context in SFG
...in¡¯s interpretation of social context includes genre (context of culture) and register (context of situation) (Martin, 1992:495). Just as Figure2 shows: The context of culture can be thought of as deriving from a vast complex network of all of the genres which make up a particular culture. Genres are staged, goal oriented social processes in which people engage as members of the culture. These genres include all of those routines from everyday experience such as purchase of goods (food, clothing etc), medical consultation, eating in a restaurant etc to the genres of particular forms of social life including church services, TV interviews, getting arrested etc. Of course they also include genres which are valued in schooling. Lessons (and lectures) are genres, as are groupwork and tutorials etc and written genres such as Figure 2. narratives, reports, explanations, procedures, expositions and many others. These genres have their own distinctive structures (or routinized stages) because of the social purposes they fulfil in the culture. They occur in particular situation types and it is the characteristics of this situation type that influence the forms of language that realize the genre. So the context of situation (register) is the second aspect of social context that influences the linguistic realization of the genre. 2.3.3 Halliday¡¯ concept of the context of situation Along Malinowski-Firth line, in order to consider how people make predictions about the kinds of meaning that are being exchanged, Halliday (Halliday and Hasan,1985) theorized the context of situation (register) of a text in terms of the contextual variables of Field, Tenor and Mode: 1) the field of discourse refers to what is happening, to the nature of the social action that is taking place: what is it that participants are engaged in, in which language figures as some essential component? 2) the tenor of discourse refers to who is taking part in, to the nature of the participants, their statuses and roles: what kinds of role relationship obtain among the participants, including permanent and temporary relationships of one kind or another, both the types of speech role that they are talking on in the dialogue and the whole cluster of socially significant relationships in which they are involved? 3) The mode of discourse refers to what part the language is playing, what it is that the participants are expecting the language to do for them in that situation: the symbolic organization of the text, the status that it has, and it function in the context, including the channel (is it spoken or written or some combination of the two?) and also the rhetorical mode, what is being achieved by the text in terms of such categories as persuasive, expository, didactic, and the like. These concepts serve to interpret the social context of a text, the environment in which meanings are being exchanged. Look at figure3 (Halliday and Hasan, 1985:12). The notion of Field has been further elaborated by Martin (1992:292) defining Fields as "sets of activity sequences oriented to some global institutional purpose" - and citing examples such as linguistics, tennis, cooking, wine making, gardening etc. These activities involve participants, processes and attendant circumstances and are temporally and/or consequentially linked to form sequences (Martin, 1992:536-42). Tenor is concerned with the semiotics of relationships, mediating these along the dimensions of status, contact and affect (Martin, 1992:523-525). Status refers to the relative position of the participants in the social hierarchy of a culture while contact refers to their degree of institutional involvement with each other. Affect addresses Halliday's Figure 3 (1978:33) notion of the "degree of emotional charge" in the relationship between participants. Mode is discussed by Hasan (Halliday and Hasan, 1985:58) under three sub-headings. The first is the extent to which the language is constitutive of, or ancillary to the social process in which it functions. The second is the extent to which the form of language used incorporates (the possibility of) feedback from the addressee. This variation is referred to as a continuum from spoken to written medium. Written medium is usually associated with the constitutive role of language, while spoken medium is associated with both constitutive and ancillary. Hasan's third sub-heading is channel - the modality through which one comes in contact with the message, which is referred to as the phonic channel and the graphic channel. It is possible for medium and channel to be congruent, ie. spoken/phonic, written/graphic, but to the extent that one writes using the same grammatical form as when one speaks, the channel may be graphic but the medium more spoken. Similarly, it is possible to speak using the grammatical constructions more typical of written text, so that the channel is phonic but the medium is written. In Martin's (1992) account, text structure is generated at the level of genre and, as part of the realisation process, generic choices pre-select Field, Mode and Tenor options associated with particular elements of text structure. The interpretation of context then includes two communication planes, genre (context of culture) and register (context of situation), with register functioning as the expression form of genre, at the same time as language functions as the expression form of register. Martin (1992:495) schematises this three plane model as Figure4 shown below: Figure 4. Relationship between Context and SFG 3.1 SFG Systemic-functional grammar (SFG) is a theory of language centered around the notion of language function. It is a major linguistic theory receiving special attention from researchers working in natural language generation. It was developed at the University of London by Michael Halliday, as a continuation of the work of his predecessors there, in particular that of J.R.Firth.It was called ¡°systemic¡± because of the detailed system network for many areas of English grammar, and for interesting areas of other language. It was ¡°functional¡± because of the theory of the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. There is no single comprehensive and authoritative textbook of SFG. Halliday is authoritative but explicitly only covers the functional part of SFG, not the systemic part. His theory¡¯s central notion is ¡°stratification¡±, such that language is analysed in terms of four stata: context, Semantics, Lexico-Grammar and Phonology-Graphology. 3.2 language and social context in SFG SFG starts at social context, and looks at how language both acts upon, and is constrained by, this social context. From the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) the oral and written texts we engage with and produce have their particular linguistic form because of the social purposes they fulfil. The focus is not on texts as decontextualized structural entities in their own right but rather on the mutually predictive relationships between texts and the social practices they realise. The form of human language is as it is since it co-evolves with the meanings which co-evolve with the community's contexts of social interaction (Hasan, 1992:24). SFG then, treats language and social context as complementary levels of semiosis, related by the concept of realisation. The relationship between language and social context has been represented using the image of co-tangential circles as in Figure 5 (Halliday and Martin, 1993:25). Figure 5: Language as the realisation of social context This representation is intended to establish the semiotic system of language as the realisation of the more abstract semiotic system of social context. 3.2 study context from the strata of language in Functional grammar Language bridges from the cultural meanings of social context (the social hierarchies and role relationships, the institutional activities, and the related distribution of language use within these) to sound or writing. It does this by moving from higher orders of abstraction to lower ones. These orders of abstraction are organised into three levels or strata - semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology (or graphology). Figure 6. Semantics is the interface between language and context of situation (register). Semantics is therefore concerned with the meanings that are involved with the three situational variables Field, Tenor and Mode. Ideational meanings realise Field, interpersonal meanings realise Tenor and textual meanings realise Mode. Lexicogrammar is a resource for wording meanings, ie. realising them as configurations of lexical and grammatical items. It follows then, that lexicogrammar is characterised by the same kind of metafunctional diversification discussed above. This takes us back to our discussion in section three where we showed that functional grammar included three separate analyses, each describing the construction of one of three different kinds of meaning which all operate simultaneously in each clause. Figure 7. Ideational (experiential and logical) meanings construing Field are realised lexicogrammatically by the system of Transitivity. This system interprets and represents our experience of phenomena in the world and in our consciousness by modelling experiential meanings in terms of participants, processes and circumstances. Resources for chaining clauses into clause complexes, and for serialising time by means of tense, address logical meanings. Interpersonal meanings are realised lexicogrammatically by systems of Mood and Modality and by the selection of attitudinal lexis. The Mood system is the central resource establishing and maintaining an ongoing exchange between interactants by assuming and assigning speech roles such as giving or demanding goods and services or information. Thus the giving of information or goods and services is grammaticalised as declaratives, questions are grammaticalised as interrogatives and commands as imperatives. Modality is the resource concerned with the domain of the negotiation of the proposition or proposal between the categorical extremes of positive or negative. The negotiation may be in terms of probability, usuality, obligation or inclination. Textual meanings are concerned with the ongoing orchestration of interpersonal and ideational information as text in context. Lexicogrammatically textual meanings are realised by systems of Theme and Information. Theme selections establish the orientation or angle on the interpersonal and ideational concerns of the clause whereas Information organises the informational status or relative newsworthiness of these concerns. The metafunctions permeating register at the level of social context and also the discourse semantic and lexicogrammatical levels of language, are simultaneous and complementary systems. In the clause each metafunctional resource (Transitivity, Theme and Mood) generates one layer of structuring, but the layers are simultaneous as shown below: Phonology is a resource for realising abstract wordings as sound and includes intonation, rhythm and syllabic and phonemic articulation. Alternatively this level may be the graphological system of a language. In general, the system of phonology is related in an arbitrary or purely conventional manner to the lexicogrammar. 3.3 study the relations from the process of text creation The relations between semantics and lexicogrammar and the components in the Situation of Context is illustrated in the table below. From the illustrations above, we can see that only functional grammar provides a description of how the structure of English relates to the situational variables (Field, Tenor and Mode) of the social context in which the language is functioning! Functional grammar is uniquely productive as an educational resource for teaching how the grammatical form of language i...