Towards a paradigmatic description of context: systems, metafunctions, and semantics

This article hopes to make a contribution to the growing body of work on the paradigmatic description of context of situation. Having considered the limited achievements of earlier work on context, I offer a fairly detailed account of what is entailed in producing a consistent and precise description of a linguistic category by using the principles and methods of the paradigmatic mode of description devised by the systemic functional linguistics. The system network is a powerful device for an accurate and orderly representation of such a description. The paper will close with remarks on the importance of a scientific analysis of language use (parole) in developing a comprehensive post-Saussurean linguistic theory.