Pragmatics is a theory of language based around user-oriented perspectives on what we say, write, and do. An analysis of pragmatic ideas, practices, and metapragmatic awareness should try and account for not only speech as utterance but also the situations and contexts in which speech is produced. But what is a context? Earlier, I discussed how semioticians and grammarians analyzed the importance of context for interpreting implied or pragmatic meaning. Context can be immediate, situational, or general. Context can be participant expectations or speech/text type. The relations between speech and situation are not causal or determinate but pragmatic. Some are direct and referential; others, indirect and associational. Some are explicit; others implicit. Aspects of what an utterance ‘means’ or ‘does,’ its implicatures, references, signification, entailments, presuppositions, attitudes, perlocutionary force, and so forth, emerge through the interaction of speaker and listener and also from expression or discourse's relation to one or more contexts or situations, not all of which are linguistic or atemporal.

In political and social media discourse, ‘context’ or the claims one's speech is ‘taken out of context’ are often controversial or manipulated. Historians, literary critics, and linguists, on the other hand, regularly appeal to putting events or words ‘in context.’ Either way, speech does not exist independently of context. Context is all there is for speech to be meaningful. The problem is, what or whose context enables an interpretation, and can there be an authoritative or ‘proper’ context? The medieval concept of virtus sermonis pressures the idea of situational context by establishing Langage itself as the principal context for any utterance.