ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses "Biography of a Sentence" to evoke Wittgenstein's way of thinking about language as a form of life, a mode of being in the world, and so to depart from an atomistic picture of language and meaning and to move toward a contextual one. It begins with a Burmese proverb, a simple sentence, a minimal text, and to move step by step from a translation (provided by a bilingual Burmese) closer to the original. The chapter identifies these six kinds of contextual relations, none of which seems to be reducible to another: structural relations, generic relations, medial relations, interpersonal relations, referential relations and silential relations. There is nothing particularly original about these six, and there has been a great deal of work on each, except perhaps the last one. The sentence—simple or complex—is, in any language, the minimal unit in which all these actions are happening, in which the drama is fully staged.
