On 22/08/2006, at 10:32 PM, bb wrote:
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
bb - An important point for me, as Ruqaiya Hasan and others point
out, is the dialectical relationship between context and language.
Halliday took ethnographer Malinowsky's terms "context of culture"
and "context of situation" and created an instantiation model, as in
a text is an instantiation of a context of situation, and a context
of situation is an instantiation of a context of culture. Register
(the channel of communication, relationship between the
interlocutors, and the nature of the activity) and text have this
dialectic relationship where each influences (shapes as you say) the
unfolding of the other. For me that is where description is enriched
- the text (discourse) as a tool in the activity and its relationship
to those using the discourse/text.
Cheers,
Phil
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