Lecture 3 Context 语境.pptVIP

Lecture 3Context and Text 3.1 What is a text? A text is a semantic unit, which is not composed of sentences but is realized in sentences. (Halliday 1978: 135) Text is a social exchange of meanings The meanings are the selections made by the speaker from the options that constitute the meaning potential; text is the actualization of this meaning potential, the process of semantic choice. (Halliday 1978: 122) Text is both a And the relation between text and context is a systematic and dynamic one: on one hand, a text is the result of the context in which it is being realized and where language is being shaped to function purposefully; while, on the other hand, a context is then realized in turn by the text,; i.e., through a text, a context is being created. 3.1 What is a text? Within the Functional Grammar perspective of language, “context and language are interdependent” (Thompson 1996: 9). Below are three figures illustrating the process of text creation. 3.2 The model of language 3.3 Context of Culture Definition of Culture: Fiske, in Television Culture (1987), calls culture the most ‘slippery’ concept of all. Rather than define what culture is, he says what culture consists of: “culture consists of the meanings we make of our social experience and of our social relations, and therefore the sense we have of our “selves” (1987: 20). Halliday also refers to culture as the whole of all meanings and “the total set of options” in “behavior that are available to the individual in his existence as social man.” (Halliday in Coupland and Jaworski 1997: 31). 3.3 Context of Culture Culture, in itself, can be defined as a system of interrelated meanings, or networks of relationships, or as a set of semiotic systems. Thus language is one among a number of these networks, or semiotic systems of meaning that – together – make up human culture and, consequently, comprise the social system underlying it. This social-semiotic