The Purpose of the Volume
Context is everywhere. Context is everything. Context is whatever contributes, consciously or unconsciously, to the understanding of reality to facilitate language processing in human interaction. We continuously construct and constrain context in our minds to understand and be understood. The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context describes how context interacts with language across different traditions and theories, and the chapters in the volume will answer some critical questions in context studies that have been puzzling linguists and scholars from other related fields, such as how much context goes into a specific linguistic model or what facets of contextual information are indispensable in a specific theory.
To answer some of these burning questions, the volume brings together some of the most influential scholars in linguistics and provides a comprehensive guide to language in context from a multifaceted perspective. For this reason, the present Handbook does not consider context as an ancillary feature for the interpretation of language, as was sometimes invoked in the past, but makes context the focal point to highlight its essential dynamic role for the interpretation of reality.
Linguistics describes language and its users from various viewpoints: interactional, textual, historical, cognitive, etc., so this volume departs from the various theories that describe these perspectives to find the emergent aspects that can illuminate a renovated description of the whole, that is, of context. In this sense, the contributors to the volume have made a creative tour de force in their reflection of how context can sharpen the theories they are describing vis-à-vis the recent developments in linguistics and other fields such as technology, philosophy or psychology, amongst others.
Context can be described in the digital era as the sum of the linguistic, physical, psychological, and technological factors that influence humans in their interpretation of reality, being aware that the addition of all these factors amounts to a more complex result than the mere sum of its parts. The understanding of communication has broadened thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet and the pervasiveness of social media. Technology has changed face-to-face communication irreversibly. Nowadays, access to global information is available with our smartphones within seconds, and conversations no longer rely uniquely on the knowledge of the interlocutors but on the verdict of the web.
Context has a polyhedric perspective, and the chapters in the volume weave a crisscrossing safety net that describes context as the background scenario of any communicative exchange without searching for a consensus between the different approaches. Like a mosaic, only the individual tiles can render the whole picture intelligible. For this reason, the Handbook pays attention to the evolution of context throughout history and identifies the various conceptualizations behind each theory to specify their differences, similarities, and complementary views.
The chapters in this volume essentialy align with two main traditions: The first has a cognitive foundation and maintains that context is related to the information processing that allows humans to understand reality. The second has a sociological anchor and focuses on the analysis of the elements that allow speakers to engage in the co-construction of conversation as the essence of society. Ultimately, the objective of The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context is to (re)propose context studies in linguistic communication following the same principle as the negative in analogic photography: most of the image space is occupied by the background and this context is essential to put the focus on the silhouettes.
The volume is organized into five topical sections. Part I is entitled “Language in Context: A Sociohistorical Perspective.” In Chapter 1, John Heritage describes the historical development of Conversational Analysis and how the discipline revolutionized linguistics and sociology with its novel principles and methods. The author gives a detailed account of the discipline and its anchor to context.
Chapter 2, “Context in Historical Linguistics” by Elizabeth Traugott, investigates the contexts that are most relevant to language change, with particular attention to the contextual changes that enable change and those that follow from change. The author highlights some of the key phenomena in the field: grammaticalization, semantic/pragmatic change, and constructionalization.
The last chapter of Part I, “Context in Discourse Analysis” by Cedric Deschrijver and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, provides an overview of the main theoretical concepts and empirical tools used to investigate context in Discourse Analysis and focuses mainly on the most significant text-based conceptualizations of context: context as dynamically evolving, context as interactionally achieved, and context as productive and constitutive of speakers’ positions.
Part II describes the philosophical, semantic, and grammatical foundations of context studies. It starts with the chapter by María de Ponte, Kepa Korta, and John Perry entitled “Philosophy of Language and Action Theory.” The authors reflect on the transition in philosophy of language when scholars started to think about natural languages as opposed to what were called “perfect languages” – giving a detailed account of this change of paradigm, present action theory, and its tenets in context studies.
In Chapter 5, Rebekah Wegener and Lise Fontaine describe the functional approach to context and its enormous impact on context studies. They mainly focus on the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework and explore its main parameters as a comprehensive theory of language, giving an account of the historical development compared with other related functional grammars.
Chapter 6, “The Grammar of Incremental Language Production in Context” by J. Lachlan Mackenzie, describes the incrementalist approach, which considers how an utterance reflects the language user’s communicative needs and the specific context. The contribution describes the way in which incremental grammars interact with psycholinguistics to demonstrate how multisensory situational contexts are integrated into the speaker’s processing strategies.
In Chapter 7 Dirk Geeraerts presents the role of context in Cognitive Linguistics by giving a complete overview of this theoretical approach to context. His main argument is that even if (re)contextualization provides a unifying perspective on the contribution of Cognitive Linguistics, it lacks a unifying perspective based on two main approaches: a universalist tendency under the assumption that the human body is the same for everyone and a sociocultural conception emphasizing the diversity and historicity of the human experience.
Part III of the Handbook revises the main pragmatic theories and their understanding of context. In Chapter 8, “The Role of Context in Gricean and Neo-Gricean Pragmatics,” Jacques Moeschler gives a full account of the role of context in the processing of meaning by making the distinction between particularized and conventional pragmatic implicatures in Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics. He advocates that context is the last resort for computing conversational implicatures.
Chapter 9, by Sophia Marmaridou, approaches the relationship between sociopragmatics and context. Her contribution describes pragmatic meaning as the tool to assess participants’ social distance, the language community’s social rules and appropriateness norms, the discourse practices, and the accepted behaviors. The author incorporates in her description some of the main domains of analysis within this field in their understanding of context and compares the research angle with other pragmatic approaches, like pragmalinguistics.
Anna Gladkova outlines, in Chapter 10, the understanding of context within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, described by the authors as a human-specific symbolic system for expressing meaning. In their approach, context includes the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of a word and the social and cultural contexts it functions in, therefore providing a holistic approach to meaning.
In Chapter 11 Deirdre Wilson examines the relation between context and Relevance Theory and reflects upon the crucial, yet controversial, concept of context due to its importance in the different approaches to linguistics. However, she attributes the lack of a shared theory not only to the linguists’ diverging understandings but also to the fact that there seem to be no limitations to the contextual information that can be triggered in understanding utterances. In her opinion, the question at stake for relevance theory is how hearers can find the necessary contextual information and succeed in recognizing the speaker’s informative intention.
In Chapter 12, “The Interplay of Linguistic, Conceptual, and Encyclopedic Knowledge in Meaning Construction and Comprehension,” Istvan Kecskes describes how these three components of meaning collaborate with each other. To delve into this proposal, the author suggests analyzing communication from an intercultural perspective as, even if it is the case that linguistic knowledge is relatively easy to encode across languages, they present essential differences in terms of their cultural approach to very similar concepts.
Chapter 13, “Corpus Pragmatics” by Karin Aijmer, describes this recent discipline as a combination of the methodology of corpus linguistics and pragmatics as a window to human thought. For the author, corpus linguistics provides the content matter and pragmatics of its explanation. Although corpus pragmatics is still a novel discipline, it is already achieving great insights into new ways of exploring language use and linguistic theory, with promising implications in some new directions, including variation and change and cultural studies.
The last chapter of Part III, “Prosodic Pragmatics in Context” by Jesús Romero-Trillo and Yalda Sadeghi, explains that the relationship between context and prosody is very intuitive but, at the same time, extremely challenging to delineate because it is based on acoustic cues that last milliseconds. However, the liaison between prosody and context is so strong that speakers of a language can understand their interlocutors’ emotional and cognitive status through their prosodic realization. The chapter describes the theory of prosody in the light of pragmatics and context, with special reference to how speakers and hearers use suprasegmental information to encode and decode a message respectively and take full notice of speakers’ intentions.
Part IV of the Handbook deals with the applications of context studies. In Chapter 15, “Language Learning and Assessment in Context,” Dale Koike and Elisa Gironzetti discuss some of the most significant historical, methodological, and social issues in context and language learning and assessment in first, second, and heritage languages, making an accurate dissection of how context influences learning and assessment in such different social and linguistic domains.
Linguistic creativity and humor in context is the topic of Delia Chiaro’s contribution in Chapter 16, in which she underlines the awareness of context for creating and understanding humor. For the author, although humor is primarily dependent on language to be recognized in its intentionality, it is also heavily context-dependent, with interesting side implications regarding the recipient’s sense of humor and the moral attachment to the object of our humor.
Chapter 17, Luis Pérez-González’s contribution, explores how scholarly thinking on context has informed research in translation and interpreting studies since the early 1990s to proceed to a critique of different approaches on context in translation scholarship. In his view, although there is a widely accepted premise that translators and interpreters are fully immersed in crosslinguistic and cross-cultural contexts, the theoretical construct of the concept has not been systematically approached by translation and interpreting theories until relatively recently.
The last chapter of Part IV, “The Role of Context in Clinical Linguistics” by Louise Cummings, examines how clinical linguistics intersects with context. The author’s main focus in the chapter is to show that for people with language disorders, context can be both a barrier to communication but also a powerful resource for the compensation of impaired language skills. The author concentrates on five context-based themes: the nonnormative use of context in children and adults with language disorders; 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.
Part V of the volume presents relevant advances in multimodal and technological context-based research. In Chapter 19, “Nonverbal Communication and Context: Multimodality in Interaction,” Pauline Madella and Tim Wharton advocate for the joint vocal-cum-visual approach to linguistic analysis to understand human linguistic behavior, which sometimes expresses more about the emotional state of our interlocutor than the words pronounced. For this reason, nonverbal modalities cannot be ignored, as our word melodies and gestures are essential to guide the hearer to our intended meanings.
In Chapter 20, “AI, Human–Robot Interaction, and Natural Language Processing,” Ian McLoughlin and Nitin Indurkhya describe the structure and processes of an AI-driven speech or dialogue system. Following the three stages of the process: speech processing (phonetic level), natural language processing (lexis, grammar, and syntax), and dialogue processing, the authors analyze the implications within the three related layers of context that they describe to reach the highest level of conversation and topic complexity. The authors hypothesize on the conditions for the future arrival of a pragmatic context level in which beliefs, desires, and intentions could also be processed.
Chapter 21, the last chapter of the volume, is entitled “Social Media and Computer-Mediated Communication.” For the author, Francisco Yus, context in cyberpragmatic communication is the information that is brought when the coded input reaches some interpretations. As in other contextualization models, the mind must select the appropriate information for meaningful interpretations. Bearing this in mind, the author describes the challenges for social media and internet communication in online contexts, like the relationship between an interface and utterance contextualization, the role of the physical–virtual interface, also the differentiation between the user’s personal, interactive, and social non-virtual contexts.
As readers can observe, The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context presents a comprehensive description of how the theory of context has evolved in the history of linguistics and how its renewed study is crucial in an ever-changing world. I am grateful to the authors for their insightful contributions and to Cambridge University Press for accepting the challenge of publishing the volume. I am sure that The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context can suggest guidelines and be of assistance to future linguistic research in the (re)creation of context studies.
