When one is asked a question one endeavours to think of context but in doing so this leads us into the problem of context
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to formulate a sharp or exhaustive definition of context. This is because, it is supposed to be a general idea that fills out the gap of everything which is not semantic or syntactic in linguistic studies.
However, there have been many attempts to flesh out an idea of what the principal elements of context could be. Usually, the general definitions claim that it is the knowledge of the world shared by the participants to a particular situation where a sentence is uttered at some point in time.
Following Lyons, S. Levinson enumerates as elements of context: ‘(i) Knowledge of role and status (where role covers both role in the speech event, as speaker or addressee, and social role, and status covers notions of relative social standing), (ii) knowledge of spatial and temporal location, (iii) knowledge of formality level, (iv) knowledge of the medium (roughly the code or style appropriate to a channel, like the distinction between spoken and written varieties of a language), (v) knowledge of appropriate subject matter, (vi) knowledge of appropriate province (or domain determining the register of a language)’
For the present considerations, a fairly broad definition of context should be sufficient. Consequently, let context be information that is neither a syntactical structure nor a dictionary, lexical definition of the meaning of a word or expression. Let me emphasize that I want to exclude from context everything that constitutes the ‘co-text’. In other words, I exclude every knowledge or information acquired from over pieces of text. I do it because co-textual information comes too directly from syntactic or
But what does it mean that I am interpreting something? Is understanding a part of interpretation or is it a distinct basis for it?
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