3.5 Context, culture and style.

Features of context:1-Deictics:All languages have deictics which are words that identify objects , persons, and events in terms of their relation to the speaker in space and time .

There are three main types of deictic

First, the speaker must be able to identify the participants in the discourse -- himself and the person or persons to whom he is speaking– by using first and second pronouns: I/we & You.

Secondly , English has here and there ,this and that to distinguish between the position of the speaker or closeness to it and other positions or greater distances.

Thirdly, time relation are indicated in English not only by general adverbs but also by more specific ones such as yesterday and tomorow .

Spatial relations, (type 2 above) may determine by pair of verbs such as come/go and bring/take.

What is the difference between come and go? When do we use come?

Deictics cannot be ignored in the study of meaning for ordinary language is full of their use . But deictics are always subjective in the sense that they can be interpreted only with reference to the speaker , while propositions are wholly objective and independent of speaker .

2-Social relations:The speaker has to indicate quite

clearly the social relations between himself and the person to whom he is speaking. We can distinguish between polite and familiar second person pronoun to address a single person. This T and V choice is determined by two factors: POWER and SOLIDARITY.

* When do we use T/V ?

3-StyleCRYSTAL and DAVY have suggested

three main features of style: province, status and modality. Province is concerned with occupation and professional activity -the language of law, science, advertising etc.

Status deals with social relations , but especially in terms of the formality of language and the use of polite or colloquial language or of the slang .

Modality is intended to relate to the choice between poetry and prose , essay and short story , the language of memoranda , telegrams , jokes , etc.

A competent speaker of a language must have command of these different styles.

Q1 What is ‘dialect’? Q2 What is diglossia ?

Bilingual society is a society where two distinct languages are in use. Within a single conversation the speaker may switch from one to the other.

This practice of changing from one dialect or language to another is called CODE- SEITCHING .

The fact that a single speaker makes use of so many varieties of language raise a serious theoretical problem , it is possible to treat each variety as a different language .

This choice of linguistic variety is related to the speaker’s recognition of the relevance of context.

In practice linguists often try to rule out context as far as possible - to deal with maximally decontextualised sentence . These are the objects of study of most grammars . On methodological ground this is essential because of the enormous variations in language .

Done by:Nouf Al-MalkiHamama Al-ZahraniSharifa Al-Hatimi