Recontextualizing Context

Book excerpt: In the humanities and social sciences, context is one of those terms which is frequently used and frequently referred to, but hardly made explicit. This book proposes a model for describing the multifaceted connectedness between language and language use, and between cognitive context, linguistic context, social context and sociocultural context and their underlying principles of well-formedness, grammaticality, acceptability and appropriateness. Combining a range of theoretical frameworks in linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and philosophy of language, Fetzer goes beyond the unilateral conception of speech and argues for a dialogue outlook on natural-language communication based on dialogue principles and dialogue categories. The most important ones are cooperation, joint production, micro and macro communicative intentions, micro and macro validity claims, co-suppositions, dialogue-common ground and communicative genre.