Context and its complications

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 1994

Taking on context as a focus for the analysis of language use presents a number of challenges: context is complex, dynamic, variable, interactive, and political. Context is such a vast and multifaceted rubric that it could be used to cover almost anything that has an impact upon how people use talk. Context is also usually simply taken for granted; in fact, in most situations of language use, participants need to be able to count on the shared backgroundedness of context so that the salient business can be unambiguously foregrounded. Examining context involves foregrounding the background. These challenges raise the question of whether context can be reified for purposes of scrutiny. As editors, Duranti and Goodwin are the ones who have done the work of foregrounding and cataloging the multiple aspects of context and drawing out the context-related aspects of each of the 13 articles in this volume; context is really not a central theme in the sense that it is directly discussed by each author. In the introduction to the volume, the editors outline the various approaches to context used by the authors in the collection. In both the volume introduction and in the introductions to the individual articles, the editors work to integrate and interconnect the articles with each other and within the context of the wider literature. Only very exceptionally do authors relate their work to that in other articles in the volume. It is really the editors' introductions that make this a cohesive volume, because the contributions are quite disparate. The scholars here are working within a fairly wide range of perspectives, requiring a term as broad as context to subsume them, and the articles vary in topic, scope, length, and level of contribution. Thus, for example, while Basso's article is a broad overview of a larger work, Philips analyzes very particular data; the pieces by Cicourel and Hanks originally appeared elsewhere. The contextualization that Goodwin and Duranti accomplish in their introductions is very much like that one might work toward in classroom discussions of the articles,

In: Bagasheva, A. (ed.) 2007. On Man and Language, pp. 330-339. Sofia: Sofia University Press, 2007

Since the introduction of the notion of context by anthropologist Malinowski in 1932, linguistic research has been infused with alternative proposals concerning the best (meaning either exhaustive or invariant) list of parameters of the communicative situation to characterize context.

2006

Every time that a new technology which directly concerns the objects and processes of human culture emerges, many different potential ways of thinking seem to compete. The history of technology is neither univocal nor deterministic. Digital technologies seem to offer some solutions to the problems which Modern ways of managing, preserving and transmitting symbols and texts had created, but they do not determine the models by which these solutions will take shape. In this paper it is assumed that interdiscursivity (pragmasphere) is the place where such models are defined, in a contest in which traditional patterns and new social and cultural instances take part. So, the shapes and processes of the discourse, as they are shaped in and through new technologies, are very crucial for understanding some of the future characteristics of symbolic exchange and cultural interaction. Starting from a morphological and functional analysis of some features of digital textuality, I will dwell upon the hypermedia as a new kind of text and discourse. Hypermedia introduce some new chronotopic features into the discourse, which change our perception and construction of cultural reality, and lead us to rethink some literary and semiotic categories, which regard pragmatics but also the ontology of signs. This paper will examine and critically use the Flichy's notion of 'imaginaire', and the Aarseth's theory of 'cybertext'. Bakhtin's notions of vyskasivanie and otvetstvennost' underlie this paper as well. A dialogic principle in defining utterances is very useful in understanding hypermedia and helps us to focus on new implications of the concept of 'context'. Intermediality itself forces us to redefine the notion of context: a pragmatic and connotative context is added to a denotative context. Links are first physical approximations, then conceptual ones. An aesthetic and a historical dimension are restored to a theory of discourse, from which they had been removed by classical information theory and from the signified-centred or the signifier-centred theories of signs and communication.

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(1), 124-134, 2011

Argumentation, 2011

In Context' is aimed at giving contextualization its rightful place in the study of argumentation. First, Frans H. van Eemeren explains the crucial role of context in a reconstructive analysis of argumentative discourse. He distinguishes four levels of contextualization. Second, he situates his approach to context in the field of argumentation studies by comparing it with Walton's approach. He emphasizes the importance of distinguishing clearly between a normatively motivated theoretical ideal model and empirically-based communicative activity types. Third, van Eemeren concentrates on the 'macro-level' of contextualization: contextualization in institutionalized communicative activity types. He makes clear that the macro-context of a communicative activity type can be characterized argumentatively by describing the disctinctive features of the empirical counterparts of the four stages of a critical discussion in the activity type concerned. Fourth, he points out what the consequences of the macrocontextualization of argumentative discourse in a certain communicative activity type are for the strategic maneuvering that may takes place and the identification of fallacies as derailments of strategic maneuvering. Fifth, van Eemeren draws some general conclusions regarding the role of contextualization in the analysis and evaluation of argumentative discourse.

Document Design, 1999

2020

While the notion of context has been in use for centuries, it has undergone remarkable conceptual refinement in the past 50 years. Once viewed in experimental psychology as a "nuisance variable," among linguistic anthropologists it is associated with actor-oriented meaning-centered approaches to the description of communicative practice. The active process by which participants make relevant, cancel or revise the interpretive process in conversation can then be viewed as contextualization. More recently, linguistic anthropologists have turned their attention to the process by which structured, text-like features of social interaction come to "gel" as "no longer in play," and thus become "decontextualized." How those discursive "texts" become "recontextualized" are among the most central practices within cultural orders, integral to the institutional authority of legal, medical, educational and artistic systems.

Technology and culture

The essays in this forum brace this meditation on the historiography of technology. Understanding devices incorporates the context of any particular hardware, as John Staudenmaier showed by quantifying the contents of the first decades of Technology and Culture. As contextualist approaches have widened from systems theory through social construction and into the assemblages of actor-network theory, the discipline has kept artifacts at the analytical center: it is the history of technology that scholars seek to understand. Even recognizing that the machine only embodies the technology, the discipline has long sought to explain the machine. These essays invite consideration of how the history of technology might apply to non-corporeal things-methods as well as machines, and all the worldly phenomena that function in technological ways even without physicality. Materiality is financial as well as corporeal, the history of capitalism reminds us, and this essay urges scholars to apply hi...

JURNAL ARBITRER

This study aims to describe the forms of shifting conventional context elements to a virtual external context in the cyberpragmatics perspective. The data of this study were manifestations of the shifts in the contexts. The substantive data source of this study was various kinds of utterances and the formulation of the context containing realizations of the shifts in the conventional external context. The locative data source was social media that published a variety of utterances and the context in which there was a shift in the context elements that could be collected by the researcher around the time of the study. The data collection method applied was the listening method, focusing on the free engaged and profound method of listening. The technique used in applying the listening method was the note-taking technique. The data were then classified and verified further. The verified data were then triangulated to experts of pragmatics, especially cyberpragmatics. Data analysis was ...