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Book: Context in the System and Process of Language

Chapter: 2. Meaning, context and text - fifty years after Malinowski [1982]

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.24884

Blurb:

In ‘Meaning, Context and Text – Fifty Years after Malinowski’ (1985),
Hasan takes issue with ‘unscholarly reading’ of Malinowski, which seems
more intent on ‘keeping alive legends’ than critically acknowledging his
‘failure to recognize the full implications of the systemicity of language.’
Systemicists, on the other hand, recognizing the dialectic between text,
meaning and context, have responded to Malinowski’s ‘underestimation of
systemicity’ by attempting to answer such crucial questions as:
• What aspects of the context can always be reconstituted by the language
of a narrative utterance, more generally, any displaced text?
• Why is it that the language of a displaced text invariably permits the
reconstitution of these and no other contextual phenomena?

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