Contexts of culture and situation

All discourse is produced in context and interpretation depends on contexts of production and interpretation being, in some measure, shared. Early ethnographic work addressed context dependency by positing contexts of culture and context of situation (Malinowski 1923; 1935; Firth 1957). Context of culture accounted for sets of culturally specific beliefs, expectations and practices in terms of which people interpret events around them. Context of situation referred to patterns of behaviour and talk which appear so regularly in association with a particular activity that they are understood as (abstract characterizations of) the function of the situation type. Behaviours which do not reflect some expected pattern can be interpreted as irrelevant, and behaviours which appear totally unrelated to the contexts in which they occur may be judged uninterpretable.

Later work by Halliday, Hasan, Gregory, Martin and others refined and developed ideas of context. Our view is once again a hybrid, informed by Halliday's ethnographic perspective (e.g. 1977; 1978; 1984; 1994), by our awareness that contexts are significantly matters of what speakers know (e.g. van Dijk 1977; 2006; van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; Gregory 1988), and by work in AI, psychology and discourse analysis on top-down cognitive models as to what ‘contextual knowledge’ might be like. The latter approaches (and ours) differ from traditional functionalist and ethnographic approaches in explicitly situating context in neurocognitive domains of semantic and episodic memory (see also van Dijk 2006).