Context

Ardita Dylgjeri, University of Elbasan "Aleksandër Xhuvani", Albania
ardita.dylgjeri@uniel.edu.al

Context refers to the circumstances, background, or environment in which something exists or occurs. It provides additional information and helps to understand the meaning, relevance, or interpretation of a particular situation, event, or statement. The analysis of context forms part of most Critical Discourse Analysis and Pragmatic approaches. Van Dijk makes a distinction between local contexts which are ‘properties of the immediate interactional situation in which a communicative event takes place’ and global contexts which are ‘defined by the social, political, cultural and historical structures in which a communicative event takes place’. Wodak identifies four levels of context that are used in the Discourse-Historical approach: 1. the immediate, language or text internal co-text; 2. the intertextual and interdiscursive relationship between utterances, texts, genres, and discourses; 3. the extralinguistic social/sociological variables and institutional frames of a specific ‘context of situation’ (middle-range theories); 4. the broader sociopolitical and historical contexts, in which the discursive practices are embedded in and related to (grand theories).

In Pragmatics, the context of an utterance is often thought of as everything that is available to be brought to bear on the utterance’s interpretation, except the form and content of the phrase or sentence uttered (and any conventional meaning attached to gestures used). The context must also include facts about the speaker’s and hearer’s beliefs, opinions, habits, etc. This can be seen clearly in the recovery of implicatures, although it applies elsewhere too.

Referring to Sperber and Wilson’s relevance-theoretic approach to pragmatics, ‘context’ refers to the cognitive environment in which communication takes place. It encompasses the shared knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, and expectations between the speaker and the hearer that are relevant to interpreting the meaning of an utterance.

Keywords: pragmatics, discourse analysis, cognitive.

Related Entries: Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse (1), Discourse (2)

References:
Van Dijk, T. (2001). Multidisciplinarity CDA: A plea for diversity. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 95–120). SAGE.
Wilson D. & Sperber D. (2004). Relevance theory. In L. R. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics (pp. 607-632). Blackwell.
Wodak, R. (2001). The discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 63–94). Sage.