As Blommaert tells us again, people have contextualization universes, Their utterances meaningful and listeners and readers are equally adept at contextualizing what they read or hear in order In spite of the difficulty in defining what we mean exactly by context, speakers and writers are remarkably adept at knowing which features of context to rely on to make Who does this text address? Who is its target audience?ĭoes the text mediate between its producers and its audience?ģWhat is the relationship between texts and ideologies (of producer/audience/industry cultures),Ĭommercial realities, generic conventions, industry/professional conventions, practical/technical codes, etc?įinally, van Dijk (2005: 237) brings in a cognitive element, defining contextĪs ‘the cognitive, social, political, cultural and historical environments of discourse’ Was this text produced, by whom and with what purpose? The present volume, Iedema and Carroll describe context as ‘the domain of the “taken-as-given”’, andīaker defines it as ‘the constraints on a communicative situation that influence language use’, while Mauranen

Blommaert (2005: 251), for example, definesĬontext as ‘the totality of conditions under which discourse is being produced, circulated and interpreted’. In spite of the difficulty of pinning down the meaning of the term context, fairly general definitions are to be found. (1992: 2) state, context is ‘notoriously hard to define’. This may be because, as Goodwin and Duranti Just what is meant by context it has tended to be taken as a ‘given’. Of the various features which make up text and talk, with notable exceptions, there has been relatively less emphasis on defining While, in its relatively short history, discourse analysis has spent a lot of time identifying the structure and functions An understanding of context is thus an essential feature of the analysis. Is concerned with the interpretation of texts and an important part of this analysis is how texts are related to the contexts Is thus, to my knowledge, the first published collection of papers to focus on context from a specifically discourse analytic Linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics or pragmatics, rather than being overtly discourse analytic. These collections have been written from the perspective of 2anthropological (Auer and Di Luzio 1992 Fetzer 2004 Duranti and Goodwin 1992), but while certainly relevant to discourse analysis,

There have been a number of volumes devoted to context in recent decades In juxtaposing theĬhapters in this way, readers are invited to compare and contrast these different contexts and approaches and the application Linguistics, critical discourse analysis, ethnographic discourse analysis, mediated discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics. Their analyses, including (in alphabetical order) conversation analysis, corpus Similarly, the authors represent different approaches and methods in Local, (socio)-cognitive or some combination thereof. Context is construed differently by the various authors it may be historical, social, The studies situate their chosen target situation or domain within

With a commitment to the study of language in context. The volume brings together researchers from different approaches, but all

More specifically, in individual chapters, with particular discourses (big D discourses) as they are manifested in particular Volume is thus concerned, in general terms, with language in its context of use (little d discourse), but at the same time, Situations and domains in which discourse is produced and, on the other, how analysts construe context in their work. In using the term ‘context’, I have in mind, on the one hand, different Volume focus on both of these approaches. Term – as systems of knowledge and beliefs, social practices and socially recognizable identities. Of the sentence, and, on the other hand, what Gee calls ‘big D’ discourse(s) – the count usage of the In using the term ‘discourse’, I have in mind, on the one hand, the notion of what Gee (1999) calls ‘littleĭ’ discourse – the non-count usage of the term – as language in the contexts of its use and above the level Presents a collection of analyses of spoken, written and multimodal discourses in a range of situations and contextual domains.

Text and contexts