LRC 595a.
Spring 2004

Some concepts from Linguistics that we can consider and some terminology we can share

• Communication happens in a context.
• Utterances are communication acts and so include both the novel and the grunt, both oral and written or drawn. Each utterance is unique and reflective, in a conversation with its semiotic environment and its history.
• All meaning is situated.
– In the context of a situation
– In the context of a culture
– Ex. “Just put it there beside those other ones.”
• Meaning depends on the situation and the culture
– Someone is unloading a truck full of household goods
– Someone is unpacking a medicine bundle
• Context of Culture
– determines what we mean through…
being ‘who we are’
doing ‘what we do’
saying ‘what we say’
•Context of Situation
• Specified through the register variables…
– FIELD
• Experiential/ideational meaning
– TENOR
• Interpersonal meaning
– MODE
• Intertextual meaning

FIELD
Refers to what is going on, including
– Activity focus (nature of social activity)
– Object focus (subject matter)

Ideational Meaning
– About phenomena – things
• Living and non-living
• Abstract and concrete
• Surrounding circumstances
• Realized through participants, processes and circumstances

TENOR
• Refers to the social relationships between those taking part.
– Interpersonal
• Status or power (agency, peerage, hierarchy)
• Affect (degree of like, dislike or neutrality)
• Contact (frequency, duration, intimacy of social contact)
Interpersonal Meaning
• Expresses the speaker’s (writer’s) attitudes and judgements
• Acting upon and with others
• Realized in words through mood and modality
• Influenced by the tenor of discourse
MOOD
Declarative: we read your blogs every week
Imperative: write your blog now!
Interrogative: did you write your blog?
• Degree of formality or informality
• Attitudinal Axis: can add “incompetent fool.”
MODALITY
• Attitude or judgment, adverbs:
• Fortunately,…/Unfortunately,…
• Modal verbs:
– Your blog might be read;
– Your blog should be read.

MODE
• Intertextual meaning
• Channel of communication – spoken or written
• Language is being used as a mode of action of reflection
CONTEXT
• The Field is the total event, in which the text is functioning, together with the purposive activity of the speaker or writer; thus including the subject-matter as one element of it.
• The Mode is the function of the text in the activity; spoken or written, genre - narrative, persuasive, etc.
• The Tenor refers to the type of role interaction, social relations, between participants.
AUTHENTICITY
Literacy Events and Speech Acts
Are authentic insofar as they take place in a genre, a social pattern created for a purpose and function.
• To make sense of what we read or hear, the context or situation must be known.
• Decontextualized language is particularly hard on language learners