Mandela’s construction of his childhood on the other hand is not context dependent in this way. Everything presumed is provided for in the co-text. We know what’s going on simply by reading, not by being there:
I was born free — free in every way that I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother's hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies under the stars and ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls. As long as I obeyed my father and abided by the customs of my tribe, I was not troubled by the laws of man or God.
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[1] To be clear, because Martin & Rose misconstrue context as register, the unwitting claim here is that Mandela's text is not dependent on register. The reason why this is nonsensical is that, on the authors' stratified model, register is construed by the language that realises it; but see [2].
[2] To be clear, as demonstrated in the previous post, what Martin & Rose actually mean by 'context dependent' is that the resolution of exophoric reference requires a reader's access to the material setting of the speech event. If this is applied consistently to Mandela's text, then 'context dependency' would mean that the resolution of exophoric reference requires a reader's access to the material setting in which Mandela wrote his text.
However, by 'context' in this instance, the authors do not mean the material setting in which the text was written, but the ideational meaning of the text: Mandela's construal of his own childhood, thereby adding yet another dimension of misunderstanding to their exposition of mode. This is the confusion that pervades the work of Martin & Rose: misconstruing the ideational meaning of language as the ideational dimension of context (field); see [3].
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