Abstract
Hasan describes context in the following way: ‘context of situation as construed by discourse is a tripartite entity, each component of which is always active in the production of a text’ (Hasan, 2004, p. 21). This description of context of situation as an entity may be due to a number of reasons. For instance, there is a language-driven semantic drift towards reification because once we start to talk about ‘context’ we come to refer to it as an entity since all our language pushes us in that direction. There is also a discourse focus on context, in the sense that ‘context of situation is construed by discourse’ (Hasan, 2004, p. 21). And there is a bounded notion of discourse, in that a text view of discourse tends towards strong boundaries that make it more likely for context to be seen as an entity.
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Wegener, R. (2016). Studying Language in Society and Society through Language: Context and Multimodal Communication. In: Bowcher, W.L., Liang, J.Y. (eds) Society in Language, Language in Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137402868_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137402868_10
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