Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of symbols and typographical conventions
- Part 1 Setting the scene
- Part 2 Lexical meaning
- Part 3 Sentence-meaning
- Part 4 Utterance-meaning
- 8 Speech acts and illocutionary force
- 9 Text and discourse; context and co-text
- 10 The subjectivity of utterance
- Suggestions for further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Text and discourse; context and co-text
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of symbols and typographical conventions
- Part 1 Setting the scene
- Part 2 Lexical meaning
- Part 3 Sentence-meaning
- Part 4 Utterance-meaning
- 8 Speech acts and illocutionary force
- 9 Text and discourse; context and co-text
- 10 The subjectivity of utterance
- Suggestions for further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
We have been operating with the assumption that utterance-meaning is crucially dependent on context. So far, however, I have made no attempt to say what context is or how it determines the meaning of utterances and controls our understanding of them. Nor have I said anything in detail about spoken and written text: I have, however, made it clear in previous chapters that speech must be distinguished from writing (and the products of speech from the products of writing), even though, in the technical metalanguage of semantics that we have been building up throughout the book, ‘utterance’ and ‘text’ are being applied to the products of both speech and writing.
In this chapter, we shall be dealing with both text (and discourse) and context (and co-text). As we shall see, text and context are complementary: each presupposes the other. Texts are constituents of the contexts in which they are produced; and contexts 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, of the kind we considered in the preceding chapter, are interpreted on the basis of a good deal of contextual information, most of which is implicit.
We shall begin by recognizing explicitly that the term ‘sentence’ is commonly used by linguists (and also by non-linguists) in two senses, one of which is, to put it loosely, more abstract than the other.
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- Linguistic SemanticsAn Introduction, pp. 258 - 292Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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