Martin (1992: 121):
These orientations [situation vs community] can be systematised as follows. Adapting Malinowski's terms, a distinction can be drawn between context of culture and context of situation. Context of situation refers here to relevant information that can be perceived (seen, heard, felt, tasted, smelled), including text; context of culture embraces relevant information which cannot be perceived, but which can be assumed because of shared knowledge among interlocutors deriving from their membership in some definable community.
Blogger Comment:
[1] The relation between 'situation' and 'community' — even on Martin's understanding of these terms — is not the same relation as that between 'context of situation' and 'context of culture', as will be demonstrated below.
[2] Here Martin fails to inform the reader that Malinowski's terms had already been introduced into SFL theory by Halliday; see, for example, Halliday & Hasan (1985/9: 5-7). In doing so, Martin thus falsely presents the work of others as his own.
In SFL theory, 'context' is the culture modelled as a semiotic system, whose expression plane includes language — a connotative semiotic in Hjelmslev's (1961) terms. Language realises context; context is a higher level of symbolic abstraction than language.
The relation between 'context of culture' and 'context of situation' is instantiation, with the former constituting the 'system pole' of the cline of instantiation, and the latter constituting the 'instance pole'. In other words, a 'situation' is a instance of 'culture' as potential, where both are conceived of as semiotic, not material.
[3] The material phenomena that can be perceived by interlocutors are features of the material setting. Any such phenomena only feature in the semiotic context of situation if they figure as an instance of the culture that is realised by the (instance of) language of the interlocutors.
[4] This blurs an important distinction. To be clear, the 'surrounding' text is the co-text, and so is language that realises context, not context itself. On the other hand, instances of culture realised in any ancillary texts, as in a teaching situation, can feature in the semiotic context of situation.
[5] To be clear, the 'context of culture' is the cultural potential that can be realised in the meaning potential that is language.
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[2] Here Martin fails to inform the reader that Malinowski's terms had already been introduced into SFL theory by Halliday; see, for example, Halliday & Hasan (1985/9: 5-7). In doing so, Martin thus falsely presents the work of others as his own.
In SFL theory, 'context' is the culture modelled as a semiotic system, whose expression plane includes language — a connotative semiotic in Hjelmslev's (1961) terms. Language realises context; context is a higher level of symbolic abstraction than language.
The relation between 'context of culture' and 'context of situation' is instantiation, with the former constituting the 'system pole' of the cline of instantiation, and the latter constituting the 'instance pole'. In other words, a 'situation' is a instance of 'culture' as potential, where both are conceived of as semiotic, not material.
[3] The material phenomena that can be perceived by interlocutors are features of the material setting. Any such phenomena only feature in the semiotic context of situation if they figure as an instance of the culture that is realised by the (instance of) language of the interlocutors.
[4] This blurs an important distinction. To be clear, the 'surrounding' text is the co-text, and so is language that realises context, not context itself. On the other hand, instances of culture realised in any ancillary texts, as in a teaching situation, can feature in the semiotic context of situation.
[5] To be clear, the 'context of culture' is the cultural potential that can be realised in the meaning potential that is language.
__________
Importantly, 374 pages later in this work, these inconsistencies are further compounded when Martin (p495) reinterprets context of situation as register and context of culture as genre. The absurdity of substituting two perspectives on functional varieties of language (register and genre) for opposite poles of the instantiation cline for context (situation and culture) can be made clear by substituting the later terms for the terms introduced above, yielding:
Register refers here to relevant information that can be perceived (seen, heard, felt, tasted, smelled), including text; genre embraces relevant information which cannot be perceived, but which can be assumed because of shared knowledge among interlocutors deriving from their membership in some definable community.
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