ABSTRACT
Introduced by Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz (1976), ‘contextualization’ refers to the shared construction of contexts (i.e. contexts are not a given) by the participants in the course of their interaction. Contextualization consists of a set of procedures that relate contextualization cues to background knowledge. Such cues can be prosodic ( prosody), proxemic ( proxemics), or kinetic ( kinesics); they may consist of choosing a particular lexical item, syntactic construction, or formulaic expression, or in code-switching, etc. Background knowledge is organized in overlapping and interrelated frames that constrain the interpretation of a cue. The meaning of cues is derived from the co-occurrence of other cues related to the same or different frames: for instance, with regard to the frame of ‘turn-taking’ ( turn), a decrease in loudness and a change in body posture may indicate that the current speaker intends to end his/her turn. The cooccurrence of cues leads to redundancy, which allows one to interpret the behavior of one’s co-participant(s), even if not all cues were clearly understood. Because frames are culturally determined, misunderstandings may result in cross-cultural interactions (see Gumperz 1982).
