This chapter presents a view on context as understood within functional models of language, specifically the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Amongst the functional approaches to language, SFL is recognized as a framework which has maintained an account of context that has prioritized its relationship with lexicogrammar, allowing it to make a causal connection between culture and language. The aim of this chapter is to highlight and explain the principal ways in which context works within the SFL framework and explore the main themes and parameters which situate context within an integrated theory of language as a semiotic resource. As no theory emerges in a vacuum, the first part of the chapter will consider the historical development of context as a concept within SFL theory with reference to how context is situated in other related functional grammars. Following this, we examine two areas of challenge related to the approach to context outlined in the chapter. Finally, the chapter concludes with closing remarks and key directions for future research in this area.

Language is paradigmatically a human activity, largely consisting of speakers saying things in order to inform, warn, misinform, threat, sell, and so on. Language is important because it is a system for doing things. This suggests that the philosophy of action should be a part – a very important part – of the philosophy of language. To a certain extent it is. And, in consequence, the focus has moved from sentences to utterances. It has moved, but not entirely. Not because philosophers and logicians are unaware of utterances, but because the working assumption is that semantics should focus on what all utterances of an expression or sentence have in common, due to meaning, and not on how they differ, due to the particular facts of the utterance. In this chapter we first consider how this assumption has been challenged and express some reservations about alternatives. Then we turn to our own theory, the reflexive-referential theory, which takes utterances as basic to the semantics and pragmatics of natural language.

The main debates about nationalism during the past two decades have concentrated on the effects of changing means of communication and processes of de- and reterritorialization. The entangled web of relations which traversed national boundaries did not produce “the utopia of a post-national history,” but the “stabilization and territorialization of the nation-state,” in Sebastian Conrad’s view.1 Whereas the dynamics of nationalism have generally been located within nation-states, as “imagined communities,” “invented traditions,” or reactions to modernization, Conrad’s own case studies show that “the shifts and changes in the discourse of nationalism … appear not only as effects of internal trajectories, as the familiar picture would suggest, but just as much of the larger process we retrospectively call globalization.”

Some years ago, the intellectual historian Bronisław Baczko noted that a crucial feature of eighteenth-century thought was its all-pervasive desire for a “return to origins,” a fixation emerging through a quasi-obsessive quest for the beginning of all sorts of social, political, and religious institutions as well as moral principles.1 Indeed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1754), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Johann Gottfried Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), and the Essai sur l’origine des connaissance humaines (1778), by the abbé de Condillac, are just a few works that testify, by their titles alone, to the eighteenth-century preoccupation with “origins.” But many more could be added. From the late seventeenth century onwards, innumerable scholars across Europe produced a plethora of tracts, pamphlets, articles, and books to investigate and dissect the origins of languages, knowledge, feelings, prejudice, and, importantly for us, nations.

What does it mean to view grammar as a fluid, flexible social resource? For linguists, it requires attending to the pragmatic consequences of syntactic items being structured in particular ways whilst accounting for any indexical links that grammatical variants have to social types. For those interested in educational issues, it means conceptualising grammar, not as rigid and inflexible, but as a semiotic resource for meaning-making. This book has demonstrated that the intertwined nature of language and persona is perhaps the most powerful constraint on language use in the school years. Consequently, by focusing on the social meaning of grammar we would work with children’s experiences, rather than against them. What might happen if children are encouraged to view their syntactic variability as a linguistic skill, rather than as something to be overcome in favour of linguistically uniform ‘standards’? Whilst it is well established that misconceptions about social class groups and their language varieties perpetuate social inequalities, this chapter also argues that misconceptions about how grammar functions also serve to disadvantage children by underestimating their linguistic skills.

Chapter 6 presents an overview of the organization of the mental grammar. We will focus on general architectural properties of the mental grammar, that is, the units and rules that every grammar must have to capture the sound form, meaning, and syntactic structure of words and sentences. I will suggest that the grammar functions like a checking device in that it tells the language user whether linguistic expressions are well-formed (i.e., grammatical, in accordance with the rules of grammar). There is some technical detail (and many linguistic terms), but at the very least the reader will be left with the conviction that languages are quite complex. It is explained how languages allow people to express any thought they might have, drawing attention to the pivotal notion of recursivity. This chapter sets the stage for being amazed that children have pretty much full control of their language by the age of 4. By learning what a mental grammar might look like, the reader can form an idea of what it is that the child needs to acquire. Without such information, it would be difficult to discuss the role of nature and nurture in language.

Handbooks of Latin usually draw attention to the presence of Greek loanwords from the very earliest stages of the Latin language. Greek loans feature in texts of all types, in a wide range of different spheres: words for flora and fauna, food and drink, aspects of trade, law and administration. The last major study of the Greek loanwords in Latin (Biville ) concentrated on the ways in which Greek sounds were represented in Latin, but did not have so much to say about the place of Greek loanwords within the vocabulary of Latin as a whole. This chapter gives a survey of Greek loanwords in Republican Latin, in both literary and epigraphic documents, with several different research questions in mind. Is it possible to unearth different chronological strata of loanwords? Can learned and vulgar loans be separated in Republican Latin, and how well integrated were Greek loans into Latin? Do phonological and semantic aspects of the words reveal anything about the source of the loans? Why do some Greek loanwords make it into the higher registers of Roman poetry (and sometimes prose) and others not, and how do these conventions come about?

This chapter examines the use of ecquis in Roman comedy, especially in Plautus. Although formally belonging to the class of adjectives, pronouns or adverbs, the interrogative markers in ec-, introducing independent as well as subordinate clauses, function as particles introducing “total” questions. The ambiguity needs to be clarified by taking into account the fact that the second constituent qu- plays the role of an indefinite, not of an interrogative element, and that its value tends to fade leaving the prefix ec- as the main semantic determinant of the term. In this respect, it is useful to compare numquis, which, unlike ecquis, is still rarely used in the early period. The controversial etymology of ec- is discussed in the light of the semantic and pragmatic nuances that are revealed in different contexts in relation to the previous or following utterance. While in most cases ec- confers on the question a character of insistence and urgency, thus producing different effects of rhetorical meanings, the value of the questions introduced by ecquis seems fundamentally neutral; ecquis, therefore, does not per se orient the interrogation either in a positive or in a negative sense.

Handbooks of Latin usually draw attention to the presence of Greek loanwords from the very earliest stages of the Latin language. Greek loans feature in texts of all types, in a wide range of different spheres: words for flora and fauna, food and drink, aspects of trade, law and administration. The last major study of the Greek loanwords in Latin (Biville ) concentrated on the ways in which Greek sounds were represented in Latin, but did not have so much to say about the place of Greek loanwords within the vocabulary of Latin as a whole. This chapter gives a survey of Greek loanwords in republican Latin, in both literary and epigraphic documents, with several different research questions in mind. Is it possible to unearth different chronological strata of loanwords? Can learned and vulgar loans be separated in republican Latin, and how well integrated were Greek loans into Latin? Do phonological and semantic aspects of the words reveal anything about the source of the loans? Why do some Greek loanwords make it into the higher registers of Roman poetry (and sometimes prose) and others not, and how do these conventions come about?

In the framework of computational cognitive modeling, natural language understanding and generation must be integrated with other cognitive capabilities, such as reasoning and learning. The language understanding component of an intelligent agent extracts and formally represents the meaning of texts and dialog turns. The output of language understanding must reflect the speaker’s intended meaning and be sufficiently detailed to serve as input to reasoning and action in artificial intelligent agents. One kind of agent action is verbal, so agents must include a language generation capability. This chapter describes a particular language understanding system that meets the requirements for the above language capabilities and also puts forward methodological arguments about the interplay between theories, models, and computational systems.

The chapter ’Meowlogisms’ explains morphological processes by using meowlogisms, which are a typical linguistic feature of cat-related digital spaces. These are created with cat-inspired morphemes and lexemes – called ’meowphemes’ here – with which people create new words to give their communication a feline spin. The chapter also looks at the reasons we consider certain words funny and discusses the concepts of humour, iconicity, and funniness in relation to meowlogisms. Denoting the feline perspective, meowlogisms are also present in the linguistic landscapes and are, thus, a feature that can be studied when it comes to the public spaces around us.

The rapid rise and success of environmental law and regulation has come with the price that the content and legitimacy of the underlying concepts and principles of environmental protection and governance have been given insufficient attention and time to evolve. Consequently, environmental law could not ‘expand organically’ in view of the rapidity, urgency and its political content and context. Yet it is the presence or absence of such legal conceptual underpinnings that will condition whether environmental law develops into a fully fledged and permanent body of law, or whether environmental protection is to be merely a factor in a problem-specific context that will be taken into account in a diversity of established substantive contexts. This chapter describes how corpus linguistics and concordances-based methodologies were used to examines specific terms typically associated with the impact of human activities on the environment, and in order to reveal how conceptual meanings have shifted throughout the twentieth century and from one decade to the other since the 1960s.