It is this approach which attempts to address the issues left unanswered by the analyst-oriented paradigm. Instead of taking an outsider stance, it aims to capture how insiders within a particular instance of language use select the relevant features of a situation when making meaning. Since it is the participants who decide which features of the situation pertain and make up context, the schematic construct necessarily includes individual and ad hoc features. Therefore, context in this paradigm is viewed as follows:
A context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world. It is these assumptions, of course, rather than the actual state of the world, that affect the interpretation of an utterance. A context in this
18 Kramsch 2004: 250.
19 Kramsch 2004.
20 Searle in Thomas 1995: 99.
24
sense is not limited to information about the immediate physical environ-ment or the immediately preceding utterances: expectations about the future, scientific hypotheses or religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the mental state of the speaker, may all play a role in interpretation.21
In actual situations, especially in less conventionalized ones, any part of the interactants’ schematic knowledge can contribute to the creation of meaning.
In addition, through various stages of the interaction meanings are negotiated between the interlocutors, which renders context fluid and makes a componential analysis of real-time, online contexts difficult, if not impossible. Since the focus here is on the process of context construction and meaning making, the question is not what makes up context but how participants create context online in order to arrive at mutual understanding.
In the Cooperative Principle Grice22 attempts to capture how participants select the relevant features of context and what kind of logic ordinary people employ when they create meaning in acts of communication. Rather than defining the constituents therefore, Grice identifies the maxims, in reference to which elements of a situation pertaining to context are selected by the insider interactants.
Context in the procedural paradigm is thus a fluid construct which is cre-ated online, and which reflects the participants’ perspective. Grasping how and what meaning participants arrive at online therefore requires an emic approach which reveals what goes on in the speakers/hearers’ mind when they negotiate and establish common meaning. One suggested way of making the invisible visible is close observation of or, preferably, engagement in complete speech events rather than segments of decontextualized interaction.23 Even then, the particular line of logic followed by the participants on a particular occasion is hard to recover and is often impossible. Lack of closeness, both physically and mentally, and distance in time and space make it impossible, for instance, to answer the question of why and how the Song of Songs found its way into the Bible24 or what the representative of a lobby group meant by whisper in his assessment of a G8 summit.25 In the latter case, the absence of information about the speaker and the specific circumstances surrounding the utterance results in the suggested interpretation of the analyst, which reflects the analyst’s perspective and does not therefore necessarily coincide with the meaning the speaker originally intended.
21 Sperber – Wilson 1986: 18.
22 Grice 1975.
23 Seidlhofer 2009.
24 See Szelid (in this compilation).
25 See Kövecses (in this compilation).
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6. CONCLUSIONS
The different approaches to context adopt differing perspectives and focus on those features of the notion which make the investigation of a particular aspect of language use possible for the researcher. In the analyst-oriented paradigm the universal and culture-specific features of context are identified by the outsider researcher, allowing for componential and cross-cultural analyses of schemata and frames. This approach, however, can account for neither the individual level of the context schema nor for the emergent and fluid nature context displays in real-life online communication. While a participant- and process-oriented approach can overcome these problems, the difficulty here lies with the recovering of the individual and fortuitous features of context. As a result, this paradigm is better suited to answer the question of how context is established rather than what constitutes it.
As we have seen, the various approaches complement each other as none of them is able to fully grasp the complex notion of context – a trait that character-izes scientific inquiry which can offer “partial views of reality” and partial truths at best.26
NOTES
1.
[…] ‘context of situation’ is best used as a suitable schematic construct to apply to language events, and that it is a group of related categories at a different level from grammatical categories but rather of the same abstract nature. A context of situation for linguistic work brings into relation the following categories:
A The relevant features of participants: persons, personalities (i) The verbal action of the participants.
(ii) The non-verbal action of the participants.
B The relevant objects.
C The effect of the verbal action.27
26 Widdowson 2009: 243.
27 Firth 1957: 182, my emphasis.
26
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