Text i verksamhet : mot en samlad förståelse

Anna-Malin Karlsson, 1969- (Författare), Hans Strand (Författare)

URI http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-175659, URN urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-175659

Uppsala universitet Humanistisk-samhällsvetenskapliga vetenskapsområdet (Utgivare)

utgivning

Uppsala : Swedish Science Press, 2012

är del av

Språk & Stil · ISSN 1101-1165

22:1, 110-134

Bidrag, Onlineresurs

Finns online:

http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-175659

ämne

Humanities and the Arts, Languages and Literature, Specific Languages, Humaniora och konst, Språk och litteratur, Språkstudier, text and context, activity, activity theory, genre, discourse

Fler detaljer Referera

Sammanfattning

The majority of text researchers today view text as deeply embedded in context. Still, the questionof how context should be treated in analysis, in order to achieve a “thick” theoretical understanding,remains substantially unanswered. In this article, a focus on the meso-level of context, the activity,is suggested as a way of contextualizing texts. This level has shown to be fruitful for explainingpatterns and variation in conversation. The meso-level of activity can also be expected to berelevant for the participants of textual communication, which is a key factor when striving for whatis sometimes called ecological validity. In the article, previous research and specific examples arediscussed in two thematic sections, focusing on texts in text-mediated activities (e.g. academic researchand education) and texts in practical activities (e.g. health care work), respectively. Basedon these overviews, a unified analytical perspective and a possible stance for researchers interestedin grounding their text analysis in a less ‘text-biased’ understanding of context are proposed. Thisperspective combines activity theory with a semiotic focus on text artefacts inspired by New LiteracyStudies. Once the role of a text in the activity is established, and when goals and possibleconflicts are identified, context-based concepts such as genre and discourse are suggested for linkingactivity to linguistic text structure.