Felix Stefani Sisvinda

196332005
Roles/Contributions of Co-text and Context

The roles of context in pragmatics not only dealing with the condition inside the text.
However it could also deal with the context outside the text. In this paper, the meaning of
words in context (physical and social word) and assumptions of given information that
speaker and hearer share will be discussed further.
The role of context can be seen in three different perspectives: situational, background
knowledge, and contextual context. In situational perspective, the speaker knows about what
they can see around them. Meanwhile, in background knowledge perspective, the speaker
knows about each other and the world. There are two types of background knowledge
context, they are cultural and interpersonal. Cultural type explains about the general
knowledge about each other and the world. Moreover, the interpersonal type examines
specific and possibly private knowledge about history of the speaker themselves. The third
type of perspective is cotextual context. The role of context here is also cannot be separated
from co-text. Co-text can be defined as the understanding of given information of what the
speaker has been saying. The contextual context is closely related with grammatical cohesion.
Grammatical cohesion refers to the situation when a referring expressions links with another
referring expression within the co-text. The reference in grammatical cohesion consists of
exophora and endophora. Exophora is a reference in a text or utterance to something external
to it, which is only fully intelligible in terms of information about the extralinguistic situation
that denotes to pronouns “I” and “you”. Otherwise, the pronouns in the reference of
endophora are “us” and “we” which refer to items within the same text. There are two types
of endophora, they are anaphora and cataphora. Anaphora is the use of the pronouns them
and this link back to something that went before in the preceding text. Then, there is
cataphora which is the opposite of anaphora. Cataphora is the use of pronouns link forward to
a referent in the text that follows. The role of discourse context in interpretation in three
general senses: the actual discourse event, the linguistic content of the verbal exchange –
what’s actually said, and the structure of the information that is presupposed and/or conveyed
by the interlocutors. In this case Lewis gives a great explanation by the example of baseball
scoreboard. In baseball scoreboard, Lewis analyze the principal element of a game such as
goal; rules, moves, and strategy with its relation to pragmatics study.
The explanation from context and cotext in both sources really helpful for me to
understand each roles. The resource book for student provides many explanation on the terms
and types of contextual context. While from Craige Roberts, the discussion of context and
cotext based on the study of Lewis on baseball scoreboard. He also discusses about the
context in semantics and pragmatics that clarify the differences among them.