The first part of the study is devoted to the philosophical and linguistic determination of contexts in (verbal) texts. A distinction is made between three elementary types: real situation context, linguistic speech/discourse context, and subjective knowledge contexts of the persons communicating. The second part approaches the subject from a literary studies vantage, using example analyses of selected works of French literature to show how the given-ness and immediacy of situational context in oral communication is established suppletively in texts taken from a range of different text varieties.