Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, Series Number 11)

The past decade has seen a fundamental rethinking of the concept of context. Rather than functioning solely as a constraint on linguistic performance, context is now analyzed as a product of language use. Language and context are seen as interactively defined phenomena. The essays in this collection, written by many of the leading figures in the social sciences, critically reexamine the concept of context from a variety of different angles and propose new ways of thinking about it with reference to specific human activities such as face-to-face interaction, radio talk, medical diagnosis, political encounters and socialization practices. The editors have provided introductions to each essay as well as a general overview of the issues under debate. The last decade has seen a fundamental rethinking of the concept of context. Rather than functioning solely as a constraint on linguistic performance, context is now also analyzed as a product of language use. In this new perspective, language and context are seen as interactively achieved phenomena, rather than predefined sets of forms and contents. The essays in this collection, written by many of the leading figures in the social sciences, critically reexamine the concept of context from a variety of different angles and propose new ways of thinking about it with reference to specific human activities such as face-to-face interaction, radio talk, medical diagnosis, political encounters, and socialization practices. Each essay is prefaced by an introduction by the editors which provides relevant theoretical and methodological background and demonstrates its relation to other essays in the volume. The editors' general introduction provides a lucid overview of the issues currently debated.Rethinking context will be required reading for everyone working within the field of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and the sociology of language. Contents List of contributors 1 Rethinking context: an introduction • Charles Goodwin and Alessandro Duranti 2 The indexical ground of deictic reference • William F. Hanks 3 Language in context and language as context: the Samoan respect vocabulary • Alessandro Duranti 4 Context contests: debatable truth statements on Tanna (Vanuatu) • Lamont Lindstrom 5 Contextualization, tradition, and the dialogue of genres: Icelandic legends of the kraftaskáld • Richard Bauman 6 Assessments and the construction of context • Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Harness Goodwin 7 In another context • Emanuel A. Schegloff 8 Contextualization and understanding • John J. Gumperz 9 Contextualization in Kalapalo narratives • Ellen B. Basso 10 Radio talk-show therapy and the pragmatics of possible worlds • Frank Gaik 11 The interpenetration of communicative contexts: examples from medical encounters • Aaron V. Cicourel 12 The routinization of repair in courtroom discourse • Susan U. Philips 13 The negotiation of context in face-to-face interaction • Adam Kendon 14 Indexing gender • Elinor Ochs Index Context has long been a key concept both in the field of pragmatics and in ethnographically oriented studies of language use as well as quantitative ones.