ABSTRACT
Approaching pragmatics as the study of the construction and construal of context in language use, this is an entirely new chapter for this edition of Doing Pragmatics. The chapter begins by showing the pervasiveness of context before identifying four ‘dimensions’ of context, styled ontological, relational, participatory and purposive, whose properties vary across pragmatic phenomena including speech acts, indexical reference and presupposition. The chapter also discusses presupposition as a context accommodating phenomenon and shows how contexts are created in detailed analyses of both intercultural encounters and in talk-in-interaction. The final section discusses the role of context as recognized in speech act theory, in Gricean implicature and in relevance theory.
