AbstractLinguistics has embraced the functional and contextual turn but, when building tools for systematic contextual description, we have not made as much use as we could of our own functional traditions. Rather, we have largely relied on the metaphors of law and rule, which do not adequately capture tensions between consistency and variability in how language and context relate to each other. Our aim in this paper is to show the economy and practicality of representing context as a pathway through a network, drawing on the network technique for mapping systems of grammatical choice introduced by Michael Halliday, and on its application to other linguistic strata first offered by Ruqaiya Hasan. The paper begins by outlining why alternative frameworks are needed for describing context-language relations. We then present a contextual network for one specific domain of the Systemic Functional Linguistic notion of Tenor, namely social distance, and use this to explore how different configurations of features of social distance influence the way that traditions of practice are passed on as a specialised legacy in two different professional collaborations. While the kind of context modelling discussed here is in a very early phase of development compared to phonetic, morphological and grammatical description, it has many advantages: contextual networks are paradigmatic in orientation; they help display and theorise metastability in language; they are “ad hoc” in Firth’s positive sense; and they constitute a proposal to be tested against observed behaviour within specific cultural and situational settings.

中文翻译：

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绘制上下文网络的实用主义

摘要语言学已经接受了功能和语境的转变，但是在构建系统语境描述的工具时，我们并没有尽可能多地利用我们自己的功能传统。相反，我们在很大程度上依赖于法律和规则的隐喻，这些隐喻并没有充分捕捉到语言和上下文如何相互关联的一致性和可变性之间的紧张关系。我们在本文中的目的是展示将​​上下文表示为通过网络的路径的经济性和实用性，借鉴了 Michael Halliday 介绍的用于映射语法选择系统的网络技术，以及将其应用于 Ruqaiya 首次提供的其他语言层哈桑。本文首先概述了为什么需要替代框架来描述上下文-语言关系。然后，我们为男高音的系统功能语言学概念的一个特定领域（即社会距离）提出了一个语境网络，并用它来探索社会距离特征的不同配置如何影响实践传统作为一种特殊遗产的方式。在两个不同的专业合作中。虽然这里讨论的上下文建模与语音、形态和语法描述相比处于非常早期的发展阶段，但它有很多优点：上下文网络在方向上是范式的；它们有助于展示语言的亚稳定性并对其进行理论化；在 Firth 的积极意义上，它们是“临时的”；它们构成了一项提议，以针对特定文化和情境设置中观察到的行为进行测试。