Labour markets and their supporting regulatory structures will always be subject to disruptive forces. The economic consequences of the recent pandemic, if nothing else, have highlighted the challenges that are likely to be faced over future decades as societies come to grips with a number of disruptive megatrends that will impact on the future character of work, labour, and employment law. While this particular chapter focusses on the disruptive impact of technological change, it is clear that this factor cannot be viewed in isolation. Political debate in Aotearoa/New Zealand is becoming increasingly concerned with the future of work, as is broadly illustrated by the introductory chapter to this collection. In late 2019 New Zealand’s Tripartite Forum on the Future of Work stated that ‘the future of work is being shaped by four global megatrends: technological progress, demographic change, globalisation and climate change’.

The nature of work, the substance of jobs, the types of party involved, their legal and operational relationships, the formation of those working relationships: there is very little in the world of work that is not subject to some form of technology-driven transformation. This, perhaps, is nothing new. After all, modern labour and employment law emerged as a response to a technologically induced industrial revolution that triggered wholesale societal transformation. As some observers predict the most radical change in the labour market since the first industrial revolution, this begs the question: if the future of work is set to change, what will the future of labour law be? If technology is disrupting employment, how is it causing a disruption in labour and employment law?

The use of different digital means of communication gives employers and employees in Estonia different opportunities to regulate work. Although the number of employees who are using digital means of communication is growing, the majority of employees still prefer to be employed under traditional employment contracts. The number of employees or workers with new employment forms (e.g. platform work) is not declining, but it is difficult to predict how quickly the number of such employees is growing. A survey carried out by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) showed that, for example, the share of platform employees in Latvia is only 1 per cent of the total number of employees. At the same time, it has been claimed that in Estonia, approximately 7 per cent of employees regularly use platform work to earn an income. In addition to platform work, other means have been used by employers to better regulate employment relationships, for example telework.

In recent years, the ‘technological question’ (typically posed in terms of the impact of new technologies on the future of work) enjoys a dominant presence in framing current policy and academic debates in labour law. Labour law scholarship has generally rejected a narrow econometric quantitative focus on the (anticipated and actual) net effect of new technologies on jobs. Instead, there is an emergent critical-contextual strand seeking to embed (and partially decentre) the technological discourse on established themes around precariousness, control, and human agency. This chapter aims to contribute to this literature by examining the dynamic relationship between UK labour law and what is herein termed ‘technological authoritarianism at work’.

Hungarian legislation follows both European and international trends in the field of labour law while showing characteristics inherent in national regulation, which was influenced palpably by German jurisprudence.

As for the routes of modern labour law, Hungary underwent a transition from state socialism to democracy and a market economy in the early 1990s. This societal change affected the regulation of the working environment. The state-owned company sector – which was dominant in the socialist era – has practically ceased to exist, with the exception of large public utility companies, and a privately owned economy has sprung up.

Technological changes and disruptions are constant companions in the working world. As such they are catalysts for the development and change of labour law. Industrialisation and its disastrous working conditions in factories were reasons for the development of labour law as specific legal protection for employees. Digitalisation is often considered a game-changing technology that is having a tremendous effect on the working world and labour law. Digitisation falls into line with the computerisation in the 1970s and 1980s, the increasing use of the Internet since the 1990s, and the distribution of mobile electronical devices. So far, the impact of digitalisation on the labour market cannot be fully assessed. While there are many speculations about ‘the end of work’, there are also studies that give a more optimistic outlook, expecting only 12 per cent or 25 per cent job losses. At least, the current development as well as the expectations and plans of the legislator and the social partners in Germany can be described and evaluated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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