The relevant features of the situation are determined by the researcher, who can work from two different directions. In the first case, the movement is from context to language. Through the analyst’s observation and introspection context is devised by selecting the relevant extralinguistic features of the situation. Once context has been determined, the most commonly used language realizations are assigned to it, thus creating correspondence between form and function. The other approach moves in the opposite direction, from language to context, and recreates context from the linguistic data available to the researcher.
4.1 Analytic approaches: From context to language
One of the delineations of context has been offered by Hymes9 who, using ethno-graphic observation, has attempted to draw up a schema of the universal dimen-sions and features of context. In the SPEAKING model Hymes10 has identified eight components, the initials of which make up the acronym: (S)Setting/scene, (P)Participants, (E)Ends, (A)Art characteristics, (K)Key, (I)Instrumentalities, (N) Norms of interaction and interpretation and (G)Genres. Particular configurations of these constituents, the presence or lack as well as the relationship of various features define individual speech acts and speech events, and render them
8 Hofstede 2001: 2.
9 Hymes 1972.
10 Hymes 1967.
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rable with other acts and events within the same community or with similar acts in other speech communities.11 Hymes’s schema of context, where the relevant features of the situation are selected by the outsider researcher, is to serve as an analytical device to make a descriptive theory of ways of speaking possible.
In Speech Act Theory, context comes about as a result of the language philoso-pher’s introspection and comprises those features of the situation which present the conditions that must obtain for an utterance to count as a particular type of speech act, that is, to make a speech act felicitous.12 For a statement to be interpreted as a promise, among others, the following conditions must obtain: the proposition predicates a future act of the speaker, the hearer prefers the speaker’s carrying out the act to their not doing it and the future act is not part of the normal course of events. An utterance such as “I’ll punch you in the face”, even if it contains the performative verb ‘promise’, does not count as a promise because the act to be performed is not the preferred option of the speaker. The objective of speech act theory is to describe language use in terms of speech acts: once the sets of conditions for all speech acts have been established, a taxonomy of language use can be provided.13 While the general conditions for the identification of various speech acts are assumed to be universal, there are differences at the cultural level.
For example, not all speech acts are present in all cultures and their binding force may vary as well.14
4.2 Cognitive linguistics: From language to context
An alternative way of creating context is using linguistic data to examine the relationship between language and cognition in order to establish the cognitive models and principles which contribute to the creation and understanding of meaning. The rationale justifying the use of linguistic evidence can be summarized as follows:
The world comes largely unstructured; it is (human) observers who do most of its structuring. A large part of this structuring is due to the linguistic system (which is a subsystem of culture). Language can shape and, according to the principle of linguistic relativity, does shape the way we think.15
11 Hymes 1972.
12 Searle 1991.
13 Searle 1991.
14 Huang 2007.
15 Kövecses 2006: 12.
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It follows from this that if language shapes the way people think, different languages influence the thinking of speakers of various languages differently. Therefore, some of the structured mental representations (the preferred term is ‘frame’ in cognitive linguistics and ‘schema’ in pragmatics) shared by a group of people will be language and therefore culture-specific. For instance, Hungarians who eat boiled meat with grated horseradish, have this particular frame which might be non-existent in other cultures.16 Applied in this way, linguistic data can serve as a tool for cultural modelling.
4.3 Discussion
The context created in this paradigm is a generalized abstraction which serves as a tool for the analysis of various aspects of language use. The researchers aim either to identify the constituents of a context, be they situational features or conditions of use, or attempt to establish the categories and frames which govern the cognitive aspects of meaning-making.
Analysts abstract the general features from the particular instances of language use, and in so doing, they rid of the temporary, individual and ad hoc features of contexts. This inevitably results in the reduction of the complexity of real-time online construction of context and the fact that only two of the three levels of Hofstede’ model17, the universal and the cultural are covered.
Since the aim is to identify patterns and regularities in language use, be it through observation or introspection, situations which are ritualistic or highly conventional lend themselves to this kind of analysis more easily. One reason for this is the fact that such situations are relatively fixed and stable, which makes their relevant features more visible. Furthermore, in settings constrained by conven-tion, the correspondence between language and context is closer and the choice of language is often fairly limited, which makes the typical linguistic realizations of a context more readily available to the analyst. As a result of this, much of the research into language use explores conventionalized contexts, which presents a limitation in the practice of this approach.
The concern with the universal and especially the cultural level of schemata or frames has given rise to the cross-cultural analysis of context by all three schools of thought within this paradigm. These analyses include the comparison of typical contexts together with the realization patterns of such contexts. Cross-cultural inquiry is based on the idealization of not only the language and context but of the particular cultures as well. The assumption is that speakers of a language are
16 Kövecses 2006.
17 Hofstede 2001.
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constrained by the culture in which their language is spoken and therefore share not only the language but culturally-defined schemata as well.
Identifying the speaker of a language with the culture or the country where the language is used may result in the somewhat outdated and simplified ‘one nation – one language – one culture’ view, where culture is “essentialized into monolithic national cultures on the model of monolithic standard national languages.”18 In terms of context, this can translate into the assumption that all speakers of a lan-guage possess a particular set of schemata, and if a speaker does not have a schema within the set, that person is not the representative of the particular culture. It is worth noting that, somewhat paradoxically, considering the spread and use of English in international communication, English language teaching is still heavily influenced by such juxtaposing and comparison of native speaker and learner language use.19
As we have seen, the notion of context as a fixed generalization identified by the analyst cannot capture all aspects of context:
[…] this analysis so far is designed only to give us the bare bones of the modes of meaning and not to convey all of the subtle distinctions involved in actual discourse. […] this analysis cannot account for all the richness and variety of actual speech acts in actual natural language. Of course not. It was not designed to address that issue.20