KARACHI: Veteran journalist Zawwar Hasan, whose career ranged from sports reporter and editorial writer to travel magazine editor and public affairs manager, passed away peacefully in San Francisco, US, after a brief illness, four months short of his 97th birthday. Born in January 1927 in Pratapgarh, India, he did his LLB from Allahabad University, then
Linguistics has embraced the functional and contextual turn but, when building tools for systematic contextual description, we have not made as much use as we could of our own functional traditions. Rather, we have largely relied on the metaphors of law and rule, which do not adequately capture tensions between consistency and variability in how language and context relate to each other. Our aim in this paper is to show the economy and practicality of representing context as a pathway through a network, drawing on the network technique for mapping systems of grammatical choice introduced by Michael Halliday, and on its application to other linguistic strata first offered by Ruqaiya Hasan. The paper begins by outlining why alternative frameworks are needed for describing context-language relations. We then present a contextual network for one specific domain of the Systemic Functional Linguistic notion of Tenor, namely social distance, and use this to explore how different configuration