Context and co-text

1. Context and co-text Utterance meaning and context

2. Introduction • Utterance-meaning is crucially dependent on context. • Text As we shall see, text and con-text are complementary: each presupposes the other. Texts are constituents of the contexts in which they are produced; and con-texts are created, and continually transformed and refashioned, by the texts that speakers and writers produce in particular situations. It is clear that even sentence-sized utterances, are interpreted on the basis of a good deal of contextual information, most of which is implicit (Lyons, 1995:259)

3. Overview

4. Introduction • Halliday, M. A. K. (1978: 5): • co-text – the linguistic environment of a wordcontext – the non-verbal environment in which a word is used • Put another way, the surrounding situation in which a word is used is its context whereas the surrounding words is its co-text. • We shall begin by recognizing explicitly that the term 'sentence is commonly used by linguists (and also by non-linguists) in two senses:

5. Text-sentences • In all lan­guages, there are such expressions, finite in number and in some cases of more or less determinate grammatical structure, whose form and meaning cannot be accounted for. • Many of our everyday utterances are grammatically incomplete or elliptical. Some of them are ready-made locutions of fixed form. e.g. Good heavens/, Least said, soonest mended, etc. synchronically, in terms of the utterance of sentences- They must of course be accounted for in the description of the grammatical and semantic structure of particular languages they do not raise problems different in kind from those which arise in the analysis of the infinite set of potential utterance-inscriptions Only a finite, and relatively small, subset of this infinite set of potential utterances is ever actualized in the day-to-day use of a language

6. Sentence & utterance relation • However, there has been a good deal of confusion, both in generative grammar (and formal semantics) and in traditional grammar about the relation between sentences and utterances to clear up this confusion we have to focus on the infinite set of potential utterance-inscriptions. • The product of the utterance of a sentence is not necessarily a sentence. The apparent paradox disappears immediately if we draw a distinction between a more abstract and a more concrete sense of 'sentence’.

7. System sentence vs. text sentence

8. Sentence & utterance relation • Most linguists, do not draw a clear conceptual distinction between system-sentences and text-sentences; the fact they do not introduces a good deal of confusion into the discussion of the relation between sentence-generating grammars and the production (and interpretation) of texts. • The sense in which texts are generated (i.e., produced) in particular situations is different from the sense in which sentences (i.e., system-sentences) are generated as abstract, mathematical, objects by the rules of a generative grammar.

9. Sentence & utterance relation • The distinctions themselves are real enough in our everyday experience of the use of language: e.g. have not seen Mary. I have not been to Switzerland. I have not got any money. In fact, out of context I haven't is infinitely ambiguous. In context, I haven't loses it ambiguity only in so far as it is possible to say which of the infinitely many sentences of English (with the appropriate grammatical structure) has been uttered.

10. WHAT IS A TEXT? AND WHAT IS TEXT • a text is a sequence of sentences. As it stands, this is clearly unsatisfactory - if 'sentence* means, as it must in this context, "text-sentence". True, there are some texts that would satisfy the definition, notably texts of a more formal character. But the vast majority of everyday colloquial texts are made up of a mixture of sentences, sentence-fragments and ready-made locutions. • its failure to make explicit the fact that the units of which a text is composed, whether they are sentences or not, are not simply strung together in sequence, but must be connected in some contextually appropriate way. The text as a whole must exhibit the related but distinguishable, properties of cohesion and coherence. • Languages differ considerably with respect to the degree to which they permit or oblige their users to connect text-units in sequence by means of explicit indications of cohesion. • the distinction between cohesion and coherence has to do with the difference between form and content. • Peter hasn't either. I haven't. Have you seen Mary? • have you seen Mary? I haven't seen Mary. Peter hasn't seen Mary ( either). Alary is never here when she should be here. • It is clear that they don’t have the same connectedness. For this reason it is less easy, though not impossible, to take the sequence as a text, rather than as a string of unconnected (or disconnected) utterances. Ellipsis and the use of pronouns, as well as the use of particular connecting particles and conjunctions (therefore, so, etc.) commonly serve to create and sustain that kind of connectedness to which the term 'cohesion' is applied.

11. WHAT IS A TEXT? AND WHAT IS TEXT Coherence - is a matter of content, rather than form. In default of any contextual indication to the contrary, what is being said in any one text-unit is assumed to be relevant to what has just been said in the immediately preceding text-units. The whole family went to town last Saturday. Veronica bought a dress, while John kept the children occupied in the toy-shop. None of these propositions has been explicitly formulated, still less asserted; and any one. of them might be contradicted, in specific contexts of utterance, by other propositions that are part of the speaker, and hearer, background beliefs and assumptions.

12. WHAT IS TEXT?

13. UTTERANCE-MEANING AND CONTEXT

14. UTTERANCE-MEANING AND CONTEXT • Utterance-meaning goes beyond what is actually said: it also includes what is implied (or presupposed). And context is highly relevant to this part of the meaning of utterances. • Tokens of the same utterance-type can result from the utterance, on different occasions, of different sentences. In such cases, the utterance-inscription itself will usually be either grammatically or lexically ambiguous (or both). e.g. They passed the port at midnight • We do not know what propositional content is being expressed unless we know what sentence is being uttered. Moreover, if the sentence contains one or more polysemous expressions, we do not know in what sense they are being used. Context, therefore, is a factor in the determination of the propositional content of particular tokens of utterance-inscriptions on different occasions of utterance. • Most of the ambiguities, whether lexical or grammatical, therefore pass unnoticed. We may then either fail to understand what they are saying, hesitating between alternative interpretations, or misunderstand their utterances by taking them in the wrong sense. • The second of these two possibilities is often exploited by humorists and comedians, who deliberately set up the context in such a way that their audience will unconsciously assign one interpretation to an utterance-inscription and then, in the so-called punch-line, suddenly reveal to them, more or less indirectly, that they have been led up the garden path (Three strong girls went for a tramp s followed, after a brief pause, with The tramp died,

15. UTTERANCE-MEANING AND CONTEXT • Let us now turn to the second of the two levels at which context determines utterance-meaning: let us take up the fact that context can make clear, not only which sentence has been uttered (arid, in the case of polysemous sentences, with what meaning), but also what proposition has been expressed. • Obviously, out of context there is no way of knowing. If we make certain assumptions about the production of the text, we can say that the speaker or writer - more generally, the locu­tionary agent is referring to himself or herself by means of I and to some third person (i.e., to some person other than himself or herself and his or her addressee) • however, that we cannot be sure even of this sim­ply on the basis of our knowledge of English. There are circum­stances in which speakers may refer to someone other than themselves, and there are circumstances in which one may refer to one addressee by name. • We also need to know when the utterance was produced. (So too, incidentally, is the fact that in most contexts there will be a tacitly understood reference to the period of time of which the predicative expression 'have seen1 • In the case of other utterances, we need to know, not only the time, but also the place of utterance, in order to establish what proposition has been expressed. For example, E.g. She is never here when she should be: • 'here1 normally refers to the place of utterance, so that the pro­position "Mary is here" may be true in respect of one place at certain times and false of that place at other times. the vast majority of utterance-inscriptions in most languages are implicitly, if not explicitly, indexical or deictic, so that they express different propositions according to the context in which they are produced.

16. UTTERANCE-MEANING AND CONTEXT • We come, finally, to the contextual determination of illocutionary force e.g. I will give you £5. • may be uttered as a promise or as a prediction. Or again, • (13) sit down. • Frequently, but not always, the prosodic contour (i.e., the stress and intonation) will indicate to the addressee that the utterance has one kind of illocutionary force rather than another. • Indeed, much of our day-to-day language activity is so closely integrated with other kinds of social behavior and activity that the occurrence of an utterance with a particular illocutionary force is often predictable from the socially identifiable situation in which it occurs. • it will be evident to us and to our interlocutorthat at a certain point in the conversation an invitation of this kind should be made. This being so, addressees do not have to calculate or determine the illocutionary force of utterances. • It is arguable that most so-called indirect speech-acts, At any rate, there can be no doubt that, in many instances, the illocutionary force of an utterance is strongly determined by the context in which it occurs.

17. What is context • the utterance itself is embedded in the context of situation: • There has been a tendency, until recently, for linguists and philosophers to neglect the context of situation in their presentation of Grice maxims. It is arguable that they have:

18. What is context • It is arguable that Grice work also suffers from its philosophical bias in favor of descriptive, or propositional, meaning. This is revealed, not only in his acceptance of a truth-conditional theory of meaning, but also in his conception of context - in the second of its two roles referred to above. For him, and for many of those who have drawn upon his ideas, context is taken to be a set of propositions in relation to which new propositions can be evaluated for truth and added to the context {or rejected as untrue). • But much of the knowledge that is involved in the production and interpretation of utterance-inscriptions is practical, rather than propositional: it is a matter of knowing how to do something, not of knowing that something is the case. Of course, it is always possible (in certain languages at least) to describe practical knowledge as if it were propositional.

19. What is context No simple answer, then, can be given to the question "What is context?". it suffices to emphasize the fact that, in the construction of a satisfactory theory of context, the linguist account of the interpretation of utterances must of necessity draw upon, and will in turn contribute to, the theories and findings of the social sciences in general: notably of psychology, anthropology and sociology.

20. References • Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Baltimore: University Park Press. • Lyons, J. (1995). Linguistic semantics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. • Halliday, M. A. K., & Hassan, R. (1992). Cohesion in English. London [u.a.: Longman.

21. Thank You Questions?