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> Context is almost everywhere and is different almost everywhere.
I was taking alterity almost to an extreme. On the other hand, taking context as consisting of sets of relations allows CHAT to begin talking to other areas such as social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics, which provide a richer language for the exegesis of human communication than in the paper by JW. I am coming to the opinion that taking only an alterity/intersubjectivity dialectic approach without some other ways of parsing what happens during communication is extremely limiting. It's not just in the over simplistic conceptual structure of just two elements, it is also, as JW aludes, in the need for methodology. Ideationally, Halliday's notion of meaning potential -- as the meanings that can be made with available language, and his notion or register -- how context shapes what language actually becomes used, add a lot of texture to description. I'm not adding anything new here. Both Grodon Wells and Jay Lemke have written scores around these ideas !
and one
of the most tractable is a chapter by Gordon in Dialogic inquiry, which locates register directly in relation to actiivty theory. Methodologically, taking language as a fundamental element of human interaction provides a host of methods for studying comnunication of which the different genres of discourse analysis is just one piece.
anyway, must keep it short and be productive elsewhere.
bb
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