Re: LCA: Linguistic borders and contextuality

From: Phil Chappell (philchappell@mac.com)
Date: Thu Jun 23 2005 - 07:53:40 PDT


Wilma,

Have you read the Lantolf/Thorne paper yet? It should afford us a
shared perspective on a couple of the issues you raise, in particular
the notion of 'pre-established' linguistic forms. The following bunch
of questions you raise might be re-framed, as you say, after looking at
the Lantolf/Thorne paper.

> In this sense, I understand the ‘pre-established’ element of language
> to be purely structural? By ‘pre-established’, do we mean ‘accepted’
> and, if so, ‘accepted’ by whom and in what contexts? Must language be
> context-bound? How do we understand ‘context’? If ‘actors’ are
> ‘reaching beyond themselves’ to make meaning – are they, in fact,
> reaching beyond language and context?

Your questions are rather broad - accepted forms of language, notions
of context, de-contextualised (language) activity, Yuri Lotman's
conributions to intertextuality - can we throw your question (below)
out to the group again?

> The question I would like to ask, then, is – does language
> have ‘borders’? Bakhtin references ‘border-crossing’… but what if
> blended contexts in fact merely ‘bend’ borders?

I'd love to start a discussion of Homi Bhabha, but I won't ;-)

Phil



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