Context and Appropriateness

Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, 2021

Abstract: What a speaker says and thereby means, and how her words are best interpreted, can be influenced in complex ways by the conventional meanings of those words, the intentions with which she speaks, and by the conversation in which she is participating. In this chapter we first lay out certain of the principal mechanisms involved in this process, and then invoke them to help account for some communicative phenomena. In aid of the former task, we will explore the relations among illocutionary force, speaker meaning, and semantic content; develop a taxonomy of conversational projects; elucidate some conversational norms and the concept of common ground; and consider the context-sensitivity of certain expressions. These tools will then be used to illuminate four pragmatic phenomena: quantity implicature, presupposition accommodation, domains of discourse, and illocutionary silencing.

Philosophical Studies

According to a popular family of theories, assertions and other communicative acts should be understood as attempts to change the context of a conversation. Contexts, on this view, are publicly shared bodies of information that evolve over the course of a conversation and that play a range of semantic and pragmatic roles. I argue that this view is mistaken: performing a communicative act requires aiming to change the mind of one's addressee, but not necessarily the context. Although changing the context may sometimes be among a speaker's aims, this should be seen as an extra-communicative aim, rather than one that is necessary for the performance of a communicative act. Along the way, I also argue that contexts needn't play a role in linking anaphora to their antecedents. On the view that I defend, theories that take publicly shared contexts to play an essential role in the nature of communicative acts or anaphoric dependence conflate an artifact introduced by idealized models of conversation with a feature of the phenomenon being modeled.

2008

How do social situations influence language use, discourse and conversation? This book is a monograph which presents a multidisciplinary theory of context and the way context influences language use and discourse. Unlike in earlier approaches, contexts are not defined as objective social 'variables', such as gender or age. Rather, they are constructs of the participants themselves, that is, 'subjective definitions of the communicative situation' that are made explicit in the sociocognitive notion of context models. These models dynamically control all language use, make sure that discourses are appropriate in the communicative situation and hence are the basis of pragmatics. In this book, context models are studied especially from a (socio) linguistic and cognitive perspective. In another book published by Cambridge University Press, Society and Discourse, Teun A. van Dijk develops the social psychological, sociological and anthropological dimensions of the theory of...

2006

Natural Language Processing, 2000

The Philosophical Review, 2001

Communicative action concerns achieving and maintaining mutual understanding among all those who are involved in a coordinated (organizational) situation. Communicative action is embedded in a social context. Current approaches in the Language/Action Perspective have focused mainly on the dynamic aspect of language, that is, on (business) conversation. In this paper, we develop a new model of context in which particular attention is given to the role of explicit context, that is, the role of texts. A text is not a (communicative) action, but it shapes the world in which communicative actions can take place. The model is illustrated by three cases: the design of a communication tool, the management of Organizational Memory, and the support of professional communities. The three cases exemplify three abstraction levels at which texts can be analyzed.

Keanekaragaman aliran politik ini melahirkan pula berbagai praktik ketatanegaraan yang berbeda antara umat Islam disatu tempat dan masa dengan di tempat masa yang lain.