Language, Culture, and Knowledge in Context - A Functional-Cognitive Approach - Brian Nolan
Context, Situation, and Common Ground
Language, Culture, and Knowledge in Context - A Functional-Cognitive Approach - Brian Nolan
Brian Nolan [+]
Technological University Dublin (retired)
Description
In Chapter 8, Context, situation, and common ground, we address how context and situation are important notions within pragmatic analysis. Within a dialogue, context helps to differentiate, for example, between what is said vs. what is meant. The nature of the contribution of context, therefore, is a central area of research interest within pragmatic analysis. We also examine context and its relation to discourse. While theories of speech acts have accounted for some of the properties of speakers and hearers, such as their knowledge, intentions or beliefs, to formulate appropriateness conditions, in many instances they have not pursued a systematic analysis of contextual conditions. Context draws on knowledge of the world and, as almost anything may become relevant for discourse, a theory of context risks becoming too large and unmanageable. However, not everything that can be understood as a knowledge background to discourse is necessarily part of its context. Developing a theory of context means selecting those elements of a communicative situation that are systematically relevant for the discourse situation. This means that there is a need to examine how situations are defined and determine criteria for what must be included in a theory of context. Context models must inform us as to how participants produce and understand discourse, and enable participants to adapt discourse to the communicative situation at the moment of communicative interaction. We also examine context and common ground, and the way in which common ground mediates the multifaceted relationship between culture and language in interaction, and communication, and how culture informs language usage. Common ground is considered to be a complex distributed structured entity important to the interface between culture, language and knowledge, where knowledge includes ontology, knowledge representation, reasoning, cultural schemata, cultural metaphors and cultural conceptualisations. We address the question of how theories of language might effectively characterise contextual knowledge and the cultural connection. One way that functionalist approaches do this is through examining speech act performatives, that is, language in interaction and use within a specific culture. We include a case study addressing how we might meet the challenges of context in the linguistic analysis of two kinds of speech act.