Language Policy by Yang Bingjun Wang Rui & Rui Wang

Author:Yang, Bingjun,Wang, Rui & Rui Wang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2016-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

5.4 Context in language policy

The idea of context in SFL can be traced back to Malinowski. With careful and extensive observation on language behavior of aborigines in his fieldwork, Malinowski concludes that language is deeply rooted in its surrounding culture and social customs, and that without proper reference to a wider social context, one can hardly understand the essence of language appropriately (Malinowski, 1935). Following Malinowski’s thinking on context, Firth expands the concept of context by incorporating situational context and speech genre into it. Based on Firth’s thinking, the internal relations of context can be illustrated in Table 5.4 below.

Addressing the issue of context, Halliday and Hasan (1989) step back a little in order to give us a clearer account. In their opinion, when linguists focus on the form of language system, for example vocabulary and grammar, the problem of their relations could be solved within language itself; but when we see language system as an organic whole, the relations in the semantic system must be approached externally. Some linguists propose taking the writing system as the standard, while others suggest treating the concept system as the standard. However, the former may ignore the significance of tone in expressing meaning while the latter can hardly distinguish different concepts themselves. Semantic meaning should be perceived as an interwoven mixture of both language and its extra-linguistic social context. This implies that non-linguistic elements constitute an important part in semantic meaning as a whole, and a full display of the semantic meaning often requires a proper understanding of non-linguistic factors from both speaker/writer and listener/reader.

Table 5.4 Structure of situational context Features of participants:

 1: linguistic activities of the participants

 2: non-linguistic activities of the participants

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