Roy
Harris
Online
Integrationism: a very brief introduction:
Language and context
4. Language and context.
4a. Language, then, is the human capacity for communication by integrating signs into series of activities, some of which involve speech or writing or both. Traditionally, only spoken and written signs are counted as ‘linguistic’ signs. But that assumption is challenged in integrational studies (see 3c above), which focus on the communicational function of the sign in its context.
4b. That is why integrationism pays far more attention to contextualization than any other approach to language. There is no linguistic topic on which more naive and simplistic ideas abound than about context. There are no context-free signs, whether verbal or non-verbal. Contextualization is a complex activity, still too often neglected and poorly theorized. It is not just a function of the immediate situation, but of the entire communicational experience of the participants. The act of contextualization is the act by which the sign is identified as a sign. No contextualization, no sign. This is a basic assumption of integrational linguistics.
4c. Contexts are not ‘given’: they are constructed by the participants in particular communication situations. How exactly this is done – how the distinctions are drawn between what is relevant and what is not – no one has yet explained. Integrational research aims to explore this problem.
4d. The complexity of contextualization is one of the reasons why misunderstandings are common in human communication. Individuals contextualize differently from one another, depending on the personal experience they bring to bear on dealing with a given situation. Not even in the case of identical twins do two individuals share the same history of communicational experience.
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