THE CONTENT OF COMMUNICATION
Every speech act, whether spoken or written, takes place in a social context. A telephone conversation, writing a letter, buying a newspaper, giving or attending a lecture, are all contexts within which the different speech acts are carried out. Such contexts have to do with our own or someone else’s experience of life and the world at large, that is, the doings and happenings in which we are involved or which affect us.
Any happening or state in real life, or in an imaginary world of the mind, can be expressed through language as a situation or state of affairs. Used in this way, the terms ‘situation’ or ‘state of affairs ‘ do not refer directly to an extra-linguistic reality that exists in the real world, but rather to the speaker’s conceptualization of it. The components of this conceptualization of reality are semantic roles or functions and may be described in very general terms as follows:
1 processes: that is, actions, events, states, types of behavior;
2 participants: that is, entities of all kinds, not only human, but inanimate, concrete and abstract, that are involved in the processes;
3 attributes: that is, qualities and characteristics of the participants;
4 circumstances: that is, any kind of contingent fact or subsidiary situation which is associated with the process or the main situation.
The following example from the text shows one possible configuration of certain semantic roles:
The kind of meaning expressed by these elements of semantic structure is representational meaning, or meaning that has to do with the content of the message. The various types of process, participants, attributes and circumstances are outlined and described more fully in “Conceptualizing patterns of experience: processes, participants, circumstances”.
