What Is Context

The term context id discourse analysis refers to all factors end elements that are nonlinguistic and nontextual but which affect spoken or written communicative interaction. Halliday (1991:5) describes context as “the events that are going on around when people speak (and write).” As mentioned previously, discourse may depend primarily on contextual features found in the immediate environment and be referred to as context-embedded: or it may be relatively independent of context (context-reduced or decontextualized) and depend more on the features of the linguistic code and the forms of the discourse itself.

Context entails the situation within which the communicative interaction takes place. Discourse analysis of context entails the linguistic and cognitive choices made relevant to the interaction at hand. In contrast. Pragmatic analysis of context and contextual description relates to the participants taking part in the interaction, the sociocultural background that is relevant, and any physical-situational elements that may have some bearing on the exchange. Human communication relies quite heavily on context and on the shared knowledge that the interactants have with respect to a variety of contextual features. These issues are dealt with in Chapter 2.