The Importance of Context in Language Use: A Pragmatic Perspective
Unit 3. The Importance of Context in Language Use
Key Word in Pragmatics: Context
Goodwin & Duranti (1992) – Rethinking Context
The metaphor of the boat in the sea: If we think of conversations, dialogues, interactions, as a boat, context would be the sea. Metaphorically, this means that the boat moves depending on the quality of the sea. If we change the quality of the sea, the boat will move in a certain way. The boat is affected by the sea. Conversations are influenced by context.
Griffiths (2006) – An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics
The essential difference between sentences and utterances is that sentences are abstract, not tied to contexts, whereas utterances are identified by their contexts. This is also the main way of distinguishing between semantics and pragmatics. If you are dealing with meaning and there is no context to consider, then you are doing semantics, but if there is a context to be brought into consideration, then you are engaged in pragmatics.
Every sentence has a meaning that semantics analyzes, but the actual meaning in a context is studied by pragmatics. Pragmatics is interested in the role of context in communicating the speaker’s meaning, and hence context plays a central role in pragmatic research. Why do we need contextual information? Because we couldn’t make sense of what people say to us unless we rely on context.
Pragmatics: Language in Context
It does NOT analyze the meaning of words as in semantics, but the speaker’s intended meaning of whole utterances. Context, intentions, and shared knowledge are the keywords. Also, cultural implications play an important role.
U.M. Quasthoff (1998) – “Context” in Concise Encyclopaedia of Pragmatics
A good account of context should answer at least the following question:
1. How do discourse participants decide which elements of physical or verbal surroundings or mental knowledge are relevant for the production or interpretation of an utterance?
In other words, what has become “context” during a particular act of communication? The idea is that we have a lot of information to choose from to become context, so how do we select what is THE context that we need? The question implies that context is not fixed. For every single communication act, we need different contexts that we use for the interpretation of utterances. This is why the boat in the sea metaphor is wrong because context is not simply there; it is not taken for granted. So nowadays, we have a more appropriate picture of what context is. At the beginning of pragmatics, context was a very static thing, important but static. Nowadays, it is looked at as more dynamic; it has to be looked for and has to be constructed as we interpret.
Traditional View of Context in Pragmatics
- Context as simply the physical environment in which the utterance takes place.
- Context as the surrounding text of an utterance.
How do we identify those particular aspects of the physical environment or preceding text that can play a role in the interpretation of an utterance? The traditional view is that context is given beforehand, the utterance is inserted in that context, and an interpretation is reached. Which is not the right picture of context that we want because we have to look for all sorts of contextual information while we interpret.
The Current View of Context
Context as information used (looked for) during the interpretation of an utterance. Contextual information may be obtained from the preceding text, or from observation of the speaker and from the immediate environment, and they may also be drawn from encyclopedic knowledge that the hearer has access to at the time, etc.
The current view is that the utterance is the starting point, an adequate context is looked for, and an interpretation is reached. Depending on what you are interpreting, you will have to access a certain type of context, sometimes only encyclopedic knowledge, sometimes only the physical surroundings, etc. But sometimes, you need to access different types of knowledge.
Which context we use depends on the utterance, and then we look for as much context as we need to interpret it. If context affects the outcome of interpretation, then in order to get the intended interpretation of an utterance, the hearer must be capable of selecting and using the speaker’s intended context. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how hearers do that. Pragmatics aims at explaining how hearers choose which information they access and how (and why) they decide when to stop processing contextual information. Sometimes there are misunderstandings because the context is not shared. The speaker’s intended context is not accessible to the listener.
Implications for Our Picture of Understanding
- Understanding an utterance involves considerably more than simply knowing the language.
- The possible interpretations are determined, on the one hand, by the meaning of the sentence uttered, and on the other by the available contextual information.
- The hearer’s task is to choose, from all the possible interpretations, the actual, intended one.
- The task of an adequate pragmatic theory is to explain how people do that.
When people talk to us, we combine what they say (new information) with contextual information and then we get a relevant conclusion.