ABSTRACT
Studies of prototype organization concern the structuring of general knowledge, but at any given moment in a discourse the thinking of the participants cannot be accounted for entirely in terms of general knowledge structures. Rather, the participants have knowledge, awareness, and a focus that are particular to that moment – what we will call contextual thinking. Seeking to characterize this contextual thinking is a way of getting at the context, the import, of language in use. Context in this sense is something internal to the discourse participants, and it is dynamic; it is the contextual thinking out of which linguistic choices emerge and in relation to which they are interpreted. But we seem to have no access to this context that is both sufficiently independent of language that we can avoid circularity and sufficiently tied to language, and to the moment of speaking, that we can systematically associate it with emerging linguistic choices. A particular linguistic item can have many different imports: given a linguistic form, we cannot entirely predict what its meaning will be for a discourse participant at a particular moment of use; even given an externally defined context, we cannot predict this with assurance. And yet the field of pragmatics has shown us that what a form ‘counts as’ is critical in determining what linguistic structures will follow it in the continuing discourse. For psycholinguistics, the contextualization of the mental representations underlying the use of linguistic forms is an equally critical issue. In this chapter, we approach the variability of contextual meaning from the point of view of the speaker: how a speaker arrives at a linguistic form in context, in particular, how linguistic forms can be seen to arise out of contextually structured thinking. We therefore will pay special attention to instances in which a speaker makes a linguistic choice that would, based on a structural analysis of the language, appear to be atypical or peripheral in form or meaning, but that can be explained as arising from the particular meaningful oppositions that are active at that moment in the speaker’s thinking. Analyses required for such examples can then be fruitfully extended to account for more subtle effects of context that may otherwise go unnoticed.
