Context
Context is a central aspect of language use. It refers to ‘things’ that ‘surround’ a text at the level both of its production and of its interpretation – that is the situation and circumstances that surround the text. But it’s the nature of the ‘things’ that are often not understood. Context can simply refer to things like other words that surround a particular word; but the use of the term in English Language study is much wider. If you think about it, it is a person’s context that gives rise to a text in the first place in the sense that it is their situation and circumstances that cause them to want to communicate an idea to someone else – in the form of a text – in the first place.
There are two aspects to context that must always be central to your consideration: the context of production, i.e. that which gave rise to and affected the text’s creation (i.e. of its speaker or writer and the circumstances in which it arose); and the context of reception and interpretation, i.e. that which affects the audience’s understanding of the text. An important word that is closely linked to context is discourse.
- A discourse is a text considered in its real-world context of use and from this you will see that all discourse is to some extent at least, context bound.
- All of your analyses should be at the level of discourse. If they are not, you are losing marks.
The word context itself derives from an ancient Latin word meaning ‘weave together’. In language study, context refers to the many subtle ways in which a text has, ‘woven’ into it elements, aspects of the social, cultural and historical circumstances of its production. What is also the case, but less often recognised, is that when a text is read or heard, elements of its audience’s context is also inextricably ‘woven’ into its reception and interpretation of the text. Would you rather follow the advice of a favourite celeb star or a teacher? Hmm? Your context is the reason for your answer: aspects of the circumstances of your life as a young teenager – wanting so desperately to be cool above all else – lead you to such a choice… (-; But you get the point?
An example might help. Imagine a letter written from the WWI trenches by a soldier to his sweetheart. The language chosen by the writer as well as the interpretation of the language by its reader will be affected by their individual, yet very different, contexts. Reading that same letter today your own context will further affect your own reception and interpretation of the text (this is because contemporary attitudes to concepts such as war, masculinity, femininity, heroism and cowardice are very different from a century ago). It is not too hard to carry this analogy across to almost any other situation and recognise how context ‘weaves’ itself both into the production and the reception and interpretation of very many types of text.
- The sum-total of the social, historical and cultural context under which we live is given the name zeitgeist. We are all affected – and in surprisingly similar ways – by our current age’s zeitgeist in terms of our attitude to many things: to gender, to sexuality, to ethnicity, to youth and age, etc.
