To say that context influences communication is close to saying that the sport you are practicing influences what you might do during training, at competitions, what you must do for a medal and so on. Naturally however, while the influence of the context is recognized, theorists are not at all ready to jump in the same bucket of consensus when it comes to answering how this influence manifests itself and is to be studied.
To begin with, the question what is context? is itself quite spiny. I believe most natural language users would understand the notion in opposition to the text (it is the thing in which the text comes, which is different from the text in that it is somehow in the background). In a more technical language, the focal event - the actual text, if there is such a thing - is differentiated from the context. As a first, negative definition, it works just fine. Now, assuming there are instances of actual texts which somehow “do not need” the context – where does this context-thing first appear on a gradual scale of, let’s say, context-independence to high-context-dependence?
Most pragmaticians would start with deixis. That, at least, is something of a consensus. When I say “I said I will” I say something quite different than when you say “I said I will”. [Often, other factors such as tu/vous distinction (je/u in Dutch) have been called “social deixis”]. But what next? You can feel the ground getting shaky. One of Sacks’ mini-stories (The baby cried. The mommy picked it up) is dauntingly simple if it proves that huge chunks of socio-cultural contexts come into play at every step – for instance, the idea that mothers usually take care of their babies, that picking a baby up can be a response to a cry. Because, you might not have noticed, but it in the picked it up could very well refer to a bowl of soup: so how come it [sic!]… does not?
And it gets even worse in two ways. Context is not only highly resistant to theory-formation. It is also, first, something actors “negotiate” during speech. The focal event is built (see Gumperz’s contextualization processes) partly as presupposing but partly as generating the context. In at least one sense we can be sure of this statement: new text creates, in its bare minimum, new co-text for what preceded and what follows. Only, of course, considerations should land on the more abstract (social, institutional, culture) levels of text-context interaction.
Second, a distinction between several contexts for seems at once highly de-stabilizing and highly needed. When two parties are speaking and only those two studied, great. But there are social events with audiences and where the speaker and the communicator differ, and situation where the hearer and the receiver of the message differ, and finally situations where the audience and the over-hearers differ. In other words, it is not only a matter of systematizing (or ‘formalizing’) contexts and making their relationship with texts apparent, but also, in a way, ‘assigning’ them the party one wishes to study. Can anything be more difficult?
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