4 - Context and culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2009
Summary
What is context? Everything and nothing. Like a shadow, it flees from those who try to flee from it, evading the levels and categories of theory, and pursues those who try to flee from it, insinuating itself as the unnoticed ground upon which even the most explicit statements depend. If you are persuaded by the phenomenological concept of incompleteness, then context is inexhaustible. The more you try to specify it, the more blank spots you project, all in need of filling it. Ultimately, context is nothing less than the human world in which language use takes place and in relation to which language structure is organized.
(William Hanks, 1996: 140).Introduction
In Discourse and Context we saw that Malinowski and Firth, and later Halliday, made a distinction between the notions “context of situation” and “context of culture.” The first kind of context is local, and involves participants face-to-face, and within a specific setting. “Cultural context” is usually defined as more global, and involving members of a whole community, as well as many of their fundamental properties, such as their knowledge, norms and values. In the previous chapter, I have called this the social “macro-context.”
In this chapter, I shall explore these “cultural” dimensions of context, although we need to begin to question the very notion of “culture.” I am concerned here not only with the global contexts of cultures, but also with the influence of culture on local contexts.
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- Society and DiscourseHow Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk, pp. 154 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009