structure. The experience of the child is transformed by the learning generated by his own, apparently voluntary acts of speech. The social structure becomes in this way the sub-stratum of the child’s experience essentially through the manifold consequence of the linguistic process. From this point of view, every time the child speaks or listens, the social structure is reinforced in him and his social identity shaped.

He distinguishes two different types of linguistic codes. One, he calls the elaborated code, in which, as he says, the speaker selects from a wide range of syntactic alternatives, and these are flexibly organized; this speech requires complex planning. In the other, which he calls the restricted code, the speaker draws a much narrower range of syntactic alternatives, and these alternatives are more rigidly organized. The elaborated code is adapted to enable a speaker to make his own intentions explicit. It is adapted to the elucidation of general principles.