This chapter introduces the two essential challenges in accommodating emotional communication within a theory of utterance interpretation: the challenge of description versus expression and the challenge of propositions and ineffability. We sketch the prehistory of philosophical thought and show how the sidelining of emotional communication in modern linguistic pragmatics is very much a consequence of the propositional foundations on which modern theories of semantics and pragmatics are built. Consequently, such theories have problems accounting for expression and ineffability. Two further challenges are also articulated. The first of these concerns the nature of the term pragmatics, and this chapter concludes with some background on what we mean by pragmatics in this book. The second concerns the nature of emotion itself: what is emotion? We turn to that challenge in the next chapter.

The goal of this chapter is to answer the question: what is emotion? We begin by presenting a brief overview of the early history of emotion studies, charting a trajectory from the study of emotions from Aristotle in classical times through to the work of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and from Descartes to Hume. and We then move on to those thinkers who are, arguably, responsible for the very beginnings of modern enquiry into emotion study: Charles Darwin and William James. We offer a summary of the three main theoretical approaches to affective science that exist today: the so-called basic emotion view, the psychological-constructionist view and appraisal theory. We will claim there are a number of reasons to favour the appraisal theory account, one of the principal of which is of these being that there are good reasons to suggest it is the one that marries most successfully with relevance theory, the pragmatic framework we adopt. As such, it offers a route ahead for genuinely interdisciplinary research involving those working in pragmatics and those working in affective science.

Chapter 6 suggests that the relevance-theory notion of cognitive effect be supplemented with the new notion of affective effect. We propose two different types of affective effect: primary affective effects, which typically act as input to inferential processes, and secondary affective effects, which are typically the output of inferential processes. Primary affective effects come in two flavours: anticipatory effects and transfer effects. The first of these are those effects which prepare an individual for a course of action; the latter are communicative, and inextricably linked with the interpretation of natural codes, inherently communicative behaviours which are ‘natural’ in the sense of Grice. In the case of secondary affective effects, propositional descriptions give rise to affective effects which rest on the imaginative abilities of the hearer/reader. This happens typically with literature and poetry. Emotions, we argue, appear to be a central contributor to persuasion, and we suggest this is so because of the special relationship that exists between affective and cognitive effects within the domain of achieving relevance.

The goal of this chapter is to examine how the study of language disorders in clinical linguistics intersects with context. For children and adults who have language disorders, context can be both a formidable barrier to communication and a powerful resource for the compensation of impaired receptive and expressive language skills. Context influences clinical assessment and intervention of language. This chapter will examine the scope of clinical linguistics and how the field intersects with the closely related profession of speech-language pathology. Language disorders are a significant group of communication disorders which also include speech, hearing, voice, and fluency disorders. The relationship between language disorders and communication disorders is addressed. Five context-based themes will be used to examine clinical linguistics: the nonnormative use of context in children and adults with language disorder; context as a barrier to, and facilitator of, linguistic communication; the role of context in the language disorders clinic; context and the ecological validity of language assessments; and context in the setting of therapy goals and the generalization of language skills. The discussion concludes with some proposals for how context may be further integrated into clinical linguistics and the work of speech-language pathologists.

This chapter reviews recent developments that reflect a convergence of work in various branches of linguistics and psycholinguistics around the implications of the incremental sequencing of speech units for understanding grammar and the cognitive processing that underlies the production, comprehension, and interpretation of utterances. Notions from Functional Discourse Grammar are used to present a view of syntactic structure as arising from the incremental extension of holophrases, i.e., minimal utterances. By prioritizing the timecourse of language processing, the chapter interprets syntactic hierarchy as arising from chunk-and-pass operations supported by predictive processing. Spoken dialogue is identified as the primary arena for these processes, with grammaticality subordinated to situational appropriateness. Linguistic data are seen as protocols of joint action aimed at the incremental co-creation of meaning. All of these notions make essential reference to context as constantly active, prior to and during the utterance of the linguistic signal, and as a crucial component of the operations and processes that take place in verbal interaction.

Traditionally, the study of linguistics has focused on verbal communication. In the sense that linguistics is the scientific study of language, the approach is perfectly justified. Those working in the sub-discipline of linguistic pragmatics, however, are faced with something of a dilemma. The aim of a pragmatic theory is to explain how utterances are understood, and utterances, of course, have both linguistic and nonlinguistic properties. As well as this, current work in pragmatics emphasizes that the affective dimension of a speaker’s meaning is at least as important as the cognitive one, and it is often the nonlinguistic properties of utterances that convey information relating to this dimension. This chapter highlights the major role of nonverbal “modes” of communication (”multimodality”) in accounting for how meaning is achieved and explores in particular how the quasi-musical contours we impose on the words we say, as well as the movements of our face and hands that accompany speech, constrain the context and guide the hearer to our intended meaning. We build on previous exploration of the relevance of prosody (Wilson and Wharton 2006) and, crucially, look at prosody in relation to other nonverbal communicative behaviors from the perspective of Relevance Theory. In so doing, we also hope to shed light on the role of multimodality in both context construction and utterance interpretation and suggest prosody needs to be analyzed as one tool in a set of broader gestural ones (Bolinger 1983). Relevance Theory is an inferential model, in which human communication revolves around the expression and recognition of the speaker’s intentions in the performance of an ostensive stimulus: an act accompanied by the appropriate combination of intentions. This inferential model is proposed as a replacement for the traditional code-model of communication, according to which a speaker simply encodes into a signal the thought they wish to communicate and the hearer retrieves their meaning by decoding the signal they have provided. We will argue that much existing work on multimodality remains rooted in a code model and show how adopting an inferential model enables us to integrate multimodal behaviors more completely within a theory of utterance interpretation. As ostensive stimuli, utterances are composites of a range of different behaviors, each working together to form a range of contextual cues.

An AI-driven (or AI-assisted) speech or dialogue system, from an engineering perspective, can be decomposed into a pipeline with a subset of the following three distinct processing activities: (1) Speech processing  that turns sampled acoustic sound waves into enriched phonetic information through automatic speech recognition (ASR), and vice versa via text-to-speech (TTS); (2) Natural Language Processing (NLP), which operates at both syntactic and semantic levels to get at the meanings of words as well as of the enriched phonetic information; (3) Dialogue processing which ties both together so that the system can function within the specified latency and semantic constraints. This perspective allows for at least three levels of context. The lowest level is phonetic, where the fundamental components of speech are built from a time-sequence string of acoustic symbols (analyzed in ASR or generated in TTS). The next higher level of context is word- or character-level, normally postulated as sequence-to-sequence modeling. The highest level of context typically used today keeps track of a conversation or topic. An even higher level of context, generally missing today, but which will be essential in future, is that of our beliefs, desires, and intentions.

One of the most complicated issues of present-day linguistics is the relationship of three types of knowledge: linguistic knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and encyclopedic knowledge. After discussing the complexity of their interplay from different perspectives, the chapter presents a model to explain their relationship. The model has linguistic knowledge on one side, and the sociocultural background knowledge (world knowledge) on the other side. There is constant interaction between the two sides in language use. For analytic reasons, within the sociocultural background knowledge there a distinction is made between conceptual knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge. According to this model, meaning is constructed in the dynamic interplay of actual situational context and lexical items, with the context representing the actual, present, situational, ever-changing side of sociocultural background and the lexical item(s) embodying previous experiences and relations in the sociocultural background. The lexical items with their semantic properties (linguistic knowledge) represent prior reoccurring experience (conceptual knowledge), and the actual situational context triggers the other part of world knowledge that we previously called encyclopedic knowledge. The difference between the two types of sociocultural background knowledge is that the conceptual knowledge part is immediately tied to linguistic knowledge while the other type of sociocultural background knowledge (encyclopedic knowledge) is called upon as needed in language use.

Historical linguists investigate those contexts that are considered to be most relevant to language change, given the theoretical approach adopted and the phenomena to be investigated. The topic of this chapter is usage-based perspectives on language-internal change, especially as conceptualized in the frameworks of research on grammaticalization, semantic-pragmatic change, and diachronic construction grammar. Contexts may be immediate, local “co-texts” or wider linguistic discourse contexts. Contexts tend to be wide and discursive as change begins to occur and local after it has occurred. I discuss the roles in enabling change of ambiguity, of pragmatic inferencing, and of “assemblies of discursive uses” such as have been proposed in work on constructionalization. With respect to contexts for “actualization,” the step-by-step language-internal spread (or loss) of a change that has occurred, focus is on host-class expansion and on the often analogy-driven changes across contexts, especially as revealed in corpus work.

The notion of “context” is currently being deployed in Discourse Analysis within approaches that subscribe to its constitutive nature. Rather than being extraneous to talk and text, context is conceptualized as an integral part of discourse, in a mutually constitutive text-context relationship. This chapter will cover key insights from three influential and affiliated ways of analyzing context: context as dynamically and interactionally achieved; context as rooted in metapragmatic awareness; and context as historicized and multidimensional. The chapter will then illustrate how these three key insights manifest themselves in the framework of small stories research. After presenting these three features of context, the chapter will focus on two core issues at the forefront of current concerns, namely ambiguity in delineating “context,” and occurrences where what can be postulated as “relevant context” is not readily retrievable from textual data. Picking up on these issues, we argue that future research will need to address discourses and contexts becoming ever more fragmented, dispersed, and even disintegrated through new communication technologies. In this respect, an analytical focus on metapragmatic awareness may aid the identification of interactionally relevant features of context as well as of the (re)affirmation of participants’ shared meanings.

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a major contributing discipline to the study of language use and social action in context. Originating in the discipline of sociology, it forms the basis for the burgeoning field of interactional linguistics. This chapter offers an overview of major themes in the field. Beginning with a brief discussion of the intellectual background of the field, the chapter sketches three distinctive levels of analysis: sequential organization, practices of turn construction, and the organization of these practices as sets of resources for dealing with recurrent problems in the social organization of interaction. Sections of the chapter deal with sequence organization, preference, turn design, the fitting of talk to specific contexts and recipients (recipient design), progressivity, multimodality, and interaction in the context of specific social institutions such as medicine, legal discourse, and news conferences.

Sociopragmatics typically refers to sociocultural parameters of the communicative use of language (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). This concept has long been taken up in the area of applied linguistics (Kaspar & Rose 2002) and historical pragmatics (Jucker 2006; Culpeper 2009). Context per se is difficult to pin down and, therefore, its association with language in a principled manner is a challenging task. In view of the above, and within a Construction Grammar framework (Fried and Östman 2004), this chapter aims to show that the object of sociopragmatic analysis can in fact be viewed as the domain of socioculturally defined genres that are often associated with particular (genre) constructions reflecting a speaker’s knowledge of the language (Nikiforidou 2016). The question to be addressed in this view is to what extent speakers’ understanding of context is systematic, conventional, and, hence, an inherent part of grammar and the description of language. The data to be discussed include recipes, labels, couple talk, stage directions, and TV talk. It will be argued that sociopragmatic context, typically encoded at the meso-level of genre, can be accounted for as a set of specifications that are routinely incorporated in the description of a language’s grammatical constructions.

The relationship between context and prosody is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive ones in language. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to describe because it is based on acoustic cues that only need milliseconds to create an image in our brain. However, speakers of a language can generally understand their interlocutors’ emotional and cognitive status through their prosodic realization. Prosodic pragmatics is the branch of pragmatics that attempts to identify the intentionality of the speaker’s meaning in a real context based on the analysis of the suprasegmental aspects of speech production. If prosody studies how an utterance is pronounced in unison with the perceptual features of pitch, length, and loudness, then prosodic pragmatics studies the acoustic and cognitive contextual parameters in conversation. The chapter will show the relationship between prosody, information, and context in communication. Starting from the essential acoustic parameters of speech, it will revise the most influential theories of intonation through the prosodic pragmatics lens to understand the cognitive adaptation of a message in a specific context.

This chapter presents a view on context as understood within functional models of language, specifically the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Amongst the functional approaches to language, SFL is recognized as a framework which has maintained an account of context that has prioritized its relationship with lexicogrammar, allowing it to make a causal connection between culture and language. The aim of this chapter is to highlight and explain the principal ways in which context works within the SFL framework and explore the main themes and parameters which situate context within an integrated theory of language as a semiotic resource. As no theory emerges in a vacuum, the first part of the chapter will consider the historical development of context as a concept within SFL theory with reference to how context is situated in other related functional grammars. Following this, we examine two areas of challenge related to the approach to context outlined in the chapter. Finally, the chapter concludes with closing remarks and key directions for future research in this area.