Meaning in Interaction: The Work of Jack Bilmes (original) (raw)
2023, Bulletin of The University of Electro-Communications, 35(1)
This paper reviews the work of Jack Bilmes in relation to the study of meaning in interaction. The review is organized around five themes, related to 1) cultural knowledge, 2) internal states, 3) firstpriority response or mention, 4) structures of meaning, and 5) the occasioned nature and intelligibility of those structures. The way that Bilmes combined three broad theories of meaningmeaning as convention, meaning as use, and meaning as response-is discussed. This combination can be seen as culminating in the program of Occasioned Semantics.
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INTERPRETATION OF LANGUAGE IN CONTEXT: A KA:RMATIC ANALYSIS OF CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION 1
Context is understood in different ways by different linguists. First, as text, it was the " the wording that came before and after whatever was under attention " (Halliday 1991: 3); later on, in the 19c, it was extended to concrete and abstract things: the context of the building; the moral context of the day; and then further, in modern linguistics, to the non-verbal environment in which language was used. Consequently, the word 'co-text' has been coined to refer explicitly to the verbal environment. At that time, Malinowski (1923, 35) introduced two distinguishing terms context of situation and context of culture. " What this means is that language considered as a system – its lexical items and grammatical categories – is to be related to its context of culture; while instances of language in use – specific texts and their component parts – are to be related to their context of situation. Both these contexts are of course outside of language itself " (Halliday 1991: 3). In discourse analysis, it is understood as knowledge, situation, and text in different approaches. According to Ka:rmik Linguistic Theory (KLT) of which ka:rmatics is a branch, language is not only used as a resource for the construction of ka:rmik (via dispositional) reality but it is also created from it in a five-fold reality construction process of dispositional-socioculturalspiritual-cognitive-contextual actional-actional realities. Form-function-meaning are dispositionalized like blueness qualifying lotus. As such, disposition qualifies all these five realities and meaning is generated-chosen-specified-directed-materialized (GCSDMed) by disposition. Here, disposition rules supreme by accepting, modifying, neutralizing or negating the prevailing cultural norms according to the individual's variable choice; again, even a new variable may be invented that may not become a cultural norm but used only for some time. Furthermore, culture is not a homogeneous structure and hence norms cannot be the same across a culture as a whole. Consequently, cultural derivation of meaning is problematic at the individual level and indeterminate at the collective level. Therefore, it is proposed here that meaning should be derived at all the levels of cultural praxis including cross-cultural communication ka:rmatically in a ka:rmik context but not in a cultural context.
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