LAIKIPIA UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF LITERARY AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES

LING 724: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Prof Felicia Yieke

THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN INTERPRETATION OF DISCOURSE

What is context?
The concept of context has received a lot of attention in recent times largely because of the
interest in the study of language in use in its social setting. As Levinson (1983) observes, it
involves the actual situations of utterance in all their multiplicity of features that are culturally
and linguistically relevant to the production of and interpretation of utterances.

They are those features, both social and cultural that are activated in an exchange by speakers
and hearers in this production and interpretation of their utterances.

Several scholars have tried to analyse the role of context by trying to look up what it is that
makes up the context of situation. This was first done by Malinowski, followed by Firth and even
Bloomfield. We will look at Firth’s model later since he tried to give context a linguistic
interpretation.

Features of Context
We look at the 2 examples below in which an identical utterance is produced by two distinct
speakers.
a. Speaker: a young mother, hearer: her mother-in-law, place: park, by a pond, time:
sunny afternoon in Sept 1962. They are watching the young mother’s two year old son
chasing ducks and the mother-in-law has just remarked that her son, the child’s father,
was backward at this age. The young mother says, I do think that Adam’s quick.
b. Speaker: a student, hearers: a set of students, place: sitting round a coffee table in the
refectory, time: evening in March 1980. John, one of the group, has just told a joke.
Everyone laughs except Adam. Then Adam laughs. One of the students says:
I do think Adam’s quick.

In both cases, prominence is placed on Adam. However, the statement ‘I do think Adam’s quick’
in the two instances mean differently due to the two different context. Adam in the first instance
is being compared/contrasted favourably with his father, i.e. if his father was slow or backwards
in development, then young Adam is fast or quick. In the second instance, Adam is being
compared/contrasted with a group of other students unfavourably. Quick is interpreted as Adam
being slow to understand/react/see the joke. Moreover, since he failed to react to the punch line
as the others did, the speaker might have been sarcastic and telling an untruth which he/she
expects to be understood as implying the opposite of what was said.

J.R. Firth (1957), who was considered to be the founder of modern British Linguistics, tried to
embed the utterance in the ‘social context’ and to generalise across meanings in specified social
contexts. He proposed an approach to the principled description of such contexts which bears a
close resemblance to more recent descriptions which we examine:
A. The relevant features of participants: persons, personalities.
(i) The verbal actions of the participants

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 (ii) The non verbal actions of the participants
B. The relevant objects
C. The effects of the verbal action

One of the most influential explanations in context is called the Ethnography of speaking. This
was developed by Hymes. He views the role of context in interpretation as, on the one hand,
limiting the range of possible interpretations and, on the other, as supporting the intended
interpretation.
‘The use of a linguistic form identifies a range of meanings. A context can support a range of
meanings. When a form is used in a context, it eliminates the meanings possible to that context
other than those the form can signal: the context eliminates from consideration the meanings
possible to the form other than those the context can support’ Hymes 1962.

Hymes (1964) specified the features of context which may be relevant to the identification of a
type of speech event in a way reminiscent of Firth’s. Hymes gives us the SPEAKING model
(which is a mnemonic device that labels each component/features with the letters of the word
speaking.) as follows:

S-Setting-Where the speech event is located in time and space/psychological.

P-Participants: Who takes part in the speech event and in what role.(speaker, addressee,
audience, eavesdropping)
E-Ends: What purpose the speech event is, and what its outcome is meant to be.
A-Acts Sequence: What speech sets make up the speech event, and what order they are
performed.
K-Key: the tone or manner of performance
(Sincere or ironic, joking or serious etc)
I-Instruments: What channel or medium of communication is used (e.g. speaking, singing,
writing, drumming, whistling) and what language variety is selected from the participant’s
repertoire.
N-Norms of interaction: What the rules are for producing and interpreting speech acts.
G-Genres-What ‘types’; does a speech event belong to, and what other pre-existing
conventional forms of speech are drawn or ‘cited’ in producing appropriate contributions to talk
(e.g. do people quote from mythology or poetry or scriptures.

These features of context may be oriented to in varying degrees of importance in any one
discourse. An important fact to note about context is that it is dynamic, it keeps changing as
discourse progresses.

Pragmatic and Discourse Context

As we have seen, the Discourse Analyst has to take account of the context in which a piece of
discourse occurs. The discourse analyst necessarily takes a pragmatic approach to the study of
language in use. Some of the most obvious linguistic elements which require contextual
information for their interpretation are the deictic forms such as here, now, I, you, this and that.
In order to interpret these elements in a piece of discourse, it is necessary to know (at least) who
the speaker and hearer are, and the time and place of production of the discourse.

Because the discourse analysts is investigating the use of language in context by a speaker /
writer, he is more concerned with the relationship between the speaker and the utterance, on the
particular occasion of use, than with the potential relationship of one sentence to another,
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regardless of their use. That is, in using terms such as speech acts, reference, presupposition,
implicature and inference, the discourse analyst is describing what speakers and hearers are
doing, and not the relationship which exists between one sentence or proposition and another.

The Importance of Context

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) emphasizes the importance of studying texts in their full
social and historical context. Critical discourse analysts generally agree that there are three levels
of discourse context: Macro, Meso and Micro.

At the macro level, the analysis of context assesses the relationship between the text and broader
social processes and ideologies; for example, what social issues are of particular importance at
the time the text was created.

At the meso level, analysis focuses on the context of production and reception of the text; where
was the text made? Who was it written by? What perspective might this person want to promote?
What kind of person might read this text? etc.

Finally, the micro level of discourse context simply looks at what is actually being said in the
text, and what linguistic features and devices are being used to depict an idea.

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