Page 221 - Beyond Methods

Contextualizing linguistic input 209
tive” because they did not get their intonation right. According to the conventions of English, when customers who had chosen meat were asked whether they wanted gravy, the Asian assistants would say gravy using falling intonation, instead of saying gravy? with ris- ing intonation. Saying the word with a falling intonation is likely to be interpreted as a statement giving a piece of information as if to say, “Hey, this stuff here is called gravy.” The proper way is to say it with a rising intonation that would indicate a polite offer.
Reflective task 9.2
Can you recall any instance you may have observed or experienced in which a misplaced stress or wrong intonation led to misunderstanding? And, how did you handle the situation?
Linguistic context with its cohesive features and extralinguistic context with its prosodic features are, in a sense, internal constructs built into the system of many languages. The two contexts certainly contribute to the process of meaning-making. However, they play only a limited role in helping us interpret and understand the real or intended meaning of messages that speakers and writers may wish to convey in a communicative event. For that we need to go beyond the language system and consider the situational context in which the communication takes place.
Situational Context
In an influential essay on the problem of meaning, Bronislaw Mali- nowski (1923) proposed that any linguistic analysis must take into account what he called the context of situation and the context of culture. The two are clearly intertwined, but, for the purpose of dis- cussion, I shall take up the former in this subsection and the latter in the next subsection. In a nutshell, Malinowski argued that lan- guage is embedded within a context of situation and that the situa- tion in which utterances are made cannot be ignored. In other words, words and utterances can have different meanings and func-