15.1 Introduction

All activity, including language learning, occurs in some kind of context, whether it is acknowledged or not in research. Language is situated behavior: It happens between and among people, at a given time and space, and with certain goals and effects. Language learning, teaching, and assessment, which are subfields of applied linguistics, are particularly sensitive to contextual factors that affect society in a broad sense. The very labels and terminology that are employed in applied linguistics to refer to first/native (L1), second (L2), and heritage (HL) languages reflect the important role of context. The learning of an L1Footnote ¹ does not happen without a rich context that provides input and feedback to the baby. Children learn their L1 from their primary caregivers in a familial, informal setting and, only later, expand their knowledge in more formal and public settings through instruction in an institutional context. An L2 learner typically learns the target language in a formal setting after the L1 and can also be exposed to it in informal settings at a later stage, such as during a study abroad experience. The learning of an L2 in institutional settings is also shaped by contextual factors, such as historical events and social trends, theories, policies, ideas that are current at a given time, and the characteristics of the individuals involved. Last, an HL speaker learns the HL in a familial setting, as in the case of an L1, but without the opportunity to expand their knowledge in more formal and public settings until they are older, and only in some cases (see also Reference ValdésValdés 2005). The learning of an HL, like the L1 and L2, is also shaped by educational and societal contexts, and how people use the heritage and dominant languages in their lives. However, the HL represents special contextual circumstances, for which we have included it here. This chapter will discuss all three types of language learning, teaching, and assessment in relation to context in the following sections.

15.2 The Contexts of L1 Learning, Teaching, and Assessment

The learning, teaching, and assessment of the L1, regardless of whether it is acquired at home or in school, is a crucial factor in human development, in all capacities (i.e., emotional, cognitive, social, linguistic, etc.). In this section, we begin by discussing internal factors that affect L1 development and how language is learned naturally at home, to then address L1 teaching and assessment in formal educational contexts.

In learning an L1, before birth, the developing fetus can hear language through the walls of the mother’s womb, a context devoid of much external linguistic stimuli except for sound. However, the affordance of hearing the mother’s voice and perhaps those around her as she interacts with them starts the child on a journey to learning acoustic features of the mother’s language: phonemes, intonation, pitch, etc. (Reference Partanen, Kujala, Näätänen, Liitola, Sambeth and HuotilainenPartanen et al. 2013). When the baby is born, they begin to receive rich input from the context around them through all their senses (hearing, smell, touch, taste, and even sight), which, coupled with their innate disposition to learn languages, accelerate the language learning process. Absent this context, the baby will fail to learn the language, as documented cases have indicated (e.g., the case of Genie, in Reference Curtiss, Fromkin, Krashen, Rigler and RiglerCurtiss et al. 1974). One need only look at examples of language-deprived children, which represent severe cases of child abuse, in which the child is usually deprived of linguistic input by strict confinement to a small space, with little to no social interaction. These examples show that context and language learning are inseparable, since due to this type of deprivation, the child cannot fully acquire the language.

The L1 learning process in context continues throughout childhood.Footnote ² When the child reaches puberty, an age at which the brain loses its plasticity and the child typically undergoes changes that affect their social and personal life, L1 learning does not stop. However, linguistic information is then learned and stored in the brain differently.Footnote ³ From these facts, we know that language learning is not completely dependent on the world external to the individual, but that the internal processes of the brain, the development of the vocal apparatus, and emotional and social growth of the individual, all play a part in interaction with external context. In addition, when considering L1 learning, we must distinguish between formal and informal contexts. On the one hand, in an informal context, the language is learned at home, through interaction with caregivers and family members, where certain functions are regularly expressed in daily living, and language use is limited to intimate and familiar registers. On the other hand, in a formal context, the language is learned at school, where it is used in an institutional setting through writing and the use of additional registers. The latter type of language extends the child’s linguistic domains and registers beyond the intimate and familiar registers, the here and now, to enable them to deal with complexities and abstractions and with the vocabulary and grammar of the institutional and formal domains. This expansion is important to allow broader modes of expression and understanding, to lead into adulthood. However, as we discuss in the next section, for students of a higher socioeconomic status, the difference between home and school language is not as great as it is for students from a lower socioeconomic status or those who belong to a minority group, who may use a distinct and often stigmatized variety of the L1 at home.

15.3 The Contexts of L2 Learning, Teaching, and Assessment

A child can learn two or more languages simultaneously or sequentially, one after the other. Many societies promote bilingualism, and sometimes multilingualism, to enhance intercultural communication and preserve other languages, such as indigenous languages, to some extent. Here we examine the historical and societal events that, throughout the years, informed L2 teaching and learning and L2 assessment in the context of formal education; that is, in institutional settings, such as the classroom, with defined, predetermined goals.

15.4 The Contexts of Heritage Language Maintenance and Assessment

To illustrate another example of how context shapes language teaching, learning, and assessment, we introduce the case of HL learners, which was briefly mentioned in Section 15.2 as an example of how linguistic policies shape the teaching and learning of English in the school system. In broad terms, an HL is a minority language that is learned and spoken mostly in the familial context and coexists with a majority language used for schooling and in other public contexts. It is important to consider that the learning of an HL generally occurs before puberty, when the child has not yet reached what many consider to be the “critical period” of language learning, discussed earlier. In the case of HL speakers of Spanish in the United States, for example, Spanish is the minority language learned at home and usually it is not employed in as many contexts as the majority language, English, which HL speakers learn at school and use when speaking and writing in public spaces in the larger society. Owing to this division of functions of the two languages, and what the HL speakers themselves may perceive as linguistic inadequacies, they may suffer from anxieties and feelings of insecurity when using their HL with Spanish native speakers and even L2 learners of the same language, because their language practices are criticized by native speakers or because they are intimidated by the metalinguistic knowledge of L2 learners (Reference Lynch and PotowskiLynch 2018).

The different definitions of an HL and HL speakers that are used today (e.g., Reference Silva-CorvalánSilva-Corvalán 1996; Reference Fishman, Peyton, Ranard and McGinnisFishman 2001; Reference Peyton, Ranard and McGinnisPeyton et al. 2001; Reference Valdés, Peyton, Ranard and McGinnisValdés 2001; Reference Extra and YagmurExtra and Yagmur 2002; Reference Van Deusen-SchollVan Deusen-Scholl 2003; Reference Duff, Brinton, Kagan and BauckusDuff 2008) attempt to capture the complex dynamics and the social and political contexts that characterize HLs and their speakers. While some of these definitions focus on the linguistic abilities of HL speakers and their bilingual status (the so-called “narrow” definitions), others emphasize the personal connection of the individual with the heritage culture or ethnic group and thus include those HL speakers with limited or no practical knowledge of the language (receptive learners or speakers, emergent bilinguals). In the United States, which is the context with which we the authors are most familiar, Spanish is one of the most important HLs due to the large numbers of Latinos/asFootnote ⁷ in the country and the growing populations of HL learners in the public school system. Spanish heritage learners (SHL) form an important, expanding constituency and the issue of context is a critical factor in their language maintenance. The contexts that form the backdrop of this learner population are discussed in the next section.

15.5 Future Trends and Implications

In this chapter, we have shown relationships that exist between contextual factors and events, and language learning and assessment in L1, L2, and HL learning, teaching, and assessment. We have shown that, at least in the United States, L1 (language arts) teaching and assessment policies are largely determined at local, regional, and national levels, while in the case of L2 and HL language learning, teaching, and assessment, there has been a plethora of language theories, policies, approaches, and methods that aim at teaching the language according to each institution’s program and goals. Numerous changes have occurred over time regarding which and how languages are taught and assessed.

The profile of L1 learners is changing due to globalization, increased mobility, and the ubiquity of technology. Instructors of L1 at the elementary and secondary level are now teaching a more diverse student body that comprises not only monolingual L1 speakers, but also multilingual speakers who may not share the same L1 but are, nonetheless, learning the dominant language in school. The case of HL speakers in the United States is a clear example, but this situation is also a pressing reality in other countries (e.g., on Spanish as a minority or heritage language outside of the United States, see chapters 30 to 36 in Reference PotowskiPotowski 2018). We expect this trend will not stop and will eventually shape not only the teaching practices at the classroom level, but also, in a bottom-up fashion, institutional guidelines and language teaching policies at the state level. If L1 teaching is to serve the needs of our students, then L1 policies need not be modeled after a monolingual and ill-defined academic register but rather consider the richness of the multilingual practices students bring to the classroom.

As societal trends and events and scholarly research continue to have an impact on the field, we also witness changes in how language is conceptualized. In the last decades, we have seen a gradual move toward a more humanistic, interdisciplinary, and less cognitive-focused approach to language teaching and assessment that places more emphasis on social, political, and affective factors of language use. At the same time, there is a growing interest in the different modalities and media that humans rely upon for communication, in part due to globalization and the impact of technology. From this perspective, then, language is seen as a complex dynamic system of conventions that transcend verbal language to include other semiotic resources that people mobilize to create meaning, such as facial expressions or gestures. This broader conceptualization of language is having an impact on language teaching and assessment, and current proposals such as multimodal and multiliteracies approaches stress that language learning should be fostered by all these elements.

Just as history has shaped our language teaching and assessment practices over time, we are witnessing at this moment how the use of technology has affected our teaching and assessment practices, especially with regard to languages. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to use technological innovations to connect with learners at a distance, and to adapt our practices, materials, and syllabi to this mode of delivery, have greatly affected the field. While the pedagogical approaches to teach L2s may not necessarily have changed notably due to the use of online tools, many instructors and students faced new challenges with regard to equity and access to education, assessment, and learners’ agency. Online teaching has the potential of reaching a wider student population, including those who live in rural areas or far away from schools. At the same time, it has also brought attention to the existing technology gap, as many students still do not have reliable internet capabilities at home or access to a computer to attend online classes. Similarly, assessment instruments have had to transform to allow for online communication (e.g., storytelling projects, blogs), often assuming students and teachers already possess technology literacy instead of recognizing the need for a multiliteracies-oriented pedagogy. Finally, students’ motivation, affect, and self-regulation assume even greater importance in the success of an online language program (Reference MercerMercer 2011), as individual learners’ agency is key in a context in which instructors and students do not share a physical space or students may have to work independently more often. The fields of language teaching and assessment await new contexts in the future.

16.1 Introduction

Humor depends entirely on context; without it, humor could not exist. In order to get a joke, a wisecrack or an internet meme, we need to understand its frame of reference because both in its creation and in its reception, humor is inextricably linked to its setting. Incongruity, an essential feature of humor, consists in the inappropriateness of what we expect to be said, see, or hear in a certain situation. From the person who slips on the unseen banana skin to the clown who receives a custard pie in the face, a defeat in our expectations may spark a humorous response, so it is essential that we know what those given expectations are. This chapter will focus on spoken and written banana skins and custard pies, namely verbally expressed humor, that is to say, instances of humor that pivot mainly, although not necessarily exclusively, on humor that occurs either in speech or in writing. Although in a sense, the fact that verbally expressed humor deals with words may appear manifest, occurrences of humor in speech and writing rarely stand alone. A humorous trope, such as a joke, that is delivered orally is likely to be accompanied by significant facial expressions, body movement, gesture, and a judicious use of timing. Instances of humor in written form may occur in prose or online within an internet meme or in a text message accompanied by an emoji or a gif. The specificity of the term verbally expressed humor (VEH) allows us to select and center on the spoken and written aspects of humor even if it takes place within a wider setting. Having established this, however, as with all manifestations of language, VEH (Reference ChiaroChiaro 2005) does not occur in a void and both its making and its response will rely on a wider setting, in other words, on context.

Humor is a fuzzy concept. Although we all know what it is, it is an extremely complex notion that is everything but easy to define. Numerous philosophers and intellectuals from Ancient Greece to the present day have endeavored to define humor, so I shall certainly not attempt to do so. For the purposes of this chapter, my use of the term will rest on my favorite and somewhat jolly definition provided by linguist Wallace Chafe, namely “that feeling of non-seriousness” (2007). While I am uneasy about defining something by what it is not, rather than what it is, I would rather employ this simple definition than get involved in designations that are entangled in humor’s cognitive, psychological, and sociological underpinnings, not to mention its close connection with such disparate emotions as happiness and disgust. Furthermore, it would be easy to become ensnared by the notion of sense of humor which, for those who possess it, is considered a positive personality trait. If humor is indeed “that feeling of non-seriousness”; having a sense of humor (SOH) may well be a virtue. SOH plays an important role in the felicitous outcome of interactions involving VEH but, to complicate matters further, we can never be quite sure whether an unresponsive recipient of VEH does not have a particularly strong SOH or whether they are simply unamused. As SOH depends on a combination of both state and trait, you might certainly have a great SOH under normal circumstances but not if you have just been through a traumatic experience (for an extensive discussion of SOH, see Reference Martin and RuchMartin 1998; Reference Ruch and RuchRuch 1998). Finally, and possibly most importantly, humor involves moral proximity and/or distance between the humorous content conveyed by the speaker and received by the listener. Humor and its sister, laughter, have to do with comity, since both act as a social glue but can also be divisive depending, for example, on our closeness to a mocked target or our sensitivity to an object of ridicule. What I am getting at is that it is all very well to take a joke, a funny story, or an internet meme and parse it, link it to a number of well-known theories that range from incongruity and superiority to purely linguistic models, by depriving humor of its context; we are only up to speed with half the story. Without knowing who made the humorous remark, where, when, and to whom, we cannot become familiar with its whys and its wherefores, and we may well find ourselves, as has often been said of humor research, dissecting a frog.

According to Reference PinkerPinker (2011), one of the reasons humans understand language better than computers lies in the difficulty of programming machines with all the knowledge we have. He argues that comedies often use robots’ lack of such extensive knowledge as a source of humor. A running joke in the sixties’ sitcom Get Smart, featuring Maxwell Smart and a robot called Hymie, consists of Maxwell asking the android to “Give me a hand.” Whenever Hymie hears this utterance, he will physically break off his hand and pass it over to Maxwell. Of course, Hymie does not understand that in context “give me a hand” is a request for help and not a literal call for him to detach his hand and deliver it to the speaker. It is the lack of pragmatic knowledge that is responsible for the misunderstanding and that in turn triggers the joke. VEH is very much about this kind of (mis)understanding of contextual knowledge. Although Reference Attardo and RaskinAttardo and Raskin’s (1991) linguistic theory of humor is one of abstract competence unaffected by context, providing us with a hypothesis that pivots upon linguistic ambiguity, incongruity, and the notion of opposing and overlapping scripts, their perspective, and several more, can be appreciated in terms of misplaced context.

Context is of course an enormous topic, and I propose to limit my examination to linguistic play that relies for its ambiguity on context, and a selection of humorous phenomena that depend on context in interesting ways. In fact, humor and context concern a vast area of scholarship that touches several disciplines – if we consider linguistics alone, it involves at the very least semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and translation studies. This chapter can therefore provide only a short overview of where the two meet (see Reference AttardoAttardo 2020 for an exhaustive discussion). Following an outline of the variety of linguistic resourcefulness required in its creation – brief owing to the breadth of such a huge topic – I will explore the intersection of linguistic and sociocultural competences necessary in order to understand VEH and the impact of context in both its construction and its reception. Backed up by examples, I will argue that the creation of VEH mirrors unintentional slips of the tongue, as both display an identical breach of the indistinctness that is present in and across all formal aspects of language. Following an overview of some of the linguistic technicalities involved in creating VEH, I will examine how the lack of conversational cooperation can also create humor, briefly touching on tropes such as irony and sarcasm. I will conclude this overview with a discussion of the role that context and moral distance between the object of humor and its recipient play in humorous discourse and survey whether it is acceptable to make fun of delicate issues, and if so, where, when, and with whom it might be appropriate to be funny about taboo subjects.

16.2 Humor and Linguistic Creativity

All languages when used for specific purposes display a series of distinct characteristics. Legalese will differ from the language of science and technology, academic discourse will be quite diverse from journalistic genres and the language of knitting is likely to be different from that of dressmaking. These genres, whether scientific, academic, or within the realm of everyday reality, exemplify a sort of baseline of serious discourse in the sense that none is designed to amuse the recipient but to inform, explain, instruct, and so forth. On the contrary, humorous discourse, which aims to amuse, is strikingly different from such “serious” varieties owing to its extreme intricacy on numerous linguistic levels. This is not to say that serious discourse cannot be intricate, but I emphasize the word extreme. While the intricacy of legalese or a knitting pattern are due to the presence of highly context-specific lexis and syntactic structures, unlike humorous discourse they are devoid of occurrences of linguistic manipulation or distortion. Whether we are looking at a joke, a single comic utterance or a lengthy funny story, when it comes to VEH, we are dealing with exemplars of a special kind of linguistic inventiveness in which the speaker stretches and twists language rules, and at the same time, if the humorous utterance occurs in conversation, may intentionally and legitimately flout maxims. The creation of VEH is not simply a matter of adopting specific lexis, register, or convention, as in more serious genres. In order to create VEH, linguistic norms require distortion and the recipient, at least for part of the content of the incoming message, needs to be deceived through that very same manipulation. In fact, the effort involved in the construction of VEH is such that it led Charles Reference HockettHockett (1977) to define the joke form in terms of “layman’s poetry,” arguing that, like traditional verse, it is founded on the extreme exploitation of language to create the desired effect, which, in the case of the joke, is to amuse. Where traditional poetry exploits features of a language, such as rhyme, assonance, and rhythm, jokes – and by extension all VEH in general – capitalize on the ambiguity present at all levels of language from its sounds and its syntactic and grammatical structures, all the way up to its semantic properties and pragmatic functions, to create a humorous outcome. In addition, Hockett argues that the joke, like poetry, is arguably untranslatable, in the sense that, owing to the fact that no two languages possess identical formal features, upon which poetry heavily depends, much will be lost in translation. Luckily, for those who do not speak several foreign languages, poetry is indeed translated, but by default, the translated versions will differ to a certain extent from the target texts. Certainly, more is lost in the translation of poetry (and by extension literature tout court) than, say, a paper on mathematics. Jokes, for the same reason, are equally untranslatable. For an extensive discussion of the complexity involved in translating humor and the strategies employed to overcome them, see Reference Chiaro and RaskinChiaro (2008, Reference Chiaro2017).

In his reflections on puns, the eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison went as far as to claim that if you cannot translate a “Piece of Wit,” it consequently must be a pun:

The punster thus engages in creativity at all levels of language by manipulating sounds, words, and syntax to generate something that is likely to lose its humorous function if translated into another language. Let us consider the following example that pivots, among other things, on the exploitation of the complexity of English phonology and its writing system:

This rather cruel and politically incorrect riddle shows that in the phrase “cat drink,” by placing stress on the term drink (i.e., cat DRINK) and giving it phonological prominence, the speaker is leading their recipient up a garden path by having them believe that they are being questioned on ways of quenching a feline’s thirst. The desired response, instead, is determined by a shift in prominence in what would otherwise seem to be an identical question. However, the question is different once contextualized by the answer. To justify the answer, prominence that had previously fallen on drink now falls on the term cat (i.e. CAT drink). In other words, noun + verb becomes and is to be understood as a compound noun. If someone reads the riddle, rather than hearing it, a similar reaction occurs when they see the answer that will make them double back on their first reading in search of a hidden script. In fact, the riddle is an instance of what Reference Attardo and RaskinAttardo and Raskin (1991), in their General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), explain as a single script that contains two opposing yet perfectly overlapping scripts – one script involving cat nutrition and another script about a horrible cocktail. Both orally and graphically, the deceit is equally palpable because the two versions are flagrantly manipulating a verbal phrase by transforming it into a noun phrase. English does not make use of many diacritics, so the joke is likewise deceptive in its written version. According to Joel Sherzer, what has occurred in such a riddle is an “axial” clash. In order to be interpreted correctly “cat drink” needs to be understood as a single item, a compound noun, therefore according to the version of utterance Q that we wish to accept, the two items, in becoming a single item, will occupy different slots along the syntagmatic axis. If, intentionally or otherwise, as in the “cat drink” example, the wrong filler occupies the wrong slot along the language axes, the paradigmatic axis invades the syntagmatic leading Sherzer to define such wordplay as “a projection of the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic … precisely the Jakobsonian definition of poetry” (1978: 341). We have thus come full circle and we return to Hockett’s notion of layperson’s poetry.

Your Wit Is My Command is the title of a book by Tony Veale. From the title, knowing that the correct expression is “your wish is my command,” one is likely to deduce that the title contains a typo. One might even think that the book might be about a witty genie because the “correct” or more natural phrase is commonly attributed to Aladdin’s genie who utters it each time he is summoned from a magic lamp to grant wishes. The book in question is actually about humor and artificial intelligence, and its title makes use of allusive or distant homophony known as alliteratio a trope that exploits the beginning or the end of two words that sound the same – wit /wɪt/ and wish /wɪʃ/ begin with the same /wɪ / sound. The book’s subtitle, Building Ais with a Sense of Humor, makes contextual sense of the replacement of a /ʃ/ with a /t/ to turn the word wish into the term wit and place it within the setting of the term command, in the sense of a directive to a computer program that will make it perform a specific task. The subtitle leads us away from the genie script and toward the intended computer script. However, there is no escaping the feeling that the title contains an intentional “mistake.” In fact, much humor is created unintentionally, and when it does, just like in cases of deliberate VEH, context is key because the mistake will clash with the situation at hand and amuse those who come across it.

16.3 Unintentional Verbally Expressed Humor

Freudian slips (or parapraxis) cause laughter because they accidentally occur where and when they should not, namely in the wrong context. One of the sources Freud used to talk about the language of the psyche was jokes. The other, of course, was dreams. Freud sees these two sources of data as tapping unconscious desires. From his patients’ verbal blunders, Freud developed his well-known personality theory that he related to their feelings of shame and primal desires, the point being that these slips of the tongue revealed new contexts that made sense. In other words, although we may laugh at the person who has made the verbal blunder for a number of reasons, the verbal faux pas usually creates perfect cohesion, albeit in the wrong context, which is precisely why it is amusing. What results from the mistake is cohesive and at the same time, ironic. Therefore, yes, the perpetrator has misplaced a sound, a word, or a phrase, but it is the accurate coherence in the wrong context that causes the humor. We laugh at people’s accidental mistakes all the time, so much so that many people pretend to make verbal blunders to show that they are clever and funny. Following an article on politicians’ slips of the tongue that appeared in the Guardian newspaper (Reference ParkinsonParkinson 2021), a reader added an example of a similar mistake:

A wedding guest who presents a “perky copulator” (instead of a coffee percolator), the word copulator is technically a homeoteleuton, a word/words in which the substitution of one or two syllables occurs, tells an especially good and funny story precisely because of the context in which it was narrated. A wedding is traditionally followed by a honeymoon during which the newly-weds are expected to engage in plentiful sexual activity. A guest who makes a wedding speech in which they talk about having given the couple a percolator that accidentally (or otherwise, the story might be an urban legend) becomes a “copulator” is, under the circumstances, semantically appropriate yet, at the same time, funny because sex is one of those taboos people laugh about. The addition of the adjective perky, which has the meaning ‘frisky’ and ‘saucy’ among others, adds to the comic effect. Such accidental, or accidentally on purpose instances of wordplay are precisely those upon which “original” jokes, quips, funny remarks and the like are shaped.

This one-liner that plays on the likeness between “your mother” and “another” – it is formally a combination of alliteratio and homeoteleuton – also exemplifies how the deliberate manipulation of language can closely resemble a fortuitous slip of the tongue. We can imagine the person uttering the quip in a deadpan manner and seemingly above comic suspicion, as though they truly did not purposefully deliver the line with humorous intent. Nevertheless, we suspect that the remark was intentional because contextually the notion of mothers primes so well with Freud’s work and his well-known Oedipus complex metaphor. Yet the one-liner resembles a slip of the tongue. Once more context is key, misplacing “another” with “your mother,” a word that sounds the same, has the same number of syllables, and also happens to rhyme, lodges well with Freud’s theory.

Verbal blunders such as spoonerisms (or distant metathesis), malapropisms, and misplaced words are all accidental instances of VEH that are a source of enjoyment and that are often reported to others in order to amuse. We laugh at the person who makes the verbal faux pas and with the person who tells us about it. Homophones, homonyms, and homographs can also lead to misunderstanding and amusement when their ambiguity leads them away from the context at hand.

Reference SherzerSherzer (1978) reports a poet ending her lecture by saying “There are some things that only happen to a woman. Period.” The American poet used the term period in the sense of “end of story” in order to emphasize what she had said in her lecture, namely that there was nothing more to add on the matter. Nevertheless, if we consider other possible senses of period, among which we find “menstruation,” we see how the poet’s choice of word was unfortunate because she adopts a homonym that also happens to denote some thing that only happens to women, that is, menstruation. So in order to determine what speakers mean (as opposed to what their words mean), listeners and readers need to assign sense to the words they hear and see. As we have seen, a very straightforward process such as assigning sense to words can cause problems if homonyms such as period, which can mean both ‘full stop’/’menstruation,’ are involved.

An American package of a make of contraceptive pill containing two months’ supply is labeled “Twin Pack” (The Telegraph n.d.). Whoever was responsible for the wording on the packaging in question was linguistically careless. It is unlikely that they purposely went for the expression “Twin Pack” to cause hilarity, yet a joke has occurred precisely because of the use of the term twin to signal a package containing two cartons of the contraceptive pill whose aim it is to avoid pregnancy. Twin, which suggests a multiple birth, is an inappropriate choice of lexis within the context of contraception, which is precisely why it is a source of amusement. In addition, this mistake, which results in cohesive irony, was reported in a newspaper column and is a retelling in the writer’s own words of the incongruity they had spotted. The writer’s intention is that readers will laugh with them, and at the pharmaceutical company that made the verbal blunder.

16.4 The Treachery of Language

Intentional VEH often mirrors slips of the tongue. In Blame It on the Bellboy, a filmic comedy set in Venice directed by Mark Herman (1992), Maurice Horton, an elderly, overweight, and unattractive Englishman, has been misled to believe that he is on a date with the young and beautiful Caroline Wright. In effect, Wright is not on a date with Horton; she is an estate agent who thinks that she is about to sell him a villa overlooking the Lagoon. Even without considering the dialogues, the plot contains all the necessary elements for a farce; however, linguistic ambiguity adds to the comic confusion. As Wright shows her client around the house saying, “Would you prefer to start inside?” “Shall we go upstairs,” and “Do you like what you see?” her utterances take on two different meanings. Wright thinks her client is there for a viewing of the villa that he intends to purchase, but Horton, who thinks he is in the company of an escort, makes very different contextual sense of what she is saying:

The two characters are speaking within two distinct and unconnected contexts. For Wright, who is trying to sell a house, getting down to the “nitty gritty” means making decisions such as bargaining on the price, finalizing the sale, and nothing more. On the other hand, Horton is looking for a sexual encounter, and so for him, that same phrase is an invitation to just that. The ambiguity of “nitty gritty” generates a dialogue in which the two speakers interact at cross-purposes because each interlocutor is speaking within opposing contexts. Interpreting Wright’s utterance as a solicitation to engage in sex, at first Horton acts shocked and embarrassed about “That sort of talk” but soon doubles back with “but that’s what we’re here for isn’t it?” For Wright, the deictic “that” refers to negotiating about the sale of the villa, but Horton understands that same “that” to mean sexual intercourse. The fact that the two are thinking in two very diverse contexts triggers amusement, and the inclusion of sex gives the humor extra vivacity. In a later scene, over a meal in which Wright is convinced that she has sold the villa, the farcical, cross-purpose conversation continues:

Wright is still uniquely talking about the sale of the house, stating that negotiations can take place over the phone. However, Horton, who is still fixated on the idea of engaging in sex with Wright, has no idea that she is trying to sell him a house and misunderstands the idiom “doing it.” In British English, “it” is a euphemism, in which do acts as a pro-form standing in for an activity that combined with the pronoun it takes on the meaning of ‘engaging in sexual intercourse.’ Fresh from the earlier conversation about the “nitty gritty,” Horton takes Wright’s utterance out of her intended context and into his own. In addition, Horton is especially content to see that she is not a novice at this “game,” a word which according to the context in which Wright is operating means working in real estate, but Horton understands that she has been on the game “for years,” in other words that she is someone experienced in having sex for money.

These instances of incorrect assignment of sense are down to homonymy, words and expressions that have different meanings, but the same problem can also occur because of homophony, two words or expressions that sound the same. Reference ThomasThomas (1995: 25) provides an example from the minutes of a management meeting at the BBC:

The issue arose because the newsreader in question spoke in a Northern Irish accent in which the term herpes is pronounced in the same way as the word hairpiece, i.e., /ˈhɜː(r)piːz/. The exact same ambiguity is exploited, this time deliberately, in the script of the film An Everlasting Peace (directed by Barry Levinson, 2000) about two men, a Catholic and a Protestant, selling wigs (hairpieces) during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The title of the film itself intentionally plays on the homophony of the word peace that, during the 1970s and 1980s when the film was set, was a much sought after condition in Northern Ireland, and, as it is also a homophone of piece we therefore have an appropriate title for a film revolving around the IRA and wigs. The term is contextualized twice over in terms of its “war/wig” scripts. The likeness of the terms hairpiece/herpes, uttered in a Northern Irish accent, generated a dialogue in the film in which a customer allocates the wrong sense to the term and takes offense at the implication that he might have herpes:

Ambiguity does not stop short at lexis, structural uncertainty can also be the source of humor:

The hearer has to decide whether it is Marvin or the salad dressing that is flowing, and although common sense points to the latter, the speaker has omitted the subject of the opening clause, creating doubt. Basic world knowledge leads the hearer to understand that it is unlikely that Marvin is “oozing” therefore leading to a humorous effect. Similarly, the traditional church hall notice “Ladies, please rinse out your teapots and stand upside down in sink” plays on the same ambiguity of the dangling participle caused by a missing subject and object in the second imperative (see Reference ChiaroChiaro 1992: 42). Like these slips of the tongue, deliberate VEH often has an accidental-but-on-purpose feel about it. This is because the same linguistic mechanisms involved in unintended verbal gaffes are adopted in the intentional creation of VEH.

Uncooperative conversational behavior represents another significant base for VEH. A panhandler who asks a passerby for a cigarette with, “Have you got a cigarette?” does not receive the cigarette they had asked for, but instead, the person they had asked just answers “Yes” and walks away. Likewise, a passerby could ask another “Have you got the time?” to which the respondent does not inform them of the time of day but just says “Yes” and walks off. In both situations the passerby’s uncooperative behavior flouts Grice’s maxim of relevance, and is indulging in what Reference Mizzau, Stati, Weigand and HundsnurscherMizzau (1991) has labeled sciopero bianco delle parole or ‘words working to rule’ (my translation). Words go on strike and work to rule when a respondent reacts to the literal sense of an utterance directed at them and not to the intention or the force of the speech act. Strictly speaking, the speaker simply makes the minimum effort to understand the speech act behind the utterance and takes it at face value. By doing this, the speaker contravenes the basic conversational principle of cooperation. In these examples, the requests for an object, a cigarette, or for the time of day are deliberately interpreted respectively as appeals to find out whether the respondent is carrying a cigarette and knows the time, and not whether they are willing to offer the ciggie or tell them the time. In terms of humor, the respondent is punching down at the person making the request.

The kind of humor conveyed to audiences by Sheldon, a character in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, works on this type of uncooperative conversational style. Sheldon is a very intelligent nuclear physicist who repeatedly makes words work to rule and accordingly obtains a comic effect. In a scene that takes place at a diner, a friend, directing his gaze at a bottle of ketchup close to Sheldon, politely asks, “Sheldon is that ketchup on that table?” Instead of responding to his friend’s request by fetching the ketchup, Sheldon answers, “Yes it is,” and launches into a lengthy and complex tirade about the ingredients of the sauce. When Sheldon has finished speaking, his friend gets up and says “I’ll get it,” causing further comedy. This kind of non-cooperation does not rely solely on the recipient of an utterance but can also be triggered by the initiator of an exchange. Catch riddles such as the notorious “Why did the chicken cross the road?” trick the recipient into thinking they are being asked to solve a conundrum and that a far-fetched and ingenious answer is expected of them (see seminal work on riddles by folklorists Reference Opie and OpieOpie and Opie 1959: 73–86). Instead, the answer is not a complex play on words but a straightforward truth, in the case of the peripatetic chicken, the traditional response is “to get to the other side.”

These examples of deliberate playground humor work in exactly the same way as the riddle about the rambling chicken. The riddler, who provides both question and answer, is being uncooperative by providing solutions that are both evident and uninformative. The notorious “Constantinople” riddle is a verbal ambush that has been delighting children for decades, the answer is, of course “it.” However, regarding the riddle about the Magna Carta, if a teacher were to ask a class that same question, a child who answers “at the bottom” would be judged as having given an inappropriate answer that is likely to be taken as sarcasm, especially if uttered by the class clown. This is because the teacher is not operating within a play frame and is not riddling but testing the class. A timely example of this kind of behavior is a schoolchild’s answer in a gap-filling exercise to the question “Who killed Goliath?” The answer sheet provides a blank space preceding the letters VID (i.e. “… VID”), to which one member of the class inserted the letters “CO” to create the word covid. Whether the child was deliberately trying to be funny we do not know, but the teacher took the response as sarcasm, as is clear from her response “See me after class” at the bottom of the page.

16.5 Encyclopedic Knowledge

Whether creating or receiving an instance of VEH, not only is it essential that interactants share the language in which it is delivered, but awareness of a number of circumstantial features is also indispensable. An important contextual wall that VEH hits is that of encyclopedic knowledge, a concept that in itself is extremely complex because it does not stop short at the sentience of a standard set of facts that vaguely go by the name of culture. The kind of knowledge required to get humor clearly stretches way beyond knowing the answers to a standard pub quiz, as it often includes information shared only by a restricted group of people, and here we see the concept of proximity/distance raising its head. So far, in most of the examples we have examined the ambiguity that triggered the VEH hinged on basic world knowledge, with the exception of the one-liner about the Freudian slip that a person unfamiliar with the psychoanalyst’s work would not get.

I shall begin by stating the obvious, namely that in order for VEH to work, the language in which a witty quip, remark, or even full-blown joke is couched has to be shared by the interactants. VEH is created through the exploitation of linguistic features present in a given language in order to create the opposition and overlap first proposed in Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory (1984) and later expanded by Reference Attardo and RaskinAttardo and Raskin in the GTVH (1991). Attardo and Raskin argue that a humorous script must essentially consist of two overlapping scripts, one of which is obvious but that simultaneously shields another, less noticeable, script that is not immediately apparent. These two scripts must be in opposition to each other in order for humor to result.

To native speakers of English, this classic children’s riddle is evident. The opposing “gardening” script (window box and garden fence) versus the “sport” script (boxing and fencing) overlap to perfection rendering the riddle both ambiguous in its contrasts but at the same time unique in its words’ ability to conceal the two meanings. In translation the riddle just does not work – unless, of course, we find a language in which the words for both box and fence contain the same homonymic sense as English. However, let us move on to instances of VEH where all interactants speak the same language.

According to the Roman orator Cicero, who among other things was notorious for his verbal wit, “a witty saying has its point sometimes in facts, sometimes in words, though people are most particularly amused whenever laughter is excited by the union of the two” (II, LXI, 248) (1965: 383). Specifically, according to Cicero, the best witty remarks, jokes, etc. combine language and world knowledge. Over and above proficiency in English, only those familiar with the Plastic Ono Band will appreciate that a vegetarian is someone who gives peas a chance and a minimum knowledge of English and French history is required to realize that Richard Coeur de Lion was the first heart transplant. For such VEH to travel successfully from initiator to recipient, two types of expertise are indispensable, linguistic expertise and encyclopedic or sociocultural knowledge, because, as emerges from the examples, these two competences may intersect. Expressly, you cannot do much if you just have awareness of one and not the other. These remarks exploit the options of English and general knowledge, too, and so far so good. However, as mentioned earlier, sociocultural knowledge is not as straightforward as one might think. Things get more complicated when knowledge becomes more specialized.

Like everything else in life, humor changes in time. Rather, humor based upon situations that were once timely are unlikely to be funny today, simply because the relevant context is lost. In the 1950s, folklorists Reference Opie and OpieOpie and Opie (1959: 106) report the following playground joke:

It is questionable that schoolchildren today will be familiar with teddy boys, a British youth subculture of the 1950s, and the type of high-waisted “drainpipe” trousers they wore. We need not go back so far in time to find that jokes and witty remarks soon go stale owing to their invisible sell-by date that anchors them to a particular moment in time. The scandal involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s spawned countless jokes, and it is implausible that the average millennial will see two opposing and overlapping scripts in the claim that what Clinton found attractive in Lewinsky was “the prettiest smile he had ever come across” – but a Boomer is liable to see both. Whether anyone finds the quip funny or not is another matter and involves sense of humor and issues connected to good and bad taste that are beyond the scope of this chapter.

Apart from temporal context, most individuals’ encyclopedias are bound to be limited to their world and to their interests – we do not live in a world of polymaths. I had no idea that engineers confuse Halloween and Christmas because Oct. 31 = Dec. 25. According to two numerical systems known as Octal (which can be abbreviated to Oct.) and Decimal (or Dec.), Octal 31 is equal to Decimal 25. At this point linguistic knowledge enters the equation (pun intended) as both look like month abbreviations and therefore we have a joke whose understanding is limited only to those familiar with the two numerical bases. I could go on providing data of VEH that is restricted to people with extremely specialized knowledge of specific topics, which could require knowing about practically anything from medicine to football, but I think that I have made my point: overlap and oppositeness involve language and world knowledge.

Owing to its inherent linguacultural ambiguity, VEH is by default cryptic. As we have seen, it is about playful deceit, and sometimes, as in the case of sarcasm, somewhat cruel deception. Our immediate response to the query “What comes steaming out of cows backwards?” would be dung, although the right answer would be the Isle of Wight ferry – Cowes, a homophone of cows, is the island’s main seaport. Contexts shift. Both dung and ferries may steam, but in order to solicit laughter or a smile the contexts must seamlessly overlap. For the creator of VEH, linguistic competence and encyclopedic competence are, however, not enough. The creator also needs comic competence to be able to spot linguacultural duplicity and partake in Sontag’s notion of “partial knowing” (2004). According to Sontag “the theory of knowing that is relevant to the comic is essentially a theory of non-knowing, or pretending not to know, or partial knowing” –the creator of VEH must pretend not to know, they must pretend to be slipping up.

16.6 In and Out of the Play Frame

Having examined the significance of linguistic and sociocultural context in VEH, I shall now look at situational context. Where and when it is acceptable to joke and engage in banter varies across cultures. Although I have no hard data to back this up, VEH is extremely pervasive among native speakers of English, or to quote anthropologist Kate Fox “The important ‘rule’ about English humour is its dominance and pervasiveness. Humour rules. Humour governs. Humour is omnipresent and omnipotent” (2017: 61). While in many cultures there is a special time and place for humor, for the English there appears to be a permanent and ubiquitous undercurrent in all spoken interactions. Even phatic communion about the weather might include the ironic “Nice weather for ducks” if it happens to be a rainy day, while a response to “How are you?” could well be “How long have you got?” if the speaker does not want to provide the standard cooperative reply “Fine thanks.” The English are also renowned for understatement, as illustrated in this brief exchange between P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves:

Tropes like irony, hyperbole, and understatement, all of which violate the conversational maxim of quality and that are highly context dependent play an important part in the creation of satire (for an exhaustive discussion of satire, see Reference SimpsonSimpson 2003). Satirical magazines and TV shows rely, among other things, on highlighting the incongruity of newsworthy stories. In October 2021, the cover of the satirical news magazine Private Eye (Issue 1557) shows former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the company of Jeff Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon. The speech bubble coming out of Johnson’s mouth reads, “That’s amazing, you actually deliver goods!” Once more, we are looking at two contexts, Bezos’ successful online marketplace and Johnson’s frequent inability to “come up with the goods” or to furnish the nation with what is expected of him, politically and socially, and therein lies the irony. Another cover of Private Eye in the same month (1159), in tune with United Nation’s Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow, shows Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin shaking hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Putin is saying, “We’ve saved a lot of energy” and Xi Jinping ironically replies, “By not going to COP26.”

Have I Got News for You (HIGNFY) is a BBC satirical television panel show in which panelists answer questions on various news stories of the week prior to each episode. In an episode of October 2021, the compere reports how “Jack the Chipper,” a fish and chip shop in London, had been criticized over its name. Owing to the play on words recalling the terrible murderer Jack the Ripper, the owner was accused of both supporting violence and hating women. In response, and presumably unaware of the irony he was about to create, the owner decided to hold a “ladies’ night” when women could buy fish and chips at half price.Footnote ¹ In another episode, audiences learn that the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark had given the artist Jens Haaning £65,000 with which to create a framed display that would represent the average wage of people in Denmark and Austria. Instead of framing banknotes, as requested by the museum, Haaning produced a blank canvas entitled “Take the Money and Run.” As though the tongue-in-cheek title of the opus was not ironic enough, in his defense the artist said, “The work is what I have taken the money for.” To add to the causticness, the quiz commentator jested that soon to appear at the gallery was a painting entitled “Artist with Broken Legs” by Frankie the Knuckle.Footnote ²

Finally, several topics that are often the subject of humor are considered delicate and therefore not always appropriate to joke about. These subjects include taboo areas such as death, race, religion, sex, and bodily functions. Such humor that is in bad taste is likely to offend, yet the fact that it exists shows that it must appeal to some people. Traditionally disasters such as 9/11 and the death of Diana Spencer would trigger cycles of oral jokes (see, for example, the work of Reference DundesDundes 1987; Reference Davies and WalterDavies 1999; Reference KuipersKuipers 2015), at the time of writing similar tragedies are more likely to prompt cycles of internet memes disseminated via smartphones. Whether passed round orally or via phones, these cycles display people’s humorous creativity. Furthermore, whether it is right or wrong to joke about such matters is a Sisyphean debate which, at the end of the day, boils down to context. Presumably, a person who sends a distasteful meme will do so only to someone who shares a similar sense of (bad) taste. However, social media platforms are dangerous ground for sharing icky jokes and memes because of a huge and variegated audience whose tastes in humor the person posting is unlikely to know. Moreover, the closer a person is to the target of a potentially offensive joke, the less likely they are to appreciate it. Collecting data on joke evaluation, I once asked respondents “Why is the Tory party known as the cream of society?” Before hearing the answer, “Because they’re rich and thick and full of clots,” one person remarked, “I don’t think I’m going to like this,” thus revealing her sympathies with the Conservatives. She knew the joke would punch up at the Tories with whom she shared her political views. The morally closer we are to the target of a joke, the more likely we are not to respond positively to ridicule about them.

An example of the fine line between serious and non-serious discourse, and above all, moral proximity to a target of humor, can be exemplified by an incident that occurred in 2012 during a live performance in which stand-up comedian Daniel Tosh told a rape joke. Whether or not the joke was in good or bad taste is not at issue, but what is at issue is the comedian’s response to a woman in the audience who heckled him and shouted out that rape is never funny. To this, Tosh replied, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?” Clearly, Tosh tried to humiliate the woman by asserting his power, as stand-up comedians will do when heckled. However, his comment caused much controversy on social media and soon led to his having to apologize. Tosh’s initial joke may have been in bad taste, yet people do joke about everything and anything. The problem with Tosh’s response to his heckler was that it sounded like an invitation to rape and a celebration of a violent crime. In addition, and this is likely to have been the issue, he had stepped outside the play frame for his riposte. Although he was standing on stage, and in a comedy club, and the rape joke disputed by the heckler had taken place within a play frame, context matters. Tosh was knowingly or unknowingly approving and giving authenticity to a felony by stepping out of the play frame.

16.7 Closing Remarks

Both creating and transmitting VEH successfully is heavily dependent on context – without context humor could not exist. Whoever creates VEH must possess linguistic competence, sociocultural competence, and, of course, comic competence in their ability to use the abstruseness present in language and culture to make it work as a comic device. The joker must be able to exploit the wide range of linguistic options available in the language to create a script, whether that script is in the form of a joke, a one-liner, or a meme as long as it contains a trope that displays VEH. The humorous script should contain two scripts, although the receiver will only see one – unless they have heard the joke before – resulting in a double-faced trap enticing the recipient to fall and then find comic relief. In addition, the joker must also pretend not to know that they are playing with two scripts in one. Comic competence ideally also comprises an awareness of the receiver’s sensitivities. In the case of sensitive subjects, the closer the receiver is to the target of the witty remark, and the more physical and moral elements are being shared with the target, the more likely it is that the receiver will be offended by a remark that punches down. Rather than take offense, on the contrary, the receiver can respond with equally creative banter, as did Obama when asked by comedian Zach Galifianakis on a spoof celebrity interview what it was like to be the last black President. Obama, noticing the ambiguity in the term last, creatively twists it away from Galifianakis’ pseudo-racist remark and answers, “Seriously? What’s it like for this to be the last time you ever talk to a President?” illustrating his skill in lingua-comic competence (ABC News 2014). Or, for example, when the Rolling Stones’ front man Mick Jagger uses irony in response to a journalist criticizing Bob Dylan’s voice. Dodging the journalist’s denigration of Dylan, Jagger ironically replies “Dylan has never been one of the great tenors of our time” impeccably displaying low-key comic competence.Footnote ³ Context in humor is all-encompassing and this chapter has simply touched the tip of the iceberg.

17.1 Introduction

Popular perceptions of translation and interpreting assume that these forms of interlingual and intercultural mediation are based on an essential determinacy of meaning. This lay understanding of the written and oral modes of interlingual transposition that translation and interpreting entail is largely informed by a conception of original texts as “entit[ies] with a stable, definable meaning” that translated texts should aim to deliver in the target language (Reference MasonMason 2006: 359). This view prevailed also in early translation scholarship published between the late 1940s, when translation emerged as an academic discipline (Reference Tymoczko and ChapelleTymoczko 2013), and the late 1980s. During this period translation was regarded as a subfield of linguistics, with theorization on translation initially revolving around a rigid understanding of textual equivalence as a form of identity rather than similarity (Reference Tymoczko and ChapelleTymoczko 2013). These early views were gradually superseded by other perspectives that placed less emphasis on referential or denotative equivalence, acknowledging instead the role that a range of linguistic units and ranks, text-normative constraints, and textual effects played in the production of equivalent translated texts (Reference Kenny and BakerKenny 1998: 96). The premise that translators and interpreters operate in a complex and often sensitive cross-linguistic and cross-cultural environment that calls for the exercise of professional judgment in context is now firmly entrenched in disciplinary discourses. However, the construct of context has not been the subject of systematic theorization on translation and interpreting until relatively recently.

This chapter sets out to explore how scholarly thinking on context has informed research in translation and interpreting studies since the early 1990s. It begins with a historical overview of the contribution that linguistics has made to the emergence, development, and consolidation of translation and interpreting studies as a self-standing discipline. It then proceeds to critique a range of perspectives on context in translation scholarship. These range from cognitive approaches exploring how participants in each communicative encounter come to share and make use of a given set of contextual assumptions, to conceptions of context as a field of power play where identities are dynamically negotiated. This exploration is illustrated with examples from different domains of translation and interpreting research to foreground the breadth of theoretical and methodological orientations that converge within the discipline.

17.2 Linguistic Approaches to Translation

Recognition of translation and interpreting as social phenomena, and of translators and interpreters as agents who contribute to the stability or subversion of social structures, constitutes a recent development in the evolution of translation studies as a disciplinary domain. During the late 1940s, early scholars of translation chose to align themselves with linguistics – at a time when the latter was emerging as a “scientific” discipline “with a highly formalized and rigorous machinery for describing languages” – in a bid to secure academic recognition (Reference Baker, Kittel, Frank, Greiner, Hermans, Koller, Lambert and PaulBaker 2005: 287). Between the 1950s and the late 1970s, translation scholars thus set out to formalize processes of lexical and syntactic transfer across languages as a basis for the elaboration of taxonomies of translation strategies, often for pedagogical purposes, informed by transformational grammar and the concept of deep structure (Reference Saldanha, Baker and SaldanhaSaldanha 2009).

Early conceptualizations of translation were considerably influenced by the notion of equivalence, understood as the replacement of textual material in the source language with written or spoken utterances in the target language that may or may not fully map onto the same aspect(s) of the extralinguistic world. Initially, equivalence was understood as a semantic category. From this perspective, translating involved finding utterances or sentences in the target language that referred to the same “slice of reality” (Reference Rabin and SmithRabin 1958: 123) as its source language counterpart, irrespective of the specific constraints at play in the communicative situation. Over the next few decades, the treatment of equivalence by translation scholars incorporated additional dimensions beyond semantics. In this revised approach, translations were regarded as equivalent if they managed to reproduce the “same effect” that their respective source texts had on their readers (Reference NidaNida 1964; Reference Nida and TaberNida and Taber 1969), or to match the main “textual function” or communicative purpose of the original text (Reference ReissReiss 1971; Reference HouseHouse 1977/1981).

As the disciplined developed, the emphasis placed by these early theories on formal linguistic analysis – rather than on translation as a social, professional, or political phenomenon – and on the sentence as the uppermost unit of analysis came to be perceived as unnecessarily mechanistic. By the mid-1980s, a growing consensus emerged, particularly among German scholars, about the difficulty of measuring the effect of translated texts on their readers (Reference Vermeer and ChestermanVermeer 1989; Reference NordNord 1991). The focus was therefore shifted to the fact that translated texts often need to serve a different function from the one that motivated the production of the original text in the first place. For proponents of functionalist perspectives, including skopos theory, “adequacy” is achieved when translations successfully comply with the commissioner’s requirements (Reference Vermeer and ChestermanVermeer 1989), thereby acquiring a function of their own within the target sociocultural context (Reference NordNord 1991).

With the influence of linguistics gradually eroding, the contribution of other disciplines in the humanities to translation studies, most notably cultural studies and literary theory, gained growing recognition. This alternative orientation, often referred to as the “cultural turn,” represented a shift from the positivism fostered by linguistic approaches to a more relativist stance on the study of translation (Reference Marinetti, Gambier and van DorsaalerMarinetti 2011), ultimately informed by the premise that the meaning of a text is unstable and culturally constructed. By highlighting the impact of sociocultural constraints on the translational activity (Reference HermansHermans 1985, Reference Hermans1996; Reference VenutiVenuti 1995), the new approach challenged “long-held tenets of translation such as the very notion of S[ource] T[ext]-T[arget] T[ext] equivalence” (Reference Munday and MundayMunday 2009: 11) and paved the way for the politicization of translation studies.

The epistemological challenge that cultural approaches to translation studies ushered in, combined with developments in various strands of linguistic research, widened the range of theoretical frameworks available to translation scholars with an interest in textual analysis. House’s translation quality assessment model (1997), for example, elaborated on her earlier application of Reference HouseHallidayan linguistics (1977/1981) to examine how translation is influenced by register, which encapsulates the connection between texts and their situational micro-contexts in each communicative encounter, and genre, namely the ritualized conventions of the culture in which texts are used to serve specific purposes. Also drawing on the Hallidayan tradition, Reference Hatim and MasonHatim and Mason (1990) explored how discourse and genre – conceptualized in their work as social planes that capture the ritualized linguistic expressions of sociocultural attitudes and the culturally recognized verbal means through which speakers pursue social goals, respectively – find expression in texts.

Reference Hatim and MasonHatim and Mason’s (1997) understanding of translation as a form of mediation across these semiotic dimensions and their emphasis on the mutually shaping relationship between translation and the social situations where it is embedded brought into sharp relief the influence of ideology and power on translators’ and interpreters’ behavior. The contribution of translators’ decisions to reinforcing or countering the use of language as an instrument of ideological control in original texts emerged as a distinct object of inquiry in studies informed by critical discourse analyses of texts in political, institutional, and journalistic settings (Reference Schäffner and Calzada PérezSchäffner 2003, Reference Schäffner2012; Reference Calzada-PérezCalzada Pérez 2007; Reference KangKang 2007). Reference BakerBaker’s (2006a) application of socio-narrative theory in translation studies provided scholars in the field with a framework to account for translators’ and interpreters’ behavior in terms of the alignment or clash between the narratives or views of the world that they subscribe to and the narratives that circulate in their environment, including those inscribed in the texts they translate. Baker’s original conceptualization of narratives and the revised typologies proposed by subsequent scholars (Reference BoériBoéri 2008; Reference BakerBaker 2010; Reference HardingHarding 2012; Reference BassiBassi 2015) have revealed how the intersection between personal, public, conceptual, and meta-narratives can influence translators’ and interpreters’ interventions in the target language and “re-narrate” the texts they work with. For translators, re-narrating a text – for example, as a form of resistance against narratives that create the conditions for the emergence or perpetuation of moral or armed conflict – involves exercising agency and discharging their moral duty to decide whether “to reproduce existing ideologies as encoded in the narrative elaborated in the text or utterance, or to dissociate themselves from those ideologies, if necessary by refusing to translate the text or interpret in a particular context at all” (Reference BakerBaker 2006a: 105).

As the theoretical foundations of the discipline have broadened, the range of models and methods used in translation and interpreting research are no longer limited to those originally borrowed from literary criticism and contrastive linguistics. While translation studies continues to rely mainly on qualitative methods of textual analysis (Reference Chesterman and OlohanChesterman 2000), there is a growing trend to make use of interviews (Reference DirikerDiriker 2004; Reference TorikaiTorikai 2009; Reference SapiroSapiro 2014; Reference Marín Lacarta, Baker and SaldanhaMarín Lacarta 2020; Reference Zwischenberger, Baker and SaldanhaZwishchenberger 2020) and ethnographic methods (Reference KoskinenKoskinen 2008; Reference TesseurTesseur 2014; Reference YuYu 2017). Process-oriented research, on the other hand, has drawn on and adapted methods from the field of cognitive psychology to empirically test the processes of cognitive management that interpreters activate under stress conditions, access translators’ and interpreters’ thought processes through think-aloud protocols, and monitor other process-related decisions through eye-tracking (Reference FonsecaFonseca 2015; Reference Hvelplund, Schwieter and FerreiraHvelplund 2017; Reference Lacruz, Schwieter and FerreiraLacruz 2017) or keystroke logging devices (Reference LörscherLörscher 1991; Reference JääskeläinenJääskeläinen 1999; Reference Jakobsen, Kirk, Sullivan and LindgrenJakobsen 2006, Reference Halverson, de Sutter, Lefer and DelaereHalverson 2017; Reference Rodríguez-Inés, Schwieter and FerreiraRodríguez-Inés 2017).

Corpus linguistics has also made an important contribution to translation and interpreting studies since the 1990s (Reference LaviosaLaviosa 2002). Parallel corpora consist of computer-held sets of texts in the source language and their target language versions in one or more languages, whereas comparable corpora are collections of texts written in the same language that share certain features or selection criteria (e.g., period of publication, topic, genre) (Reference Kenny, Baker and SaldanhaKenny 2009). The use of corpora in translation studies research is driven by the premise that translational activities are bound to leave traces in the target text (Reference Baker, Baker, Francis and Tognini–BonelliBaker 2003). Using concordancing software, corpus-based translation studies have focused on the distinctive patterns of language use observed in translated language, also referred to as “typical features of translation” (Reference OlohanOlohan 2004), including the tendency of translated texts to be more explicit and use more conventional grammar and lexis than texts originally written in either the source or target languages. The compilation and study of corpora continue to serve as a robust methodology in advancing applied (Reference Ferraresi, Bernardini, Picci, Baroni and XiaoFerraresi et al. 2010; Reference Kübler, Volanschi, Boulton, Carter-Thomas and Rowley-JolivetKübler and Volanschi 2012; Reference Tagnin and TeixeiraTagnin and Teixeira 2012; Reference López-RodríguezLópez-Rodríguez 2016; Reference Rodríguez-Inés, Schwieter and FerreiraRodríguez-Inés 2017) and theoretical research agendas, including but not limited to the study of creative language (Reference DirdalDirdal 2014; Reference Saldanha, Berman and PorterSaldanha 2014), multimodal texts (Reference Bernardini, Ferraresi, Russo, Collard, Defrancq, Russo, Bendazzoli and DefrancqBernardini et al. 2018; Reference Soffritti and Pérez-GonzálezSoffritti 2019), or translation processes as part of mixed-methods approaches (Reference Halverson, de Sutter, Lefer and DelaereHalverson 2017 and Reference SzymorSzymor 2017).

As this historical overview shows, early linguistic approaches to translation focused on systemic differences between languages and developed semantic notions of equivalence to formalize internal mechanisms of textual transfer at sentence level. As the positivist epistemological orientation underpinning this body of scholarship began to lose its explanatory power, various disciplines in the humanities shifted the analytical lens onto more relativistic dimensions of translation – including the role of communicative situation, culture, and power. Since the 1990s, these aspects located at the interface between language and context have become more salient also in research work undertaken by linguists capitalizing on the affordances of new qualitative and quantitative research methods.

17.3 Translation and Context

Baker’s insight that the notion of context “is hardly ever subjected to scrutiny in its own right,” despite “being routinely invoked in much of the literature on translation and interpreting” (Reference Baker2006b: 322), drives her critique of three conceptualizations of context developed by scholars in the fields of pragmatics and linguistic anthropology that have the potential to facilitate new developments in translation studies. This section examines how each of these approaches to the study of context has been applied in translation research, drawing on examples from various areas within the discipline.

17.4 Conclusion

In keeping with the overarching theme of this volume, this chapter has surveyed key developments on the role that context has performed and will continue to play in driving translation studies forward, against the shift in scholarly discourses on context in the language sciences – away from static perspectives toward the socially constituted processes of negotiation captured by the notion of contextualization.

Structured around three perspectives on the study of context, each of which has been conceptualized as a cline between a pair of polarities, this chapter has shown how the discipline of translation studies has been considerably enriched through its more intense and sustained engagement with dynamic and power-sensitive understandings of context. As the transition from the twentieth-century electronic culture to the twenty-first-century digital culture continues to unfold and translation studies becomes fully emancipated from linguistics, scholars in the discipline are increasingly aligning themselves with dynamic conceptualizations of context. While power asymmetries and their concomitant sociocultural constraints on the production and reception of translated texts cannot be overlooked, translations are increasingly construed and investigated as sites of negotiation between actors furthering their own agendas and capitalizing on more democratic access to technologies of text production and distribution. Against this backdrop, the emergence of ever more complex forms of translation authorship and agency is exposing the limitations of traditional disciplinary discourses on translator agency and translation ethics. More importantly, this development is also raising new questions about how translation studies can engage with fast-evolving forms of digital literacy in the predominantly multimodal textual genres that underpin processes of political deliberation and affective sociality in the information and knowledge society.

18.1 Introduction

Clinical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that characterizes and attempts to explain the many ways in which language may be impaired. It is a foundational discipline of study for those who seek to practice the profession of speech-language pathology (in the US) or speech and language therapy (in the UK). Yet, not much is known or written about the different ways in which clinical linguistics, and the language disorders it studies, intersects with context, a core concept in the study of language. In this chapter, I plan to put clinical linguistic applications of context center stage. In an important sense, this is long overdue. While disciplines like pragmatics and sociolinguistics have always explicitly examined context, the concept has been somewhat hidden in the background of work in clinical linguistics. And yet no language disorder can be adequately characterized, assessed, or treated apart from a range of contexts. The language-impaired child who talks to a parent at home encounters contextual variables in this setting that are quite different from those that he/she must navigate when communicating with a teacher at school or with a friend in the playground. Context weaves its way through each of these spoken interactions, making some aspects of communication challenging while facilitating other aspects. The clinical linguist can no more afford to shun context than the sociolinguist can afford to overlook the influence of social class, gender, and age on language. This will be my starting point in the discussion to follow.

The chapter will unfold along the following lines. In Section 18.2, we examine the scope of clinical linguistics and consider its relationship to the related profession of speech-language pathology. This section will also examine language disorders, a prominent category of communication disorders, as well as other main categories of communication disorder that can be found in children and adults.

In Section 18.3, the concept of context is explored as it relates to clinical linguistics and speech-language pathology. Five themes are introduced to facilitate the discussion. Children and adults with language disorder can make nonnormative use of context, with implications for both their interpretation and their expression of language. We examine some populations of language-disordered children and adults where this is most evident (theme 1). Some individuals with language disorder can usefully exploit context to compensate for their impaired language skills, while for others context overwhelms their language processing abilities, leading to characteristic anomalies in their use of language. We consider these opposing responses to context in people with language disorder (theme 2). The language disorders clinic is the context in which language skills are most often evaluated and treated. And yet this environment does not represent how children and adults use language across educational, social, and work contexts in their everyday lives (I refer to this as the “clinic paradox”). We consider the limitations inherent in using a clinical setting to understand something as dynamic as language disorder (theme 3). To address the clinic paradox, speech-language pathologists must consider the ecological validity of the instruments they use to assess language skills (theme 4) and how intervention can be tailored to contexts that are salient in the lives of clients (theme 5). The chapter concludes in Section 18.4 with some reflections on how clinical linguists and speech-language pathologists may integrate context more fully into their work.

18.2 The Scope of Clinical Linguistics

Many of the “prefixed” disciplines in linguistics (e.g., sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics) have arisen as it became apparent to linguists that new terms and concepts were needed to characterize certain linguistic phenomena. The same is true of clinical linguistics. It is difficult to mark the exact starting point of any linguistic discipline. But we can do no better than look to the work of British linguist David Crystal for the first book bearing the title of this new field of linguistic study (Reference Cummings and AronoffCummings 2014a). Published in 1981, Crystal’s book defined clinical linguistics as “the application of linguistic science to the study of communication disability, as encountered in clinical situations” (1981: 1). Crystal’s definition made it clear that clinical linguistics was not a purely academic discipline, and that the purpose of the field was to understand “communication disability … in clinical situations.” From this early starting point, the connection between clinical linguistics and individuals with communication disability in speech therapy clinics was explicitly forged. This connection remains as strong today. But before we examine this relationship in more detail, it is worth considering what else Crystal has said about clinical linguistics. In a later definition, he teases apart the linguistic aspects of the discipline. Clinical linguistics is “the application of linguistic theories and methods to the analysis of disorders of spoken, written, or signed language” (Reference CrystalCrystal 1997: 418). This definition helpfully moves us beyond the common misconception that all language disorders involve spoken language. They do not. When an adult develops aphasia (an acquired language disorder) as a result of a stroke or a cerebrovascular accident (to give it its medical term), the ability to produce and comprehend written language is as likely to be disrupted as the ability to produce and comprehend spoken language. If this same adult is a user of a signed language like American Sign Language prior to his or her stroke, the ability to produce and comprehend manual signs may also be impaired. Language disorders compromise the understanding (reception) and production (expression) of linguistic symbols in all modalities, spoken, written, and signed. Let us examine some of these disorders in more detail by considering three distinctions used by clinical linguists to classify language disorders.

The first distinction concerns the difference between a developmental and an acquired language disorder. For most children, the acquisition of language in the developmental period is a process that requires no effort or special instruction. However, for a sizable minority of children, first language acquisition is anything but straightforward or effortless, resulting in a developmental language disorder. These children may be born with a genetic syndrome and have intellectual disability that makes it difficult or, in severe cases, impossible to acquire language. Alternatively, children may be born with an anatomical defect of their articulators (e.g., cleft lip and palate) that results in deviant speech sound substitutions such as the replacement of oral stops with a glottal stop (e.g., cat /kæt/ → [ʔæt]). The collapse of distinction between the oral plosives – they cannot be distinguished when they are all realized as a glottal stop – leads to a phonological disorder, as important contrasts in the child’s sound system are lost. As a result, the child’s language disorder is developmental in nature as the acquisition of phonology is compromised.

For other children and adults, they can acquire language along normal lines, only for an illness, injury, or disease to lead to its impairment. This gives rise to an acquired language disorder. For example, the adult with previously normal language skills who has a stroke or develops a brain tumor and cannot form and understand questions has an acquired language disorder. Similarly, a 16-year-old child may sustain a head injury in a road traffic accident and lose the ability to produce well-formed, grammatical utterances. The impairment of grammar in this case, too, is an acquired language disorder even though the impairment occurs in a child. This is because the distinction between a developmental and an acquired language disorder rests ultimately on how much language has been acquired by the time an injury or illness occurs. In a 16-year-old child, many aspects of language acquisition, including the acquisition of phonology and grammar, are complete. In the same way that children can have acquired language disorders, adults may have developmental language disorders. For example, an individual who is born with a genetic syndrome like Down syndrome will continue to experience into adulthood the same impairment of language skills that arose in the developmental period as a result of intellectual disability. This individual has a developmental language disorder even as an adult.

Clinical linguists also draw a distinction between an expressive and a receptive language disorder. In an expressive language disorder, the ability to formulate a sentence or an utterance is compromised. For example, the child with intellectual disability who cannot form sentences containing a relative clause or a passive voice construction has an expressive language disorder. Similarly, the adult with Alzheimer’s dementia who cannot retrieve the words needed to produce a spoken utterance also has an expressive language disorder. Expressive language disorders often occur alongside deficits in receptive language. In a receptive language disorder, the ability to comprehend or understand language is compromised. For example, a child with intellectual disability may also be unable to understand utterances that contain a relative clause or a passive voice construction. Similarly, the comprehension of words and their meanings may be disrupted in an adult who sustains a stroke. It is important to recognize that the impairment of language comprehension is not related to a sensory deficit (e.g., hearing loss) – the child or adult with an expressive language disorder can adequately hear, for example, the spoken utterance but cannot decode its linguistic structure and interpret its meaning. In the same way, an impairment of expressive language is not related to a loss of movement of the speech articulators, although a speech disorder may also be present. Rather, it results from an inability to select and encode the linguistic structures that are required to express an utterance.

A third distinction that is acknowledged by clinical linguists is the distinction between a speech disorder and a language disorder. Speech and language are frequently treated as one and the same thing. However, for clinicians and clinical linguists, they represent quite separate components of communication. Speech production is a complex motor activity that requires the integration of several biophysical processes such as nerve impulse transmission and muscle contraction. If any part of this complex, highly integrated motor system is disrupted, a speaker can have a speech disorder such as dysarthria or apraxia of speech. For example, a child may be exposed to a viral infection in utero that damages the development of the motor centers in the brain, causing a condition called cerebral palsy. As well as impaired voluntary movement of the limbs, head, and torso, a child with cerebral palsy may experience impaired movement of the speech articulators, resulting in developmental dysarthria. The impairment of speech production may be mild, moderate, or severe, leading to varying levels of unintelligibility. But even in the child with cerebral palsy who has severe dysarthria, possibly necessitating the use of an alternative communication system, expressive and receptive language skills may nonetheless be intact. A quite different situation arises in the adult with non-fluent aphasia who may struggle to produce even one- or two-word utterances. For this adult, the problem with the production of spoken utterances relates solely to difficulty encoding language and is not in any way related to the production of speech. This adult has a language disorder in the absence of a speech disorder.

It can be seen from the above discussion that no account of language disorders is possible in the absence of the children and adults who have these disorders. To understand their impairments of language, we must know something of the developmental disorders and other conditions that are the aetiology of these impairments. This requires us to look beyond language and engage with medical and scientific disciplines that, like clinical linguistics, are also foundational to speech-language pathology. And indeed, what we find is that clinical linguistics is one of several disciplines that speech-language pathologists must study in order to assess and treat children and adults with language disorders (Reference CummingsCummings 2018). But speech-language pathology extends more widely than clinical linguistics in another important respect. For the clinicians who practice this profession are concerned with the assessment and treatment of all communication disorders, and not just disorders of language. Communication disorders include fluency disorders like stuttering, voice disorders like alaryngeal communication following laryngectomy (surgical removal of the larynx), and hearing disorders like conductive hearing loss. Communication disorders also include speech disorders such as dysarthria, which, as we have already seen in Section 18.2, are properly set apart from language disorders (see Figure 18.1).

Figure 18.1 Communication disorders

But even the broad grouping of communication disorders does not exhaust the scope of practice of speech-language pathology. For some years, the assessment and treatment of swallowing disorders (dysphagia) in children and adults have also been part of the professional remit of speech-language pathologists. It emerges that speech-language pathology is a broad, interdisciplinary area of clinical practice that draws on the concepts and theories of clinical linguistics in much the same way that it draws on disciplines like neurology, psychology, and anatomy. The mutual dependence of speech-language pathology and clinical linguistics will be integral to the discussion of context in the next section.

18.3 Context in Clinical Linguistics

It should be apparent by now to readers that when we discuss clinical linguistics, we must also consider the related profession of speech-language pathology. This will provide the backdrop for the discussion of the present section. Speech-language pathology weaves its way through each of the five themes that will be used to address context in clinical linguistics in this section.

The first theme concerns what is known about how children and adults with language disorders process context. This processing deviates markedly from normative uses of context, with terms such as “context insensitivity” used to capture clients’ difficulties. The second theme examines how for some children and adults with language disorder context can be a barrier to communication, while for others it can serve to facilitate communication. In the latter use, context can be a powerful strategy in the compensation of impaired receptive and expressive language skills. The third theme examines the role of context in the language disorders clinic. Clinics in speech-language pathology present something of a paradox. They aim to equip clients with language skills that will serve them in their daily lives, but they are constrained to do so from within a setting that is quite unlike most natural language contexts. We examine how clinicians attempt to resolve this paradox. The fourth theme examines context in relation to language assessment and considers how clinicians have increasingly moved beyond word- and sentence-testing formats to adopt assessments with greater ecological validity. The fifth theme considers context from the point of view of language intervention and considers how this concept is embedded in a client’s therapy goals, among other aspects of intervention.

18.4 Future Directions

This discussion has demonstrated the different ways in which context plays a role in people with language disorders, and how it permeates the work of speech-language pathologists. Not only must clinicians understand the nonnormative use of context by children and adults with language disorder, but they must also be attentive to the reach of context when they assess and treat clients in clinic. But is there something more that speech-language pathology can do to integrate context into its work? I believe that there is. In this section, I outline briefly what I think those future developments for the field should be.

The clinical education of speech-language pathologists must include an explicit focus on context. This central concept is left in the background of educational efforts as if it were simple and unproblematic and, hence, not worthy of discussion, or as if students could somehow naturally assimilate it. Neither of these scenarios is true. We all recognize the need to train students in phonetics, neurology, and child language development. We must now recognize the same need in relation to context. If students are encouraged to think about every interaction with clients in terms of context, this will provide an important impetus to the development of assessments and interventions that can reflect the actual communicative challenges and needs of clients. One context into which many clients with language and communication disorders are still not able to achieve successful (re)integration is the workplace (Reference Meulenbroek, Bowers and TurkstraMeulenbroek et al. 2016). As clinicians, we must design assessments and interventions that can address the unique challenges of this context. To a limited extent, some speech-language pathologists are already doing exactly that. For example, Reference Isaki and TurkstraIsaki and Turkstra (2000) have established that communication measures that use impairment- and disability-based tasks are better able to predict work reentry following traumatic brain injury than measures that use impairment-level tasks alone. Speech-language pathologists who have been directly trained to be aware of context and who are guided by it in their clinical practice are best placed to undertake these developments in the service of their clients.

Another future development relating to context concerns a greater focus on long-term outcomes in children and adults with language disorder. These outcomes are not realized immediately after an episode of therapy but often occur many years after language intervention has taken place. For a child with developmental language disorder, a long-term outcome may include an individual’s literacy and language skills, social networks, mental health, or vocational status as a young adult (Reference Whitehouse, Watt, Line and BishopWhitehouse et al. 2009a, Reference Whitehouse, Line, Watt and Bishop2009b). It is these outcomes that speech-language pathologists must increasingly use to demonstrate the effectiveness of their interventions to clients, their families, and the health providers who commission clinical language services. In most service delivery models, language intervention is delivered in one or two sessions per week, with an episode of therapy completed in a certain number of weeks. An intervention is judged to be effective if language performance, often measured in test scores, has improved by the end of an episode of care. But when the context of language intervention is expanded beyond the language disorders clinic to include a range of participants and settings, it also becomes necessary to use longer-term outcomes to assess the effectiveness of intervention. The use of long-term outcomes in language intervention research has been hampered by issues such as cost – it is expensive to follow clients over a long period of time – and small sample sizes, with many clients lost to follow-up. But these outcomes are a more reliable criterion against which to assess the impact of intervention on the lives of clients who receive speech-language pathology.

There is a final area in which I believe context can be more fully integrated into the work of speech-language pathology. Notwithstanding the significant societal costs of language disorder, there has been little effort to characterize language disorder as a public health issue (for further discussion, see section 1.6 in Reference CummingsCummings 2018). This is the case even though language disorder exerts the same population-level health and economic effects as many other conditions. There is lost productivity when people with language disorder are unable to participate in the workforce and family members must leave the workforce in order to support and care for them. Economically inactive people must be supported through the receipt of welfare benefits. There are also additional healthcare costs associated with language disorder (Reference Cronin, Reeve, McCabe, Viney and GoodallCronin et al. 2017). These costs are accrued through the provision of support services like speech-language pathology and the management of poor mental health associated with language difficulties. By conceiving of language disorder as a public health issue, there is also fresh impetus to investigate the epidemiology of language and communication disorders. There has been little discussion of, and a dearth of research into, the epidemiology of communication disorders (Reference BylesByles 2005; Reference Enderby and PickstoneEnderby and Pickstone 2005). This has resulted in a lack of knowledge of the prevalence and incidence of these disorders, which is essential for workforce planning in speech-language pathology. By using context to revise how we conceive of language disorder in the same way that we have used context to revise how we assess and treat children and adults with language disorder, substantial progress can also be made in the provision of clinical language services.