How we know where someone is
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This document discusses how context influences language use. It identifies six key contextual factors: setting, participants, activity, channel, code, and subject matter. It then provides examples of how each factor can shape language, such as institutional settings influencing formality or the number of participants affecting unison speech. The document also notes that when people from different backgrounds interact, their language may converge or diverge depending on rapport. Overall context, including the situation, individuals involved, communication medium, and task, significantly impacts communication.
How we know where someone is
- 3. How we know where someone is: the contextual issue • Setting: The time and place in which a communicative act occurs, such as in church, during a meeting, at a distance or upon leave-taking. • Participants: The number of people who take part in an interation, and the relationships between them, such as the addressee(s) and bystander(s).
- 4. How we know where someone is: the contextual issue • Activity: The type of activity in which a participant is engaged, such as cross- examining, debating, or having a conversation. • Channel: they influence the medium chosen for the communication (e.g. speaking, writing, singing, whistling, singing drumming) and the way it is used.
- 5. How we know where someone is: the contextual issue • Code: They influence the formal systems of communication shared by the participant, such as spoken English, written Russian, American Sign Language, or some combination of these. • Message form: They influence the structural patterns that identify the communication, both small-scale (the choice of specific sounds, words, or grammatical constructions) and large- scale (the choice of specific genres).
- 6. How we know where someone is: the contextual issue • Subject matter: They influence the content of the communication, both what is said explicitly and what is implied.
- 7. How setting influences language • The particular time and place in which people interact will exercise its influence on the kind of communication that may occur – or whether communication is permitted at all. In institutionalized settings, such as a church or a court of law, the effect on language use is clear enough.
- 8. How participants influence language. • The simple opposition of message sender and message receive needs considerable refinement if we are classify communicative events satisfactorily. Normally a single person acts as sender, or addressor; but we have to allow for unison speech, as in the case of liturgical responses in church or other rituals, group teaching, and speeches by players in a theatrical presentation.
- 9. How we accommodate. • When two people with different social backgrounds meet, there is a tendency for their speech to alter, so that they become more alike (if the speakers are in rapport) or less alike (if they are not). The process is known as accommodation – convergent in the first case, divergent in the second.
- 10. How activity influences language. • The kind of activity in which we will also directly influences the way we communicate. At one level, our activities reflect the social status we have and the roles we perform. But status and role are very general notions, within which it is possible to recognize a much more specific notion of activity type.