Context in the Analysis of Discourse and Interaction

Context is a central concept in the analysis of discourse and interaction in all the major research traditions in applied and sociolinguistics. Early linguistics did not display much sensitivity to it (Scollon, 1998, p. 80) and tended to study utterances in isolation and without reference to context. Today, however, there seems to be a general consensus around the idea that we understand utterances because they fi t or make sense within particular situations. Studies of discourse and interaction include some orientation to context, if nothing else because “language is always produced by someone to someone else, at a particular time and place, with a purpose and so forth” (Blommaert, 2005, p. 39). Beyond general agreement that “context should be taken into account” (Jones, 2004, p. 22), however, researchers often disagree about what should count as context, or how much context should be taken into account in the analysis. It could be argued that the way context is treated is in fact what usually sets apart and distinguishes different approaches and research traditions (Tracy, 1998). Conversation analysts, for example, often described as interested in identifying universal conversational rules, usually advocate limiting the study of context to those elements which are evoked in the sequential unfolding of the text or the interaction. Institutional context, social background, gender of the participants, and so on therefore should only be attended to by the analyst if they show up in the interaction and are made relevant to the ongoing exchange by the participants. For others, such as critical discourse analysts, for example, it is the connection between language and social processes that needs to be explicated, and this requires examining how text and interaction are woven into the fabric of sociopolitical action, social structures, context of cultures, and so forth (Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Fairclough, 1989). These different perspectives, with many others, have given rise to heated debates (Tracy, 1998) and have strongly contributed to giving the fi eld its current shape.