Types Of Context

Duranti and Goodwin (1992) propose four types of context :

a. setting (physical and interactional)

b. behavioral environment (nonverbal and kinetic)

c. language (co-text and reflextive use of language)

d. extrasituational (social, political, cultural, and the like)

For our specific purposes, two of these types of context are particularly important corresponding roughly to Duranti and Goodwin’s (a) and (c) respectively (1) the situational context- i.e, the purpose, the participants and the physical and temporal setting where communication is taking place (i.e, analyzed as pragmatics) and (2) the discourse context (or co-context), the stream of prior and subsequent language in which a language segment or an exchange occurs (i.e, analyzed as discourse).

For example, if someone encounters a friend and says “Hello,” the person expects some sort of oral response. Or if one hears an utterance such as “Who else was there ?” one looks to prior discourse about the people present at some event in order to interpret the utterance.

In written texts we can often make sense of the message and understand the meaning thanks to the co-text, the language material in any particular piece of discourse. In the following passage, excerpted from the middle of an article in Time magazine on the National Cherry Festival in the United States, it becomes clear how important co-text is in the process of interpreting the written text :

Indeed, the victory for vendors and consumers could well be the festival’s loss. The 6.00 Sara Lee slices typically sold at the festival are donated by the company, with proceeds funneled back to the festival organization.

(Time, July 1998:4)

In this piece of discourse, in order to understand what “victory” the writer is talking about, we need to have read the earlier sections of the article. To understand why this is the “festival’s loss” we need to read on and find out that there used to be a donation (which will no longer exist) that everyone attending made to the festival organization. And if the reader does not know (from prior knowledge) who or what Sara Lee is, s/he may find out via cataphoric reference when “the company” is mentioned. All the cohesive devices and the coherence organization elements work within the wider co-text and need to be properly identified by anyone trying to interpret the meaning of the text.