Editorial - On context

T E U N A.VA N D I J K U N I V E R S I T Y O F A M S T E R DA MDiscourse & Society Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks, CAand New Delhi) Vol 10(3): 291–292[0957-9265 (199907) 10:3; 291–292; 009579]Discourse analysis as a discipline deals with the study of text and talk in context. Whereas both ‘text’ and ‘talk’ have received detailed theoretical and descriptive attention during the last decades, the same is not true for the study of‘context’. True, most discourse analysts recognize the importance of the study of the relations between text/talk and their local (situational) or global (societal) contexts. ‘Contextualization’ has become a prominent key word in many con-temporary studies of the way discourse indexes, reflects or influences properties of social situ-ations. Various directions of research, such as systemic–functional linguistics, the ethnography of speaking, interactional sociolinguistics, and the social psychology of episodes and situations, among others, have made significant contributions to a more explicit conceptualization of con-text. However, we still lack a more systematic theory, or even a single monograph.An editorial is not the place to provide a summary of such a non-existent theory, even if I had one. Yet, it can’t hurt to remind readers of this journal and other researchers that an adequate study of discourse in society presupposes an explicit theory of context and its relations to text and talk. Discourse & Society welcomes work that provides fragments of such a framework.So far, many approaches have opted to elaborate Dell Hymes’ well-known S.P.E.A.K.I.N.G grid, defining contexts in terms of Setting, Participants, and other elements of the situation. Similarly, the social psychology of language had provided another dimension of the way language users construct communicative events as episodes defined in terms of speech participants, in various roles, interacting in some setting and with specific goals. Conversation Analysis, and eth-nomethodology more generally, have argued that contexts are not pre-established situations con-sisting of a number offixed categories that are indexed or affected by talk, but are locally constituted by participants orientated to a particular ‘relevant’ aspect of a situation rather than others. Indeed, several scholars have proposed ‘relevance’ as the central concept in a theory of context.Following such flexible and dynamic conceptualizations of context, this would mean that a context is the structure of those properties of the communicative situation that are ostensibly rel-evant for participants in the production and comprehension of text or talk.Although this may do as a starting point for more explicit conceptualizations, this working definition raises more problems than it solves – which is fine as a challenge for further research. Let us spell out some of these problems.It may safely be assumed that many if not most analysts would accept the thesis that contexts, as well as their instances of text or talk, are unique. Both in sociological and psychological terms, contexts of speaking are never exactly the same. But uniqueness and local constitution of con-texts do not exclude rule-governed or otherwise constrained orderliness, as is also true for text and talk themselves. Thus, hair colour or years on the job may sometimes be personal or social292Discourse &Society10(3)features to which speech participants draw attention but they would probably not qualify as systematic relevance categories for a more general theory of contextualization: we may speak about, or refer to such properties of a situation but they would not tacitly influence (say) the choice of pronouns, lexicalization or politeness forms. In other words, they are discursively irrelevant, and probably not only in western culture.For cognitively oriented scholars, it would be a further argument that for language users to be able to adequately produce or understand text and talk in context they need to be able to strategically (and hence fast and flexibly) manage the theoretically infinite set of poss-ible contexts of everyday life experiences. Language users can do so only when they are able to constitute contexts as variable instantiations of a limited set of learned schemata(e.g. ‘talking to a friend at home’, ‘giving a class’, ‘writing a news item’, or ‘consulting adoctor’), or in terms of a limited set of categories and rules or strategies to constitute vari-able contexts. Depending on culture and social situation, such categories are more likely to be those of time, place or circumstances, on the one hand, and age, gender, social role, status, beliefs or aims of participants, on the other hand – rather than size of the room in which one is speaking or, indeed, hair color or number of children of the speaker. That is, whatever speakers may draw attention to, contexts and their categories are not struc-turally or socially arbitrary. And it is an empirical rather than theoretical question for cross-cultural discourse analysis to establish universal or very general relevance con-ditions, categories and rules for the construction of contexts out of social situations.There is a second problem. Most theories of context are socially framed, and hence lacka theoretical mechanism to deal with individual variation. Such theories cannot explainwhy in ‘the same social context’ all speakers do not say the same thing. In other words, a theoretical link is missing between the social nature of contexts and the social as well as personal nature of individual discourses and their unique structures.There is a related, well-known, third problem: context properties do not ‘cause’ their contextualization in text or talk, nor do discourse properties themselves influence, affect or cause changes of context. The ‘causal’ terminology may be intuitively handy, as long as we realize that situations and discourse do mutually ‘cause’ each other. Indeed, without an appropriately ‘personalized’ cognition–action interface between social situations and dis-course all speakers in that social situation would say the same thing.Current cognitive psychology offers just such an interface: mental models, defined as schematically organized event-representations (experiences) in episodic memory.According to that approach (which I happen to defend), a context is simply a subjectively variable mental model of a communicative situation. This ‘context model’ acts as a ‘rel-evance’ mechanism on other representations during processing, and makes text and talk situationally adequate. It is crucial that such a mental-model theory of context provides the missing link between personal, subjective interpretations of social situations and their relevance (and hence explains communication conflicts), and the socio-cultural common ground needed for adequate and hence normative interaction and understanding among group members.Whatever approach one prefers as a theoretical framework (and in my opinion only a complex, multidisciplinary theory of mental models with contexts constrained socially-culturally as well as personally bears any real promise to provide such a framework), much further theoretical and empirical work is necessary in order to profoundly understand how text and talk may vary as a function of context.Readers are invited to critically react to this editorial. Their comments will be published in the Discussion section of one of the next issues of Discourse & Society. See the inside back cover for the required format of these contributions.。