What is context?

By: Assist. Lect. Dalya Qays

It is commonly agreed that, in order to fully understand discourse, people need to understand it in its “context”. Up to the time of Malinowski (1923), the word ‘context’ in English had meant ‘con-text’; that is, the words before and after a specific sentence that individuals had been looking at. Malinowski was the first when he realised the need for a term that reflects the overall environment, including the verbal environment as well as the condition in which the text was pronounced. Therefore, in an article written in 1923, he coined the term “context of situation”, which means the environment of the text (Malinowski 1923 in Halliday and Hasan, 1989: 6). From van Dijk’s point of view, context refers to the “social situation” of language use in general, or to the specific situation of a given text or talk (van Dijk, 2009: 1-2).  In addition to that, Cook (1992: 9) points out that it is accurate to say that the answer to the question of what gives discourse its unity can be difficult without considering the world at large (the context). 

Sources 

Cook, G. (1992). Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Halliday, M. & Hasan, R. (1989). Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van, Dijk. (2009). Society and Discourse: How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.