In Pragmatics, Context Is Everything

This study is concerned with the interrelationship of context, common ground, and situation in pragmatics and how contextual content lends itself to resolving meaning in underspecified utterances.

In this book, linguist Brian Nolan examines three primary concerns occupying the study of pragmatics. First, he seeks to interpret what constitutes context and its contribution to language in use, which is one of the core unsolved questions in the literature of the discipline. Next, he gauges the deep relationship between interlocutors' common ground and context, and lastly, he analyses the incorporation of the situation as a cognitive framing device, where context meets common ground. A key component of this investigation is understanding how the pragmatic processing of the situation in real time, via its construal, involves the appropriate and relevant selection of content from context. As the interlocutors advance a discourse, a common ground is established between them, and the subsequent emergent common ground updated, as the dialogue continues. Nolan further defines what we mean by a context and determines how interlocutors communicate felicitously while dynamically leveraging context. A key issue of this book is the delineation of context. Delimiting context delivers the important benefit of avoiding the dizzying effect of the apparent unboundedness of context.

This dynamic book is designed for the next generation of scholars who need a sophisticated toolkit to advance the boundaries of pragmatics as a cognitive-functional and computational science.