Ruqaiya Hasan (3 July 1931[a] – 24 June 2015) was a professor of linguistics who held visiting positions and taught at various universities in England.

The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues.

The title of her thesis was 'A Linguistic Study of Contrasting Features in the Style of Two Contemporary English Prose Writers'.

In the 1960s she worked at the Sociolinguistic Research Centre with Basil Bernstein, on issues concerning the relation of language and the distribution of forms of consciousness.

In the externalist approach, "language is reduced to a name device: it becomes a set of 'names' that label pre-existing things, properties, events, actions, and so on.

It is a condition of naming that the phenomena should exist and be recognisable as having specific identities quite independent of the 'names' that the speakers of the language choose to give them.

[14] She argued for the application of the system network as a mechanism for the systematic description of the regularities across diverse social contexts.

[15] While working at Macquarie University in Sydney, Hasan undertook 10 years of research into the role of everyday language in the formation of children's orientation to social context.

According to Hasan, of the Prague School linguists Mukařovský has produced "the most coherent view of the nature of verbal art and its relation to language".

We need to be able to specify under what conditions a pattern in language is significant such that we consider it to be foregrounded, and, therefore, can attribute to it some of the responsibilities for conveying the text's deeper meanings.

Semantic drift refers to the manner in which an ensemble of features take the reader toward “the same general kind of meaning” (Hasan, 1985a: 95).