Sunday, 28 June 2020

Fontaine's Claim That She Is Using Halliday's Model

Fontaine (2017: 4):
In this paper, the conceptualisation of context is taken primarily from Halliday (1991), see Hasan (2009) which examines the place of context in the SFL framework, including an excellent discussion of Halliday’s 1991 view of context and language.

The two aspects of context are explained by Halliday (1991: 271) as follows:
Language considered as a system – its lexical items and grammatical categories – is to be related to its context of culture; while instances of language in use – specific texts and their component parts – are to be related to their context of situation. Both these contexts are of course outside of language itself.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is untrue. By 'context' Halliday means the culture as semiotic system. Fontaine has already demonstrated (p3) that she misunderstands context as language, co-text, on the one hand, and as the material environment of a text, on the other. It is this claim that Fontaine is using Halliday's model that justifies critiquing her paper in terms of Halliday's model.

[2] To be clear, the two "aspects" of context are the two poles of the cline of instantiation on that stratum: potential (culture) and instance (situation).

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