Contextualising the Notion of Context in Jurilinguistic Studies
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Contextualising the Notion of Context in Jurilinguistic Studies Edyta Więcławska1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Context is a notion that is commonly invoked in many linguistic studies, either with very general reference or, more specifically, in the light of one of a number of research approaches which assign distinct definitions to context, ranging from factors that can be recovered from a text, through social parameters serving as an index for the appropriation of discursive performance, to factors that bring texts into being and give them meaning. This exploratory and descriptive research problematises the notion of context specifically on the grounds of English/Polish translation of corporate documentation processed in company registration proceedings, touching upon factors that are presumed to be discursively relevant in this communicative situation. The study is conducted from the perspective of the sociocultural approach and it adopts the parallel corpus methodology. The author discusses the concept of context on the ground of legal communication and secondarily presents a corpus-based description of the context categories that are idiosyncratic and potentially discursively relevant for the said communicative situation in the cross-linguistic perspective. The contextual variation is tested for its capacity to affect translation performance. The results reveal specific tendencies as regards the distribution patterns in the values corresponding to the investigated context categories. They point to some divergencies in translation output caused by the source text variantivity and they pave the way and directions for further research. Already at this stage the findings may have significant pedagogical value and they constitute a solid starting point for sociolinguistic research on discourse variantivity. Keywords Context category · Corporate discourse · Discursively relevant · Source text variantivity · Contextual variation · Translation performance
* Edyta Więcławska [email protected] 1
Faculty of Philology, Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszów, Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, Wydział Filologiczny, Al. mjr. W. Kopisto 2B, 35‑315 Rzeszow, Poland
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1 Introduction The notion of context is a term transgressing many disciplinary borders, it is used as a research perspective for studying various phenomena on the grounds of many disciplines and it ascribes distinct social factors. The common thread running through various, discipline-specific definitions of context is that it covers collective, external background phenomena which determine the perception and/or operation of specific actions, whether these belong, for example, to the realm of psychology (e.g. [58]: 50–70), or sociology [55]: 257–287, [59]: 501, 504, [63]: 1–19). Along with the development of sociolinguistic studies, the notion of context has earned its own discipline-specific definition, yet even here it can be interpreted functionally on a few levels of analysis [29: 81, 54: 13–34]
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