Project
Context
Context
Already since my early (1977) book Text and Context, I have been interested in a theory of context.
This project culminated in a large (700 pp) book, which however for obvious reasons (no publisher today publishes theoretical books of this size) had to be split into two books, one on context, language, cognition and discourse, and one on context, social cognition, society, and culture.
The example used throughout this book is a speech by Tony Blair persuading British parliament to accept his motion to invade Iraq.
The last chapter of the second book analyzes this whole debate, and thus also implies a more political application of the theory. The main thesis of the theory is that contexts are not, as was hitherto assumed, some kind of social environment of talk and text, but rather the interpretation by the participants of the ongoingly relevant dimensions of this social environment.
This interpretation is represented in so-called ‘context models’ in episodic memory.
These context models control all the relevant aspects of the production and comprehension of discourse that vary with the social situation.
Publications
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Books on Context
Text and context
Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse . London: Longman, 1977.
Texto y contexto
Madrid: Catedra, 1980.
Testo e contesto
Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981.
Discourse and Context
A sociocognitive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Gedisa? Discuro y contexto
Barcelona, 2012.
Contexto
São Paulo, 2012.
Society and discourse
How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk.
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Spanish translation
Sociedad y discurso
Gedisa, Barcelona
2011.
Articles on context
Pragmatics, presuppositions and context grammars.
In: S.J. Schmidt, (Ed.) Pragmatik/Pragmatics II,
Munich: Fink, 1976, 53-82.
A note on the partial equivalence of text grammars and context grammars
In: M. Loflin & J. Silverberg, (Eds.) Discourse and inference in cognitive anthropology. The Hague: Mouton, 1978, 135-144.
Acceptability in context
1974. In: S. Greenbaum, (Ed.), Acceptability in Language.
The Hague: Mouton, 1977, 39-62.
Context and cognition
Knowledge frames and speech act comprehension.
Journal of Pragmatics 1, 1977, 211-232.
Relevance in text and context. Paper
Nobel Symposium on Text Processing, Stockholm, 1980.
In: S. Allen, (Ed.) Text processing.
Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1982, 415-432.
Context models and text processing
In M. Stamenow (Ed.). Language Structure, Discourse and the Access to Consciousness (pp. 189-226).
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1997.
Towards a Theory of Context and Experience Models in Discourse Processing
In Herre van Oostendorp & Susan Goldman (Eds.), The construction of mental representations during reading. (pp. 123-148).
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999.
Discourse, ideology and context
Folia Linguistica, XXX/1-2, 2001, 11-40 (Special issue edited by Ruth Wodak).
Algunos principios de la teoría del contexto
ALED. Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso 1(1)
2001, 69-82.
Algunos principios de la teoría del contexto
ALED. Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso 1(1)
2001, 69-82.
Text and context of parliamentary debates
In P. Bayley (Eds.), Cross-cultural Perspective on Parliamentary Discourse. (pp. 339-372). Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2004.
Spanish version
Textos y contextos de los debates parlamentarios
Published in the internet journal Tonosdigital 2 (Noviembre 2001).
Contextual knowledge management in discourse production. ”
A CDA perspective. In Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton (Eds.), A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis. (pp. 71-100)
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005.
Critical Context Studies
Lecture for the First International Conference of Critical Discourse Analysis, Valencia, May 2004.
Macro Contexts.
Lecture First International Conference on Discourse and Intercultural Relations, University of Murcia, September 2004.
Discourse, context and cognition.
Discourse Studies, 8(1), 159-177, 2006.
Contextualization in parliamentary discourse
Aznar, Iraq and the pragmatics of lying.
Congress on oral discourse, Almería (Spain), November 23-25, 2005.
Comments on Context and Conversation
In Norman Fairclough, Giuseppina Cortese & Patrizia Ardizzone (Eds), Discourse and Contemporary Social Change. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007.
Context Theory and the Foundation of Pragmatics
December 2007. Plenary Lecture Congress of the Pragmatics Society of Japan, Osaka, December 2007.
Studies in Pragmatics, 10 (2008), 1-13.
Text, context and knowledge
Unpublished.
Partial French version
Revue de sémio-linguistique des textes et discours
published in Semen, 27 (avril, 2009), pp. 127-155.
Context
In Karen Tracy (Ed.),
International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction.
London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.
Epistemic Context Analysis
In special issue of Signos dedicated to the memory of Giovanni Parodi
2021
