"JING" OR "HUANJING"?
That is the question.
Xu, I'm a bit confused. You are writing an essay in CHINESE, who you intend
to present to your ENGLISH professor, and besides, the topic will be, the
implicatures in RUSSIAN! Couldn't you have chosen something, say, a bit ...
EASIER?
I don't know the first thing about Chinese - other than MAK Halliday wrote
his PhD on it! - but you write,
"Context" is translated as "yujing",
from "yu": language and "jing": environment.
Cognitive is "renzhi" in Chinese. Thus,
"cognitive context" became "renzhi yujing"
So far so good.
I have to decide to follow our English professor or
to adapt another translation (for example, "renzhi
huanjing" - "huanjing" means environment).
Hey hey hey. Wait a minute. You said earlier that "JING" means ENVIRONMENT
and now you say that "HUANJING" means "environment". It seems to me as
though, in the proceedings, you have introduced a little prefix there,
namely, "HUAN". What does "HUAN" mean? (LITERALLY, I mean). "JING" and
"HUANJING" can *not* mean the same thing!
Trouble is, "context" is also a hateful English term. It should be "co-text"
(Why the anglophones intrude an "n" there escapes me!). Also, to "worsen"
the situation, "text" actually means "fabric". So we can speak of the
"textual quality" of a painting, for example. It does not necessarily mean
"linguistic". So, we can speak of a painting (e.g. Picasso's "GUERNICA") and
its context (The Spanish Civil War).
What I do like is the family of concepts:
text
context
co-text
and pre-text
A "pre-text" is what stands in place of a "text", but it's not much used by
linguists! (A term some of them love is "context-dependency" though!).
A famous London linguist (of the SOAS), JR Firth became especially famous
for his use of "context of situation". This "context" included, for him,
quite a lot (Dell Hymes's use of context is quite broad, too). But, now, if,
to study Russian implicatures, you only want to speak of the utterer's and
the addressee's beliefs and intentions (i.e. metarepresentations or
cognitive states/processes) it doesn't really matter whether you choose
"context" or "environment", it seems to me.
It's the COGNITIVE SIDE you're interested in, anyway. Not the
"context/environment" side. For the most complex theory of "context" (as
such) that you can ever imagine I recommend the books on Montague Grammar!
Best,
JL
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