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The article reviews the article "A public language: some sociological implications of a linguistic form" which is by Basil Bernstein, was published in this journal in 1959, and is reprinted in this issue.

This paper arose out of the empirical requirements to describe and position agents and agencies of symbolic control concerned with the regulation of social relationships, consciousness, disposition and desire. These requirements led to a differentiation of agents in terms of their function and discourse and their segmentation through their specialized fields of activity and their stratification according to hierarchical position in a given field. This model generated a sensitive differentiation and segmentation which provides the social basis for expected differences in interests, motivations and identifications of functionally similar agents operating in different fields of activity. The model raises general issues of social class allocation and the relation between theory and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologist Basil Bernstein's theory of symbolic control and cultural production, reproduction and change, developed since the late 1950's until present day, is famous for its complex, formal and generative character and has gained international acknowledgement. It has provided inspiration for theoretical work in a variety of disciplines and the conceptual framework for robust and sensitive sociological empirical research on cultural and particularly, pedagogic practices and their effects, in many parts of the world. This research in turn was used in the continuous development and refinement of the theory. For a variety of reasons, the theory was not always welcome, or well treated, in the Anglo-Saxon intellectual milieu. It has caused strong controversy and has sometimes become the object of crude oversimplification and miscomprehension, as well as of political and ideological misuse. The theory is explicitly grounded on selected and inventively remolded elements of modern social theory and critically incorporates features of more recent currents of thought.

The analysis in this paper has its origins in a critical account of the sociology of education (Bernstein, 1975) where the various approaches to the study of sociology were taken as the distinguishing feature of the discourse. This matter was further developed (Bernstein, 1996), with the distinction between vertical and horizontal discourses and their various modalities introduced in the context of differentiating this mode of analysis from more 'Bourdieuan' perspectives. This present paper is concerned with filling out and extending the sketches adumbrated in earlier work in a more accessible form. The model proposed generates a language which relates the internal structure of specialised knowledges, the positional nature of their fields or arenas of practice, identity constructions and their change, and the forms of acquisition for successful performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a clarification on points made in a theory of social class communication codes by Michael Huspek. I raised questions about the status of the terms 'code,' 'dueling,' and 'opposition' in my original Rejoinder. For it seems to me that these terms are not known by their internal relations, that is known through a language of their description, but are known only by what is taken to be their realizations. That is, in crude terms they are known by their outputs, not by their 'inputs'. Thus there is no necessity between the terms and what counts as realization. And, if this is the case, there is no principle of interpretation by means of which information provided by, or elicited from, an informant, can be transformed into data. This means that once an example, a stretch of speech, is challenged for its interpretation, or an alternative interpretation is offered, the theory is literally vacuous. This raised a further question about the use of the term 'theory'. I am inclined to think that if a term is only known by a realization, an exemplar, then the term is only a metaphor and the example stands in a metanymic relation to the metaphor: Terms in social theory are likely to be metaphors but if we can substitute x or y for these terms, and if their descriptions and functions are available, then external referents of the theory can be recognized and interpreted with some plausible necessity.

This article presents Basil Bernstein's response to an article by Michael Huspek which advanced a theory of the relationship between social class and communication codes. Bernstein acknowledges that a developing theory creates a burden for those who engage with it. Such a theory requires its readers a recency of reading. In the case of Huspek he seems to have parted company with the theory well before 1975. The major arguments derived from papers published well before 1970. The section headed A Reconsideration of Bernstein's Descriptions of Working-class Speech draws entirely from a paper published in 1962, and the description of codes reduced syntactic complexity goes back to a paper published in 1958. According to Bernstein, it is therefore difficult, if not possible, to comment on Huspek's paper without summarizing or at least referring to developments of the last 20 years. Developments which not only have escaped Huspek, but perhaps equally seriously have escaped the anonymous reviewers whom Huspek acknowledges. Bernstein's comments is grouped under two headings: Social Class and Education, and Class and Oppositional Codes. Huspek points out that Bernstein has operated with a two level model of empirical research.

Criticizes A.D. Edwards' construct of an idiosyncratic concept of classroom code and that classroom practice fails to demonstrate the use of such code. Set of concepts whereby code modalities may be identified; Close relation between the theory and its empirical base.

This paper is a response to Harker & May 1987 which rejects as inaccurate and misleading their 'exposition' of the theory, the analysis of the place of rules in the theory, the analysis of what is taken to be its structuralist base, and shows how forms of the practical sense may be realised in, and described by, the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports social class differences in the emphasis placed upon the use of language in two areas of the socialization of the child: inter-person relationships and the acquisition of basic skills. The sample of 100 mothers is a sub-sample of 120 mothers who live in a middle class area and 192 mothers who live in a working class area. (The correlation between area and the social class position of the family is 0.74.) The results obtained from the use of a closed schedule show that the middle class mothers, relative to the working class mothers, place a much greater emphasis upon the use of language in the person area; whereas the working class mothers, relative to the middle class mothers, place a greater emphasis upon the use of language in the transmission of basic skills. The results are consonant with the prediction derived from the theory of restricted and elaborated linguistic codes which has also been used to generate a model for the understanding of social learning and forms of cultural discontinuity between the home and the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence from a sample of 351 families reveals social class differences in mother's conceptions of the uses of toys. Both the degree of agreement in the ranking of six possible uses of toys and the differentiation of the choices follow a social class gradient. Within the lower three social class groups the score on an index of maternal-child communication relates to maternal conceptions of the uses of toys. A significant correlation exists between the rank order of two uses of toys and the measured ability of six year old children even when the effect of social class is partialed out of this relationship. Maternal conception of the uses of toys is thought to have an important bearing upon socialization into the role of infant school pupil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only a summary will be given here as the study has been described in detail in the previous report. Five sub-groups were selected with the characteristics shown in the article from two parent samples. The members of the main sample were drawn from a public school and a day release college. The speech sample consisted for each group of the 1800 words, approximately, which followed the first five minutes of the discussion. Long and short utterances were distinguished according to whether the utterance was between ten and forty syllables or over forty syllables.

Focuses on the relationship of linguistic codes, hesitation phenomena and intelligence. Elaborated and restricted linguistic codes; Levels of cognitive behavior.

This article focuses on linguistic forms or codes. Changes in the form of the social relation affect both the planning procedures used in the preparation of speech and the orientation of the listener. Different forms of social relations can generate quite different speech-systems or linguistic codes by affecting the planning procedures. These different speech-systems or codes create different orders of relevance and relation for their speakers. Two general types of code can be distinguished: elaborated and restricted. These codes can be defined in terms of the probability of predicting for any one speaker which syntactic elements are to be used to organize meaning across a representative range of speech. They themselves are functions of a particular form of social relationship. The pure form of a restricted code would be one where all words and hence the organizing structure are wholly predictable for speakers and listeners. It defines the form of the social relationship by restricting the verbal signaling of individual differences. Individuals mainly relate to each other through the social position or status they occupy. An elaborated code, where prediction is much less possible at the syntactic level, is likely to arise in that social relationship which raises the tension in its members to select a verbal arrangement from their linguistic resources which closely fits specific referents.

The goals of this session are as follows: 1) to familiarize attendees with the complex system issues that child and adolescent psychiatrists encounter today when they work in hospitals and residential treatment centers, including forensic, financial, ethical, community, logistic, and personnel concerns; 2) to be more knowledgeable about compromised care as a result of the impact of these obstacles; and 3) to understand how high-complexity "outlier" cases test the care systems of inpatient units and to learn new strategies to meet these challenges. Child and adolescent psychiatrists too often encounter outliers in their hospital and residential treatment center work. We need to advocate for enhanced research efforts to identify more effective delivery systems and evidence-based treatment interventions (eg, the use of the wraparound process and other delivery systems) for the most serious childhood mental illnesses and vulnerable children. [Extracted from the article]

The goals of this presentations are as follows: 1) to emphasize the role of medical ethics and professionalism in the ongoing education of child and adolescent psychiatrists; and 2) to support the professional development of the attendees using case studies that highlight current salient clinical, social, service delivery, training, and legal issues. Child and adolescent psychiatrists frequently encounter complex ethical dilemmas in their clinical, academic, social policy, and administrative work. [Extracted from the article]