1.3.1 A Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) Pers...
Malinowski (1935) initially proposes the notion of context to understand discourse and to explain how language functions in society.He further divides it into the concepts of context of culture and context of situation, stressing that language context is a necessity to understand language.Later on, Firth (1957b) systemically develops Malinowski’s context theory in linguistics.He suggests that the study of linguistic research is the study of meaning, while the study of meaning should be placed in the context, because the same word used in different contexts can express different meanings.In this way, particular forms of speech or writing can be produced and manipulated by people who participate in different communicative activities.Firth stresses the core role of text in linguistic research and advises that the linguist who is working on language use should put his or her emphasis on the real instances in real contexts of situation, or specific settings or activities.Firth (1968) at the same time clarifies his ‘psychosomatic attitude to meaning’ (p.118) and carefully distinguishes the duality of mind and body.According to him, the best way to know individuals’ linguistic behaviour, ‘a network of relations between people, things and events’ (Firth, 1968, p.19), is to put their mental experience into the general context of experience.Therefore, when stressing the linguistic meaning in individuals’ social process and patterns of life, Firth does not reject the attitudinal elements on the whole.
Halliday (1985) extends Malinowski’s notion of context and develops Firth’s context theory into SFL theory that he establishes.In Halliday’s notion, language is a semiotic system, which involves a selection of meanings in the system network stemming from cultural and social contexts.That is to say, language cannot be produced in a vacuum.Two dominant concepts in SFL for describing and analysing the functions of context in the organisation of text are context of culture and context of situation.Context of culture is an abstract and recapitulative concept used to describe semiotic meaning potential in real environments (Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Halliday, 1999; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014).It is realised by the context of situation—‘the immediate environment’ (Halliday & Hasan, 1985, p.46) in which a text is actually organised and functions.On the other hand, context of culture can be an entity that determines how meaning and text are produced and understood in the context of situation (Halliday & Hasan 1985, pp.46-47).It thus affects or decides the ways in which individuals speak, behave and even exist in interaction.
The current study adopts the SFL perspective on language, because it offers a systematic interpretation on language by emphasising the semiotic, cultural and social nature of language.It lays the foundation for further discussing the relation between language and identity construction in a specific sociocultural context, in which a set of behaviour models construct a behaviour potential.By following Halliday’s (1985) perspective, this study views language that is realised by the society and situation in a similar way to social and cultural behaviour.That is, in the social realm, individuals establish their roles, develop and maintain relationships in the interaction with social encounters, while in a particular situation, they select particular linguistic units to perform and negotiate appropriate behaviour in the enacting of identities.The analysis of these social activities, as Hasan (1999) meticulously points out, thus can be delimitated in the configured field of situational context, where the creation, change or restoration between them intersectively happens.
The multiple-faceted nature of identity has also inspired many functional linguists to look into the semiotic realisation and instantiation of language users and use of language and also to search for a multitheoretical and multidisciplinary panorama (cf.Tann, 2010; Knight, 2008, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Martin, 2010; Martin & Stenglin, 2006; Zappavigna, 2011; Martin et al., 2013) and to practically apply it in situational contexts, such as David Butt and his colleagues’ recent works on identity, behaviour and thought, and psychotherapeutic discourse (cf.Butt et al., 2014), in order to uncover its complexity.Yet this has not been comprehensively mapped into the consideration of language development.To give a cohesive description, more discussion on certain relevant SFL identity research will be put forward in Section 3.4.