On The Realization Relation Between Language And Context

Functional linguists claim that language and context are interdependent and there is a dialectical realization relation between them. Looking from the top down, context constrains the choice of language through which it is realized, while choice of language can only comes to and expresses meaning in particular cultural and situational context. Looking from the bottom up, language realizes its context in the sense that language is not a passive reflection of the context in which it comes to meaning and by which it is constrained; in fact, language does act on and adds new meaning into it.Based on Halliday's context model, this paper, with 18 pieces of front-page hard news reports on the North Korea Nuclear Issue from China Daily and the New York Times as the research subjects, aims to illustrate the bottom up realization relation between language and context. With reference to the characteristics of the data selected, it manages to carry out a contrastive study from three aspects to show how choice of language in newspaper hard news is used to realize its particular situational context and the ideological aspect of its higher level cultural context embedded in it: Transitivity analysis at the clause level, Mood system analysis and Theme analysis.The analytical findings show that the language used in newspaper hard news realizes, on one hand, the specific features of their context of situation and the basic values of news: objectivity, timeliness, importance, prominence etc.; on the other hand, their respective features of the context of culture and the propagandistic value of news as a vehicle of ideology inculcation. Therefore, the study further verifies the dialectical realization relation between language and context proposed by functional linguists. The findings can be summarized as followings: at the textual level, striking resemblances exist in the amount of each process type used and in the presence of Tense, Modality and unmarked and marked Themes and their respective distributions; while at the lexicogrammatical level, there are great differences between the two types of news texts in their specific choices of participants of the Transitivity processes, Subjects, Modal auxiliary verbs, Modal adjuncts and Marked Themes.Therefore, this paper can not only prove the practicality and applicability of the context model within the functional framework and help readers understand the language in news more clearly and objectively but also set an example for introducing functional grammar into other texts analyses.