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Recontextualisation

Recontextualisation is a process that extracts text, signs or meaning from its original context (decontextualisation) and reuses it in another context.[1] Since the meaning of texts, signs and content is dependent on its context, recontextualisation implies a change of meaning. The linguist Per Linell defines recontextualisation as:

the dynamic transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse/text-in-context ... to another.

Levels and Dimensions of Recontextualisation

Per Linell distinguishes recontextualisation at three different levels:

1. Intratextual: recontextualisation within the same text, discourse or conversation. Intratextual recontextualisation plays an important part in most discourse in so far as it refers to what has been said before, or anticipates what is to be said. In conversation, for instance, the one part usually infuses what the other part just – or earlier – has said in a new context thus adding new meaning to it. Such turns of decontextualisation and recontextualisation combined with metadiscursive regulation are crucial for the continual unfolding of texts, discourses and conversations.
2. Intertextual: recontextualisation relations to specific texts, discourses or conversations. It is when the author or speaker, explicitly or implicitly, fetch elements from other texts. The importance of this becomes clear when the meaning of a word is clearly based on its meaning in other contexts; it could be an encyclopaedia, but more often its meaning stems from contexts in which it is used.
3. Interdiscursive: recontextualisation between types of discourse, such as genres. In Fairclough, chains of genres is closely connected to interdiscursive recontextualisation. Chains of genres denotes how genres depend on each other's discursive material, e.g. the relation between interviews, transcription of interviews and the analysis of interviews. However, interdiscursive recontextualisation is also abundant between large interdiscursive entities or formation and is part of society's discursive workshare. An example is the import of results from statistic theory into social science with the purpose of testing quantitative analyses.

Basil Bernstein's Three Fields

Though recontextualisation is often used within linguistics, it also has interdisciplinary applications. Basil Bernstein uses recontextualisation to study the state and pedagogical discourse, the construction of educational knowledge. His concept of the pedagogic device consists of three fields: the fields of production, recontextualisation and reproduction.

1. The Field of Production: where "new" knowledge is constructed (i.e. academic institutions). To be recontextulised, there must be an original context and thus decontextualised from that.
2. The Field of Recontextualisation: mediates between these two fields. This field "is composed of two sub-fields; namely, the official recontextualising field (ORF) and the pedagogic recontextualising field (PRF). The ORF consists of 'specialized departments and sub-agencies of the State and local educational authorities'. The PRF consists of university departments of education, their research as well as specialised educational media.
3. The Field of Reproduction: where pedagogic practice takes place

Precontextualization

Rhetorical scholar John Oddo argues that recontextualisation has a future-oriented counterpoint, which he dubs "precontextualization".[5] According to Oddo, precontextualization is a form of anticipatory intertextuality wherein "a text introduces and predicts elements of a symbolic event that is yet to unfold."