The concept context of situation introduced by Malinowski some eighty years ago has now become an essential element of the vocabulary of any linguistic theory whose aim is to reveal the nature of language. With the abandonment of the spurious distinction between competence and performance, the process of language, i.e., language use, has claimed its rightful place in the study of language. The chapters of this book focus on the relations of context and text, conceptualising the latter as language operative in some recognizable social context. It is argued that context is not simply a backdrop for the occurrence of words; rather, it is an active element which on the one hand plays a crucial role in the progression of human discourse and on the other enters into and shapes the very nature of language as process and as system, furnishing the foundation for functionality in language. Acting as the interface between language and society, context analysis reveals the power of language for creating, maintaining and changing human relationships.

The concept context of situation introduced by Malinowski some eighty years ago has now become an essential element of the vocabulary of any linguistic theory whose aim is to reveal the nature of language. With the abandonment of the spurious distinction between competence and performance, the process of language, i.e., language use, has claimed its rightful place in the study of language. The chapters of this book focus on the relations of context and text, conceptualising the latter as language operative in some recognizable social context. It is argued that context is not simply a backdrop for the occurrence of words; rather, it is an active element which on the one hand plays a crucial role in the progression of human discourse and on the other enters into and shapes the very nature of language as process and as system, furnishing the foundation for functionality in language. Acting as the interface between language and society, context analysis reveals the power of language for creating, maintaining and changing human relationships.

The concept context of situation introduced by Malinowski some eighty years ago has now become an essential element of the vocabulary of any linguistic theory whose aim is to reveal the nature of language. With the abandonment of the spurious distinction between competence and performance, the process of language, i.e., language use, has claimed its rightful place in the study of language. The chapters of this book focus on the relations of context and text, conceptualising the latter as language operative in some recognizable social context. It is argued that context is not simply a backdrop for the occurrence of words; rather, it is an active element which on the one hand plays a crucial role in the progression of human discourse and on the other enters into and shapes the very nature of language as process and as system, furnishing the foundation for functionality in language. Acting as the interface between language and society, context analysis reveals the power of language for creating, maintaining and changing human relationships.

The first chapter in this volume – ‘Language and society: a systemic functional perspective’, a paper originally appearing in Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective (Equinox 2005) – clearly establishes the author’s ideological position, namely, that ‘the social and the semiotic are inseparable: their co-evolution is the history of humanity’. As Professor Ruqaiya Hasan, explains, it is an ideological position which is rooted in the writings of Malinowski, Firth, Bernstein and Halliday, and fundamental to SFL’s ‘struggle to understand how and why language works’. This ‘interdependence of the social and the semiotic’ becomes apparent in the ways ‘we use language to do things in social life’, prompting exploration into ‘situationally appropriate discourse’ (register) describable in terms of ‘the nature of the activity (field)’, ‘interactant relations (tenor)’, and ‘changing modes of contact’.

In ‘Meaning, Context and Text – Fifty Years after Malinowski’ (1985), Hasan takes issue with ‘unscholarly reading’ of Malinowski, which seems more intent on ‘keeping alive legends’ than critically acknowledging his ‘failure to recognize the full implications of the systemicity of language.’ Systemicists, on the other hand, recognizing the dialectic between text, meaning and context, have responded to Malinowski’s ‘underestimation of systemicity’ by attempting to answer such crucial questions as: • What aspects of the context can always be reconstituted by the language of a narrative utterance, more generally, any displaced text? • Why is it that the language of a displaced text invariably permits the reconstitution of these and no other contextual phenomena?

Coded messages, passed between us, turn the subjective into the intersubjective, the private into the public. As Hasan explains in What’s Going On?: A dynamic view of context in language (1981), there are multiple semiotic codes at work in both text creation and interpretation. Formed out of systems of social convention, these codes not only convey but also shape our perception. The individual, writes Hasan, ‘can be seen as a being who has been actively shaped by the sum of his own interactions and hence by the nature of the multiple semiotic codes prevalent in his community.’ The blurring of artificially imposed dichotomies between the individual and the social, the unique and the conventional follows from an appreciation of the inherently social nature of interaction, ‘no matter how personal the ends it is made to achieve.’

‘Wherefore context? The ontogenesis of meaning exchange’ (2001), the concluding chapter in this first section on Language in the context of life in society was first presented at the International Conference on Discourse Analysis at the University of Macau in October 1997. Unapologetically, Hasan begins by acknowledging that the paper ‘offers neither any technicalities that can be readily borrowed and quickly applied to the analysis of another text of one’s choosing, nor does it make an appeal to our moral sense of responsibility.’ Hoping instead to ‘enhance our understanding of the place of context in the system and process of language’, she puts forward a way of conceptualizing the category of context which rests on the principle that society, semiosis and the brain form ‘a trinity no one member of which can exist without the other two.’

The concept context of situation introduced by Malinowski some eighty years ago has now become an essential element of the vocabulary of any linguistic theory whose aim is to reveal the nature of language. With the abandonment of the spurious distinction between competence and performance, the process of language, i.e., language use, has claimed its rightful place in the study of language. The chapters of this book focus on the relations of context and text, conceptualising the latter as language operative in some recognizable social context. It is argued that context is not simply a backdrop for the occurrence of words; rather, it is an active element which on the one hand plays a crucial role in the progression of human discourse and on the other enters into and shapes the very nature of language as process and as system, furnishing the foundation for functionality in language. Acting as the interface between language and society, context analysis reveals the power of language for creating, maintaining and changing human relationships.

Explaining the word Functional in Systemic Functional Linguistics, Professor Ruqaiya Hasan, in The Conception of Context in Text (1995), notes the relation between the metafunctions, on the one hand, and the contextual parameters of field, tenor and mode, on the other, such as is accounted for in the context metafunction hook-up hypothesis (or cmh hypothesis), i.e. the speaker’s perception of field, tenor and mode, i.e. context of situation, activates the choice of certain meanings. As Hasan explains, ‘On the one hand, a speech event is meaningful, because, as talk, it is answerable to the system of language. But on the other hand, the very motivation for the speech event has to be attributed to the fact that it impinges on human beings because, as action, it has a concrete social basis.’ The key to identifying context types then is to identify text types – i.e. what various texts hold in common and what they do not share. In her words ‘by virtue of its meaning-wording choices, each text announces itself as an instance of some registral variety whose correlate is some specific category of context.’

In Speaking with Reference to Context (1999), Hasan acknowledges instances, however, where contextual/registerial constancy across a text can be called into question, i.e. where ‘the integrity of a text survives certain kinds of contextual/registerial changes.’ Rather than describe the relationship between context and text in deterministic terms, Hasan instead describes the relationship as being more along the lines of a ‘realizational dialectic’.

The ‘well regulated nature of parole’, i.e. naturally occurring discourse involving ‘exchanges of meaning between ordinary speakers as participants in “concerted social activities”’ (Malinowski 1923) should, argues Hasan in The Place of Context in a Systemic Functional Model (2009), ‘put both language use and context centre stage in linguistics’.

In Towards a Paradigmatic Description of Context: Systems, Metafunctions, and Semantics (2014), Hasan illustrates how a paradigmatic description of context can be accomplished using a system network, i.e. sys-net. Sys-nets, which have successfully been used to account for variant possibilities, i.e. choices, specific to parameters in other strata, e.g semantics and lexicogrammar, may also be applied to the stratum of context. As Hasan points out, however, ‘The problem is to establish their calibration in a way that the realized actuals agree with the experience of the community whose language and culture are under description.’

The concept context of situation introduced by Malinowski some eighty years ago has now become an essential element of the vocabulary of any linguistic theory whose aim is to reveal the nature of language. With the abandonment of the spurious distinction between competence and performance, the process of language, i.e., language use, has claimed its rightful place in the study of language. The chapters of this book focus on the relations of context and text, conceptualising the latter as language operative in some recognizable social context. It is argued that context is not simply a backdrop for the occurrence of words; rather, it is an active element which on the one hand plays a crucial role in the progression of human discourse and on the other enters into and shapes the very nature of language as process and as system, furnishing the foundation for functionality in language. Acting as the interface between language and society, context analysis reveals the power of language for creating, maintaining and changing human relationships.

The concept context of situation introduced by Malinowski some eighty years ago has now become an essential element of the vocabulary of any linguistic theory whose aim is to reveal the nature of language. With the abandonment of the spurious distinction between competence and performance, the process of language, i.e., language use, has claimed its rightful place in the study of language. The chapters of this book focus on the relations of context and text, conceptualising the latter as language operative in some recognizable social context. It is argued that context is not simply a backdrop for the occurrence of words; rather, it is an active element which on the one hand plays a crucial role in the progression of human discourse and on the other enters into and shapes the very nature of language as process and as system, furnishing the foundation for functionality in language. Acting as the interface between language and society, context analysis reveals the power of language for creating, maintaining and changing human relationships.