Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
4. "in real life, most sentences that are uttered are not uttered for the first time. a great deal of discourse is more or less routinized; we tell the same stories and express the same opinions over and over again. we do, of course, create new sentences....but it really does not matter whether we do this or not; what matters is that we all the time exchange meanings, and the exchange of meanings is a creative process in which language is one symbolic resource--perhaps the principle one we have, but still one among others....language is as it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve in people's lives; it is to be expected that linguistic structures could be understood in functional terms. but in order to understand them in this way we have to proceed from the outside inwards, interpreting language by reference to its place in the social process."
28. "we do not experience language in isolation--if we did we would not recognize it as language--but always in relation to a scenario, some background of persons and actions and events from which the things which are said derive their meaning"
29. "it is important to qualify the notion of 'situation' by adding the word 'relevant.' the 'context of situation' does not refer to all the bits and pieces of the material environment....it refers to those features which are relevant to the speech that is taking place"
31. register = "what is actually taking place" + "who is taking part" + "what part the langauge is playing" = "the range within which meanings are selected and the forms which are used for their expression"
32. "the fact that the language we speak or write varies according to the type of situation...is no more than stating the obvious. that the theory of register does is to attempt to uncover the general principles which govern this variation, so that we can begin to understand what situational factors determine what linguistic features"
35. simply, the difference is this: "dialect...= variety 'according to the user'" & "register...= variety 'according to the use'"
61. "from a sociolinguistic standpoint, a text is meaningful not so much because the hearer does not know what the speaker is going to say, as in a mathematical model of communication, but because he does know. he has abundant evidence, both from his knowledge of the general (including statistical) properties of the linguistic system and from his sensibility to the particular cultural, situational and verbal context; and this enables him to make informed guesses about the meanings that are coming his way."
145. "the various genres of discourse, including literary genres, are the specific semiotic functions of a text that have social value in the culture. a genre may have implications for other components of meaning: there are often associations between a particular genre and particular semantic features of an ideational or interpersonal kind, for example between the genre of prayer and certain selections in the mood system. hence labels for generic categories are often functionally complex"