Abstract
This paper investigates the relationship between culture and language through analyzing material and semiotic features in a context of language-in-use. The paper first discusses what is meant by ‘material’ and ‘semiotic’ context from an SFL perspective. It then investigates the way in which these two ‘senses’ of context may converge within a specific instance, affecting interaction in a subtle way and together construing a cultural phenomenon.
Highlights
The title of this paper derives from a selection of titles, some of which included the abbreviation ‘vs’ between two concepts, given to me to choose from as a title for a presentation at the inaugural Halliday and Hasan Forum held at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in December 2016.1 I chose the title “the semiotic sense of contexts vs the material sense of context” as it related most closely to my interest in the concept of context in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
The analysis of Excerpt Two has shown that the material elements of the context, e.g. the tray filled with food and the location of the interaction, are key to interpreting what is going on in the beginning of the exchange, the semiotic context, even though those material elements are not, picked up in the language of the text in any explicit way
While the analysis and interpretation of just one line of the dialogue demonstrates the rich relationship between language, context and culture, there remains the issue of how to organize and model such an analysis and interpretation
Summary
The title of this paper derives from a selection of titles, some of which included the abbreviation ‘vs’ between two concepts, given to me to choose from as a title for a presentation at the inaugural Halliday and Hasan Forum held at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in December 2016.1 I chose the title “the semiotic sense of contexts vs the material sense of context” as it related most closely to my interest in the concept of context in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Elements in any model representing context at the system end of the system—instance continuum are only ‘potentially’ semiotic, and developing a description of what may be potentially relevant to language-in-use seems like an impossible task Those features that interactants attend to in a situation of language use, the Field, Tenor, and Mode, can be generalized into a set of primary systems of Field, Tenor and Mode briefly defined here as: Field: Action, Sphere of Action, Performance of Action Tenor: Social Hierarchy, Agentive Role, Social Distance Mode: Role of Language, Channel, Medium [see Bowcher 2014; cf (Butt D.: Parameters of context, unpublished); Hasan 2014] Essentially, these define what each of these contextual parameters is all about: Field is about the nature of the activity and its content; Tenor is about the nature of the participants vis-à-vis one another in the situation and in the text (which is a part of the situation); Mode is about the nature of the means of communication in the situation and how this affects the role and nature of the language used.
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