2024年4月11日发(作者：酷狗音乐2019旧版本下载)

The Theory of Context

Context (in language use)——the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use,

language variation and discourse.

Structural ambiguity:

"You have a green light"

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you are holding a green light bulb.

you have a green light to drive your car.

you can go ahead with the project.

your body has a green glow.

"Sherlock saw the man with binoculars"

Sherlock observed the man by using binoculars;

Sherlock observed a man who was holding binoculars.

the context and the speaker's intent

A sentence is an abstract entity — a string of words divorced from non-linguistic

context — as opposed to an utterance, which is a concrete example of a speech act

in a specific context.

The cat sat on the mat. (A sentence)

“The cat sat on the mat”, she said. (an unterance)

Context may refer to:

ConTeXt, a macro package for the TeX typesetting system

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ConTEXT, a Windows text editor

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Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative

situation that influence language use, language variation and discourse

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Context (computing), the virtual environment required to suspend a running

software program

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Archaeological context, an event in time which has been preserved in the

archaeological record

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Context may also be used for:

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Context analysis, analysis of the environment in which a business operates

Context awareness, ability for computers to adjust to the natural environment

Context menu, usability improvement based on context awareness

Context mixing, a type of data compression algorithm

Context principle, philosophy of language

Context Sensitive Solutions, transportation

Context theory, theory of how environmental design and planning of new

development should relate to its context

Contextualization, a translation approach that is not literal; predominantly

used in regards to Bible translations

High context culture

Low context culture

Trama (context or flesh), the mass of non-hymenial tissues that composes the

mass of a fungal fruiting

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context

contributes to meaning.

Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in

interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and

linguistics.

It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic

knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the

context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, the inferred

intent of the speaker, and so on. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language

users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner,

place, time etc. of an utterance. Semantics

Pragmatic competence——The ability to understand another speaker's intended

meaning is called

pragmatic competence

. An utterance describing pragmatic function

is described as metapragmatic. Pragmatic awareness is regarded as one of the most

challenging aspects of language learning, and comes only through experience.

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Pragmatics is that branch of linguistics, which deals with the study of meaning,

its transmission of words by manner, place, time, etc.

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Traditional View on Context

 Bronislaw Malinowski——the initiator of context

context of situation and context of culture

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introduces the term sociological linguistics: the meaning of “context” from the sentence before

and after a particular sentence to the relation between language (the linguistic context) and social

environment (context of situation).

“meaning” is to be regarded as a complex of textual relations, and phonetics, grammar,

lexicography, and semantics (Firth 1957:192).

According to this idea, the meaning of any sentence consists of the following five parts：

(Firth,1991: 187-223)

(1) The relationship of each phoneme to its phonetic context;

(2) The relationship of each lexical item to the others in the sentence ;

(3) The morphological relations of each word;

(4) The sentence type of which the given sentence is an example; （linguistic environment）

(5) The relationship of the sentence to its context of situation. （non-linguistic environment）

 Halliday

takes a functional approach to view language as an instrument of social interaction

greatest contribution——“register语域” （in Language as Social Semiotic， 1978）

“A register can be defined as the configuration of semantic resources that a member of a culture

typically associates with the situation type. It is the meaning potential that is accessible in a given

social context. The register is recognizable as a particular selection of words and structures. In a

word, register is defined as the selection of meaning that constitutes the variety to which a text

belongs” (1978:111).

In the words of Halliday, “the category of register is postulated to account for what people do

with their language. When we observe language activity in the various contexts in which it takes

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place, we find differences in the type of language selected as appropriate to different types of

situation” (Basil Hatim & Ian Mason 2001:46). That is to say, register is the term employed for the

kind of variety which is distinguished in terms of use.

Field，Tenor，mode

 Dell Hymes（an American sociolinguist）

He concerned with what determines the appropriateness of the utterances in particular context.

He put forward the eight components of speech situation, which are usually called SPEAKING

model, namely,

act situation (setting and scene which refer to the time and place of a speech act, and the

psychological setting or cultural definition of a scene, respectively),

participants (speaker/sender, addressor, addressee, hearer/receiver/audience),

ends(purposes/outcomes, or goals of the discourse),

act sequences (message form, message context),

keys ( which denotes the cues that establish the tone of the speech act), instrumentalities

(forms and styles of speech, including channels, oral or written, etc),

norms(norms of interaction, norms of interpretation, or social rules governing the event and the

participants’ actions), and genres (which include assorted categories such as poem, myth, tale,

proverb, riddle, oration, lecture etc). In addition, he explored the role of context in interpretation:

“The use of a linguistic form identifies a range of meanings. A context can support a range of

meanings. When a form is used in a context it eliminates the meanings possible to that context other

than those the form can signal: the context eliminates from consideration the meanings possible to

the form other than those the context can support (Gillian Brown& George Yule, 1987:38). In other

words, context can limit the range of possible interpretations as well as support the intended

interpretation.

 John Lyons

the components of context as follows:

(1) knowledge of role and status;

(2) knowledge of spatial and temporal location;

(3) knowledge of formality level;

(4) knowledge of medium;

(5) knowledge of appropriate subject matter;

(6) knowledge of appropriate province(1977:574-585).

 Sperber and Wilson

——Cognitive Context

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“the set of premises used in interpreting an utterance (apart from the premise that the utterance

in question has been produced) constitutes what is generally known as the context.

A context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world,

which affects the interpretation of an utterance” (Dun Sperber & Deirdre Wilson, 2004:15-24).

information that can be retrieved from memory

The cognitive context is generally made up of three elements:

logical information, encyclopedic information, and lexical information.

Chinese experts:

Chen Wangdao

Wang Dechun

Hu Zhuanglin

Classification of Context

(1) Subjective context and objective context (王建平，1989)

(2) Linguistic context and non-linguistic context (何兆熊, 2000)

(3) Linguistic context, situational context, and cultural context (胡壮麟，1994:182)

(4) Cognitive context (Sperber and Wilson, 2004:15-24)

(5) The original context factors and the target context factors in the translation (彭利元，2001：

106-108).

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To sum up, the specific classification of the context can be seen as follows:

The original phrase context

The original sentence context

The original paragraph context

The original text context

Linguistic context

The original linguistic context

The target linguistic context

Field of discourse

Tenor of discourse

Situational context

Context

Mode of discourse

The topic

The author’s creative intention

Addressor

The author’s character and experience

The figure’s identity and status

Addressee

Channel of communication

Rhetorical figure

Allusion culture

Idiom culture

Custom culture

The original cultural context

Cultural context

The target cultural context

Cognitive context

The translator’s cognitive context

The target reader’s cognitive context

2.4 Features of Context

It may help the speaker use proper words in proper places as well as help the listener

understand the speaker’s intentions.

“The more the analyst knows about the features of context, the more likely he is to be able to

predict what is likely to be said” (Gillian Brown & Yule, 1987:40).

the following features:

(1) Hierarchy.

“Each context (apart from the initial context) contains one or more smaller contexts, and each

context (apart from the maximal context) is contained in one or more larger contexts”. (Dan Sperber

& Deirdre Wilson, 2001:142) .

(2) Relativity

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Context is of relativity, which refers to the fact that context is dynamic rather than static.

(3) Transferability

Theoretically, context is transferable. Suppose A is a contextual factor of utterance B, and B for

utterance C, then A is for sure the contextual factor of C. why is that so? When A is said to be the

contextual factor of B, it follows that A is a relevant factor for the participants to understand

utterance B during communication. In other words, without contextual factor A, it would be

unlikely to understand utterance B. however, B is a contextual factor for utterance C, that is to say,

utterance C would not be understood without B, therefore, the comprehension of C is inseparable

from A.

(4) Universality

Iit means context exists in any language communication and there is no communication

divorced from context) and so on.

In utterance communication and translation, the listener or translator must master these features

and recreate context in accordance with what the speaker or writer has assured. Only by doing so,

can the listener or translator accurately understand the speaker or writer’s intention and achieve the

communication purpose.

Related fields

There is considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, since both

share an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community.

However, sociolinguists tend to be more interested in variations within such

communities.

Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social

phenomena; it thus pervades the field of linguistic anthropology. Because pragmatics

describes generally the forces in play for a given utterance, it includes the study

of power, gender, race, identity, and their interactions with individual speech acts.

For example, the study of code switching directly relates to pragmatics, since a

switch in code effects a shift in pragmatic force.

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According to Charles W. Morris, pragmatics tries to understand the relationship

between signs and their users, while semantics tends to focus on the actual objects

or ideas to which a word refers, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines relationships

among signs. Semantics is the literal meaning of an idea whereas pragmatics is the

implied meaning of the given idea.

Speech Act Theory, pioneered by J.L. Austin and further developed by John Searle,

centers around the idea of the performative, a type of utterance that performs the

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very action it describes. Speech Act Theory's examination of Illocutionary Acts has

many of the same goals as pragmatics, as outlined above.

Significant works

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J. L. Austin's How To Do Things With Words

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Paul Grice's cooperative principle and conversational maxims

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Brown & Levinson's Politeness Theory

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Geoffrey Leech's politeness maxims

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Levinson's Presumptive Meanings

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Jürgen Habermas's universal pragmatics

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Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's relevance theory

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