Context in the System and Process of Language - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 4 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
5. The conception of context in text [1995]
Context in the System and Process of Language - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 4 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Ruqaiya Hasan† [+]
Macquarie University
Description
Explaining the word Functional in Systemic Functional Linguistics, Professor Ruqaiya Hasan, in The Conception of Context in Text (1995), notes the relation between the metafunctions, on the one hand, and the contextual parameters of field, tenor and mode, on the other, such as is accounted for in the context metafunction hook-up hypothesis (or cmh hypothesis), i.e. the speaker’s perception of field, tenor and mode, i.e. context of situation, activates the choice of certain meanings. As Hasan explains, ‘On the one hand, a speech event is meaningful, because, as talk, it is answerable to the system of language. But on the other hand, the very motivation for the speech event has to be attributed to the fact that it impinges on human beings because, as action, it has a concrete social basis.’ The key to identifying context types then is to identify text types – i.e. what various texts hold in common and what they do not share. In her words ‘by virtue of its meaning-wording choices, each text announces itself as an instance of some registral variety whose correlate is some specific category of context.’