The Third Lecture: Spoken and written discourse

3.1. Linguistic Forms and Functions of Discourse

Form is concerned with syntactic structure up to the sentence level, i.e. the arrangement of morphemes
and words into the larger units of group, clause, and finally, sentence. Form is also concerned with the
syntagmatic relationship between words within clauses and sentences. For example, “I’m taller than
you” is different from “You’re taller than I am”. Inverting ‘I’ and ‘you’ around the comparative
adjective changes the propositional meaning of the sentence. Function, however, is concerned with
the utterance’s purpose, i.e. what the utterance is meant to achieve. For example:
Father: Get the tools down off the shelf
Son: You’re taller than I am!

The son uttered “You’re taller than I am” for the purpose of refusing to comply with a command.
This is a very different function of than that of:

A: Which of us is taller?
B: You’re taller than I am

…where, “You’re taller than I am”, functions to provide information to a question. Nothing about
the form, that is the syntactic structure of the utterance itself, or the syntagmatic relation between the
words within it, allowed us to predict its function.

3.2. Transactional and Interactional

Discourse analysis examines language in use. In order to create a well-arranged system, language was
divided into two basic branches according to its functions. These functions are “transactional, which
language serves in expression of ‘content’ and interactional function, which is involved in
expressing social relations and personal attitudes” (Brown and Yule 1983: 1).

The transactional function suggests that an addresser’s intention is to provide addresses with
information, or to induce a reaction of the hearer. Brown and Yule name this particular language as
“primarily transactional language” (1983: 2). It is widely recognized, that the information, which
addressers want to give, should have a clear form in order to be understood without any confusions.

Transactional language is assumed by philosophers, linguists and psychologists to be the “basic”

language, in which the aim of communication is that the message be correctly understood. Typical
contexts for transactional language are: doctor-patient (how to take the medicine), customer-bank clerk
(how to open a new bank account), or friend-friend (details of a recipe).

On the other hand, the interactional function is the subject of sociolinguistics which examine
establishing, maintaining and ending of the communication. Moreover, they check “whether the

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communication channel works by attracting the attention or confirming the interest of the
interlocutor, often by expressions” (Dontcheva- Navrátilová 2005: 15).
Interactional function involves a search for agreement. The hearer should feel that the speaker is
friendly. This kind of conversation does not usually have any effect on the world. Typical contexts for
interactional language are phoning mum, visiting a friend in a hospital, a chat at a bus stop, Internet
chat, talking to people at a noisy party. Typical content of interactional language might be the coldness
of the weather, the lateness of the bus, the prettiness of the baby, the rudeness of the young etc.

The same distinction has also been pointed out by McCarthy (1991), who says: “Transactional talk is
for getting business done in the world, i.e. in order to produce some change in the situation that
pertains. It could be to tell somebody something they need to know, to affect the purchase of something,
to get someone to do something, or many other world-changing things. Interactional talk, on the other
hand, has as its primary functions the lubrication of the social wheels, establishing roles and
relationships with another person prior to transactional talk, confirming and consolidating
relationships, expressing solidarity, and so on. (…..) The words mainly and primarily are used to
underline the fact that talk is rarely all one thing or the other, and, in a sense, it is almost impossible
to conceive of talk between two people that does not, in some small way, ‘change the world’, even if
that only means getting to know someone a little better.”

Most language is, of course, not wholly transactional or interactional but a mix of both, and for this
reason, Brown and Yule (ibid) suggest that exchanges are generally better described as primarily
transactional or interactional. Social chat will contain some information - e.g. if I'm telling you about
my last holiday - but it remains primarily interactional in terms of its function. It doesn't really matter
if you don't retain the details. And transactional exchanges will often be interspersed with elements
which are there to serve an interactional function. Compare the exchange above with:
A : Good morning. Can I have two pounds of cherry tomatoes.
B : Would you like these ones, or the ones next to the potatoes?
A: The ones next to the potatoes please.
B: Here you are. That's £5 please.
A: Thank you.

None of the underlined elements are essential for the transmission of information, even though the
exchange remains primarily transactional. They serve an interactional function.

3.3. Written and Spoken Discourse

Written discourse is a domain of transactional function (Brown an Yule 1983: 1). It means that
writer’s intention is to provide the addressee with information. The substantial advantage of written
discourse is the ability of coming back to the text which has been already written, in order to be
checked, or to help writers to acquire inspiration for their further writing; or, they are even able to

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restructure and rewrite again what they have already written. A great disadvantage of written
discourse is that “the writer has no access to immediate feedback and simply has to imagine the
reader’s reaction” (Brown and Yule 1983: 5). It follows that the written discourse is occasionally
misleading by virtue of wrong imagination of a writer, addresser’s and addressee’s context, or by
“the background knowledge of the participants, their shared experience and cultural
background” (Dontcheva- Navrátilová 2005: 13).
Since the spoken language is very swift and full of fillers, e.g. interjections, coughing, or other
people’s speeches; it is very arduous to apply the discourse analysis. In order to be able to use such
analysis, firstly, spoken language has to be transcribed and written on the paper by discourse analysts
who “use normal orthographic conventions for representing the speech” (Brown and Yule 1983:
10).
The advantage of spoken discourse is that addressers usually use gestures and facial expressions in
order to support their message. The attitude of addressees is also usually sustained by their body
language. But these “paralinguistic features of a spoken message” (Cook 1989: 9), are frequently
distracting addresses and they also disturb the communication channel and the decoding of the
message itself. Cook argues that “when we receive a linguistic message, we pay attention to many
other factors apart from the language itself” (1989: 9). In written discourse the aspect of
paralinguistic features occurs in limited extent, e.g. handwriting or typography.
3.3.1 Distinction between Written and Spoken Discourse

The distinction between speech and writing is often referred to as channel (D. Hymes) or medium as
speaking and writing involve different psychological processes. Spoken and written discourse differs
for many reasons. Spoken discourse must be understood immediately; written discourse can be
referred to many times.

General Differences between Spoken and Written Discourse

1. Grammatical complexity
2. Lexical density
3. Nominalization
4. Explicitness
5. Contextualization
6. Spontaneity
7. Repetition, hesitations, and redundancy
8. Continuum View

1.Grammatical Complexity Written discourse is more structurally complex and more

elaborate than spoken discourse. In other words, sentences
in spoken discourse are short and simple, whereas they are
longer and more complex in written discourse.

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 Structurally?
 Spoken discourse is more fragmented. It contains more
simple sentences and coordination words (and, but, so,
because, etc.)
 Written texts exhibit a bewildering variety and richness of
different structural forms.
 In written discourse we often use passive when we don’t
want to specify the agent. In spoken discourse we would use
a subject like “people”, “somebody”, “they”, “you”.
2. Lexical Density It refers to the ratio of content words (i.e. nouns, verbs,
adjectives, and adverbs) to grammatical or function words
(e.g. pronouns, prepositions, articles) within a clause.
Spoken discourse is less lexically dense than written
discourse.
Content words tend to be spread out over a number of clauses,
whereas they seem to be tightly packed into individual
clauses.
Lexical characteristics?
Spoken discourse has:
 More pronouns (it, they, you , we).
 More lexical repetitions.
 More first person references.
 More active verbs.
3. Nominalization It refers to presenting actions and events as nouns rather than
as verbs.
a. Written discourse has a high level of nominalization: i.e.
more nouns than verbs.
b. Written discourse tends to have longer noun groups than
spoken discourse.
Lexical characteristics?
Spoken discourse has:
More verb-based phrases:
having treatment – being treated
hospital care – go to the hospital
 More predicative adjectives:
statistics are misleading – misleading statistics news is
frightening – frightening news
4. Explicitness According to Paltridge (ibid.) explicitness is not absolute.
When speaking or writing, individuals may say something
directly or they may infer it. So, they can decide how much
they say something directly or indirectly. Therefore, as Biber

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 (1988) suggests, depending on what the speakers want their
hearers to understand, both modes can be explicit. However,
writing is more explicit because it is more pre-planned.
5. Contextualization Dooley and Levisohn (2001) believe that when we talk about
the context for something, we mean the situation in which it
is embedded, and is seen as part of a larger whole. In this
sense, the kind of context that is of importance to us is the
context that people are aware of. Therefore, in terms of
mental representations context is part of one’s mental
representation which is connected to or it surrounds the
concept which he is talking about, and the phenomena when
a hearer attempts to develop a viable mental representation
for a text, can be called "contextualization" (Fillmore, 1981).

There is a theory that spoken genres are not strictly dependent

on a shared context (Halliday, 1989). However, Tanen (1982)
claims that spoken language is dependent on a shared
background knowledge or context that is needed for a
reasonable interpretation. Conversely, written discourse does
not depend on a shared background. Accordingly, Paltridge
(2006) concludes that written form is more decontextualized
than spoken one. But in some occasions, such as personal
letters, writing is more dependent on a shared background
than some spoken genres as academic lectures. Again, written
fictions and non-fictions may provide their readers with
enough background knowledge which help them enter into
the world the writer has pictured.
6. Spontaneity Some scholars believe that spoken discourse is
ungrammatical and lacks a good organization, because the
speakers may interrupt each other or speak simultaneously.
But Paltridge (ibid.) declares that spoken language is
organized but has a different organization than that of writing.
However, spoken form has a benefit for listeners in that they
can ask their speaker to clarify what he is saying. Thus, the
speaker can correct and reformulate his sayings. Because,
spoken form is produced spontaneously, so we can see its
process of production as the person is speaking. But writing
is more grammatical and has a well-formed organization. It
cannot be interrupted, because the audiences can see it when
the product (e.g, book, journal, etc.) is finished and printed.
Thus, it is “a highly idealized version of the writing process”
(Halliday, 1989). In addition, the use of intonation, different

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 gestures and people`s body language can help speakers to
convey the information they want to transfer; while the way
of conveying information in writing is limited to a certain
number of papers and the audiences do not have the
opportunity to ask any questions (Paltridge, 2006)
7. Repetition, Hesitation and Because spoken language is produced in real time, it uses
Redundancy considerably higher amounts of repetition, hesitation and
redundancy. It uses ore pauses and fillers such as “ummm”,
“ahh”, “you know”. This helps them have the time to think
about what they are going to say (ibid.). Another application
of these pauses is in turn-taking where the speakers use them
to indicate that they want to start speaking after the person
who is talking (Biber, 1988).
8. Continuum View Based on Biber (1988), McCarthy (2001) and Paltridge
(2006), the differences between speech and writing are not
simply one-dimensional, but they are regarded as a scale or
continuum from some texts like casual conversations that are
more involved interpersonally to some other texts as written
public notices that are more separated. Some written forms in
English may be more explicit than spoken forms. Also, some
writings like prepared academic lectures or academic writings
which are published may be more tightly organized.
Consequently, as McCarthy (2001) states, by considering a
scale of differences, one can prevent people from having
over-simplified views towards the differences between the
two modes of discourse

3.4. What is meant by an Utterance and a sentence?

Just conventional signals like the blowing of a whistle can have different meanings in different
situations, so different pieces of language can have different meanings in different contexts. Let`s
illustrate with three fictitious events:

A beggar who has not eaten all day says “I`m hungry”;
A child who hopes to put off going to bed announces “I`m hungry”
A young man who hopes to get better acquainted with one of his co-workers and intends to ask her to
have dinner with him begins with the statement “I`m hungry”.

The three events obviously have something in common and yet, just as obviously, they are different:
they indicate different intentions and are liable to be interpreted differently because the situations and
the participants are different.

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Each of the three speech events illustrated above is a different utterance, and we write an utterance
with quotation marks: “I`m hungry”. Each utterance contains the same sentence, which we write
with italics: I`m hungry. An utterance is an act of speech or writing; it is a specific event, at a particular
time and place and involving at least one person, the one who produces the utterance, but usually more
than one person. An utterance happens just once; a spoken utterance happens and then, unless it is
recorded electronically, it ceases to exist; a written utterance is intended to last – for a short time in
the case of a shopping list, for instance, or much longer, as in the case of a book. A sentence, on the
other hand, is not an event; it is a construction of words (in English or whatever language) in a
particular sequence which is meaningful (in the language).In our illustration each of the three utterance
contains the meaning of the sentence, and each utterance has an extra meaning or meanings because
of the circumstances in which it occurs. The meaning of a sentence is determined by the language,
something known to all people who have learned to use that language. It is the meanings of the
individual words and the meaning of the syntactic construction in which they occur.

The meaning of an utterance is the meaning of the sentence plus the meanings of the circumstances:
the time and place, the people involved, their backgrounds, their relationship to one another, and what
they know about one another. All these circumstances we can call the physical-social context of an
utterance. (Kreidler 1998, 26 – 27)

3.5. Why Distinguish between Sentence and Utterance?

Because it is important to recognize what meanings are communicated to us in language and which
meanings, we derive from the contexts in which language is used. Because it is important to distinguish
between linguistic meanings, what is communicated by particular pieces of language, and utterance
meaning, what a certain individual meant by saying such-and-such in a particular place, at a particular
time, and to certain other individuals? The utterance “Our visit to the factory was a wonderful
experience” may be spoken as a joke, or sarcastically, or as a straightforward report, among other
possibilities. The sentence "Our visit to the factory was a wonderful experience" has none of these
meanings in itself—or, to put it differently, it has potentially any of these meanings. An utterance is
often part of a larger discourse—a conversation, a formal lecture, a poem, a short story, a business
letter, or a love letter, among other possibilities. A spoken discourse is any act of speech that occurs
in a given place and during a given period of time. A written discourse may be the record of something
that has been spoken, or it may originate for the purpose of being performed aloud, like a play or
speech, or it may exist without ever having been spoken or intended to be spoken, like most articles
and books. The linguistic context of an utterance makes a difference of meaning, as well as the social
context.
3.6. On 'Data'
When we talk about the ‘data’ here, we focus on the two points of view. That are from grammarian
and discourse analyst. Short to say, grammarian is a person who studies grammar and usually writes

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books about it. On the other hand, discourse analyst is a person who analyses a discourse in a
professional way
The grammarian’s ‘data’ is the sentence, while the discourse analyst’s ‘data’ is the utterance.
According to Brown & Yule (1983: 20) , the grammarian’s ‘data’ is inevitably the single sentence, or
a set of single sentences illustrating a particular feature of the language being studied. They also
stressed that the grammarian will have constructed the sentence or sentences he uses as examples.
Differ with the grammarian, the discourse analyst’s ‘data’ include all aspects of linguistic. As Brown
& Yule (1983: 20) explained that the discourse analyst’s data is typically based on the linguistic
output of someone other than the analyst. Discourse analyst’s data include physical contact, gesture,
and some features like hesitation, slips, and other non-standard forms.
Although these two views of 'data' differ substantially, they are not incompatible, unless they are taken
in an extreme form. A discourse analyst may regularly work with extended extracts of conversational
speech, for example, but he does not consider his data in isolation from the descriptions and insights
provided by sentence sentence-grammarians. It should be the case that a linguist who is primarily
interested in the analysis of discourse is, in some sense, also a sentence-grammarian. Similarly, the
sentence-grammarian cannot remain immured from the discourse he encounters in his daily life. The
sentence he constructs to illustrate a particular linguistic feature must, in some sense, derive from the
‘ordinary language’ of his daily life and also be acceptable in it.
3.7 Rules vs. Regularities
Brown and Yule (1980: 22) state that in Chomskyan linguistics, the grammarians were interested in
the rules that govern the well-formedness of sentences that’s why their data are only allowed to
contain 100% correct rules. In addition, their data consisted of either a single sentence or a set of single
sentences serving as examples in illustrating a particular point in the language being studied.
Discourse analysts, on the other hand, are interested in the output of ordinary language users’ behavior
in which they labelled as the “ordinary language” data and simply known as the regularities which
analysts tend to express in dynamic terms. The reason why they are expressed in dynamic terms is that
the data dealt with is the output of ‘ordinary language behavior’ which is likely ‘to contain evidence
of the behaviour element’, that is the data investigated is ‘the result of active processes’ to convey
intended meaning (Brown and Yule, 1980 :23).
They also state that the regularities that discourse analysts are interested in describing are “based on
the frequency with which a particular linguistic feature occurs under certain conditions in his
discourse data”.
Cramer (2011: 79) supports their idea by illustrating Hopper’s (1998) and Johnstone’s (1994) points
of view that the actual sentences in discourse show frequency or repetitions that grammar doesn’t
explain. Examples tend to be found in aphorisms, greetings, etc. He further argues that such repetitions
tend to be found in “actual instances of talk and text, and grammar represents only one kind and

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set of conventionalized repetition, one that is particularly linked with written, prestige forms of
discourse”.
Therefore, the conclusion drawn by B & Y (1980: 22) was that “a regularity in discourse is a
linguistic feature which occurs in a definable environment with a significant frequency” and in
order to define such regularities, the discourse analysts would attempt to adopt the descriptive
linguistics’ traditional methodology in order to describe the linguistic forms used in their data relative
to the environment they occurred in.
3.8. Product vs. Process
Since the grammarians’ data are not connected to behavior, then they focus on text as product which
is dealt with in static terms. As mentioned earlier, the items or objects that their data consist of are ‘the
well-formed sentences of a language which can exist independently of any individual speaker of that
language’ (B&Y, 1980: 23). That is, such sentences have neither producers nor receivers, which make
it unrequired to be considered in terms of their function. This view is known as the sentence-as-object
view.
Chomsky (1968: 62) supports this idea saying that:
“If we hope to understand human language and the psychological capacities on which it rests,
we must first ask what it is, not how or for what purposes it is used.”
In other words, in order to understand the human language we need to account for examples to be
described and analyzed in terms of rules excluding the option of relating them to a context because if
we do, it would have a producer and a receiver and would thus be considered in terms of the following
view.
Another related view has been proposed in terms of natural language sentences that tend to be found
in “literature which relates to discourse analysis” (B&Y, 1980: 23). This view differs from the
previous one in that it has producers as well as receivers of sentences. However, the analysis would
only be concentrating on the product; that is ‘words-on-the-page’.
B&Y (1980) categorize these two views within one approach or view which is known as text-as-
product view. A typical view of such an approach is ‘the cohesion view of the relationships between
sentences in a printed text’ for example, the anaphoric expressions, e.g. pronouns, used in creating a
cohesive text.
The conclusion that can be drawn is that the analysis of the product is not concerned with how it’s
produced or received, that is, it’s not concerned with the principles that govern the production of texts.
Another approach which, in contrast to the previous one, sets the communicative function of language
as the goal of its investigation is known as the discourse-as-process view. So analysts would simply

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be interested in the purpose of the linguistic data produced as well as the processing of such data by
both the producer and the receiver. The main principles of such a view is for discourse analysts to:
1. Consider words, phrases and sentences that appear in textual record of a discourse to be
an attempt of the producer to communicate his message to a recipient.
2. Be interested in discussing how a recipient comprehends the message produced on a
particular occasion.
3. To know how the requirements set by the recipient(s) that may influence the organization
of the producer’s discourse (B&Y, 1980: 24).

3.9. Arguments Against the Static Concept found in both Initial Views
Wittgenstein (1953: 132) warns that “the confusions that occupy us arise when language is like an
engine idling, not when it is doing work”. Therefore Kuno (1976) concludes that “it is time to re-
examine every major syntactic constraint from a functional point of view” since the sentence-as-
object view fails to account for a variety of sentence structures.
As for “the text-as-product view of cohesion in text, Morgan (1979) argues that we see a link
between a particular pronoun and a full noun phrase in a text because we assume the text is
coherent and not because the pronoun refers back to the noun phrase”. So “we seek to identify
the writer’s intended referent for a pronoun, since a pronoun can be used to refer to almost
anything. That is, what the textual record means is determined by our interpretation of what
the producer intended it to mean” (B&Y, 1980: 25).
3.10. On Context
Context is the term used to refer to the environment or the circumstances where language is used. In
recent years, sentences were analyzed without considering the contexts in which they were used
because grammarians were only interested in determining whether the strings produced by their
grammar are correct ones or not. They would implicitly appeal to contextual considerations since to
account for the acceptability of sentences they construct a context where sentences would be
acceptably used.
In DA, analysts are concerned with what language users can do with language and accounting for the
context where language is employed.
The summary that can be found in B&Y (1980: 26) is that discourse analysts treat their data as a text
of a dynamic process when language was used for the purpose of communicating as well as achieving
intentions (discourse) in a context held by a producer and a receiver. Though a lot of linguists have
turned their eyes to the investigation of context in recent years, unfortunately, they have not been
established a generally accepted and systematic theory about context standing by itself. As far as the
categories of context are concerned, different scholars have different opinions. Basically, the
categories of context can be divided into two kinds: one is the division within the same category;

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the other is the division of hierarchy. Different scholars utilize different names for the division of
context. In a narrower sense, context consists of the lexical items that come immediately before and
after any word in an act of communication. In a wider sense, everything may belong to a context,
such as geographical and cultural background, the discourse interpretation and production in a certain
communication, the discourse participants, their individual experiences, encyclopedic knowledge and
their special roles in the communication, and the like.
In Changes and Development of Context Research, Qiu Xinyi puts forward seven key points for
defining context:
I. Is context objective situation, psychological production or the background constructed by the
communication subjects or not?
II. Is context pre-existed before the communication or constructed dynamically during the process
of a certain communication? Is it formed dynamically by the participants or by itself? The
participants are constrained by context. Can they construct context for their communicative
intention at the same time? Is the process accumulative if context is constructed continuously?
III. What is context comparison with? Is it single or unique? Is it definite or not?
IV. Is context shared by the participants or included in their shared knowledge? Does context vary
according to different participants?
V. What level should we put context research on? Does an abstract and general context exist?
VI. What problems should we solve if we want to give a definition for context?
VII. What problems should we solve for constructing a descriptive context model?

All above seven aspects are theoretically valuable, scholars working in different disciplines tend to
concentrate themselves on different aspects of context and hold diverse perspective or approaches.
3.11. A Brief Review of Context Research
A. Traditional Research on Context
The notion of the context is initiated by Malinowski, a British anthropology (born in Porland), in the
complementary of The Sense of Sense by Ogden and Richards in 1923. He distinguished three types
of context: the immediate context of utterance, the general context of situation, and the broader context
of culture and put forward that context included not only the linguistic element but also cultural and
situational factors. Malinowski‘s notion of context of situation was accepted and elaborated by one of
his colleagues Firth. He took over Malinowski‘s context of situation and extended it to linguistics. In
1950, he made a detail exposition about context in his book Personality and Language in Society. He
further pointed out that Malinowski‘s conception of the context of situation was not quite adequate for
the purpose of linguistic theory, because it was not general enough. Firth‘s own linguistic theory was
built into by furthering the study of context. Four categories were proposed by him to cover the
context of situation:

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 I. The participants in the situation: what Firth referred to person and personalities, corresponding
more or less to what sociologists would regard as the status and roles of the participants;
II. The action of the participants: what they are doing, including both their verbal and non-verbal
action.
III. Other relevant features of the situation: the relevant objects and non-verbal and non-personal
events;
IV. The effects of the verbal action: what changes were brought about by what the participants in
the situation had done.
He is the first to analyze language from the angle of context and sketch a framework for the study of
context thereafter.
As one of Firth‘s students, M.A.K Halliday further develops the theory of situation into what is known
as register theory, a more generalized interpretation intended as a basis for deriving the features of the
text from the features of the situation. (Meiyun Yue, 1997).
The register theory is described in terms of a framework of three dimensions: field of discourse, tenor
of discourse and mode of discourse. Field refers to the environment in which the speech event takes
place which includes the topic, participants and the whole process of the interaction. It is the reflection
of the social function of the text. Tenor is the relation between participants taking the social status and
role into account. Tenor in effect directly determines the formality of the language used, and mode the
medium of language activity. It is manifestation of the nature of the language code being used. In the
other words, mode is the channel through which a language is used. Halliday gives us a specific and
detailed analysis of context in discourse interpretation.
B. Context and Pragmatics
Leech (1983) defined pragmatics as ―the study of how language is used in communication‖. In other
words, pragmatics focuses on two main topics: ① what is communicated? And ② how is
communicated ? As we have noted, communication does not take place in vacuum but in a context.
Context is, therefore, an indispensable notion that makes pragmatics as it is. At present, the study of
pragmatics mainly includes five aspects: deixis, conversational implicature, presupposition, speech
acts and conversational structure. All these five aspects are involved in the problem of context. Since
its great significant position as a corner stone to the discipline of pragmatics, pragmatic context is
much broader in scope thus is much dwelt on by pragmatists.
Levinson is one of the pragmatists who are active on the scene of the newly arising discipline. His
Pragmatics(1983) is a classic work which sketches the framework for the new discipline and is
accepted by the later researchers ever since. In Pragmatics, the notion of context is not explicated
separately in details but interrelated with other topics. In this book, Levinson (1983) claims that
―context is understood to cover the identities of participants, the temporal and spatial parameters of
the speech event, and the beliefs, knowledge and intentions of the participants in that speech event,
and no doubt much besides.‖ Levinson‘s context does not label all the actual situations of utterance in

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all their multiplicity of features, but only those features that are culturally and linguistically relevant
to the production and interpretation of utterances. (van Dijk, 1976).
In Pragmatics, Levinson also discusses context in line with two socio-linguists J.Lyons and Ochs.
Lyons considers that the following features should include the participants‘ knowledge of six aspects:
I. knowledge of role and status (where role covers both the role in the speech event, as speaker
or hearer, and the social role, and status cover notion of relative standing.
II. knowledge of spatial and temporal location;
III. knowledge of formality level;
IV. knowledge of the medium(roughly the code or style appropriate to a channel, like the distinction
between written and spoken varieties of a language);
V. knowledge of appropriate subject matter;
VI. knowledge of appropriate province (or domain determining the register of a language
)(Levinson, 1983)
Moreover, Levinson claims that an utterance is the issuance of a sentence, a sentence analogue, or
sentence fragment, in an actual context (Levinson, 1983).So aspects of contexts play a very important
role in the production and interpretation of the utterances.
Reviewing the ideas formulated by traditional researches, we seem to perceive a phenomenon: that is,
when analyzing a text or a discourse, they normally believe context is set up in advance of
comprehension. In much of the literature, it is explicitly or implicitly assumed that the context of a
given utterance is not a matter of choice: the context is seen as determined, as given. Moreover, it is
generally assumed that the context is determined in advance of the comprehension process.
C. Cognitive Context
With the analysis of traditional study of context, we seem to find the possibility of developing the
research. Many scholars have stepped on this way. As we all know, communication by itself is
dynamic so context can‘t be static for its important role in the communication. A context is not limited
to information about the immediate physical environment or the immediately preceding utterances:
expectations about the future, scientific hypotheses or religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, general
cultural assumptions, beliefs about the mental state of the speakers, may all play a role in
interpretation. (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). It is these assumptions, rather than the actual state of the
world that affect the interpretation of an utterance.
In verbal communication, significant to the interpretation of the utterance is not the immediate
concrete environment but a series of assumptions that make up of the cognitive context. An individual
makes an assumption in the expectation that he will be able to combine it with existing assumptions
to derive a new assumption, which will yield what the co-author calls a ‘contextual effect’. According
to their account of contextual effect, we have identified three ways in which a new item of information
may have a contextual effect.

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 I. Strengthening existing assumptions;
II. Contradicting with the existing assumptions;
III. Combining with existing assumptions to yield contextual implications—conclusions derivable
from input and context together, but from neither input nor context alone.
To Sperber & Wilson, cognitive context is a fundamental concept. It is because of the diversity of the
cognitive context that makes the interpretation of utterance difficult. Although some people live in the
same physical world, deriving information from this common environment and constructing the best
possible mental representation of it, no two individuals construct identical representation due to
difference in many aspects especially in our cognitive abilities. Perceptual abilities vary in
effectiveness from one person to another. Inferential abilities also vary, and not just in effectiveness.
People speak different languages, they have mastered different concepts; as a result, they can construct
different representations and make different inferences. (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). Moreover, people
have different memories that they bring to bear in their experience in different ways. Hence, even
though they have the same physical environment, the cognitive environment would still differ.
Cognitive environment is still not the genuine to context of communication but only a potential one
needed to be filtered. Although people never share their total cognitive environments there is still
intersection that is, there are a set of facts and assumptions manifest to them both. But this interesting
part remains insignificant unless it is mutually manifest. In a mutual cognitive environment, for every
manifest assumption, the fact that it is manifest to the people who share this environment is itself
manifest. (Sperber & Wilson, 1995).
D. Structurization of Cognitive Context Factors
Cognitive context is different from the traditional pragmatic context which consists of linguistic
knowledge (the ability of mastering the language and knowledge about the co-text) and non-linguistic
knowledge [background knowledge (encyclopedic knowledge, the social norms and conversational
standards of certain culture); situational knowledge (time, place, topic, formal or informal occasion
and relations between the participants); mutual knowledge of the participants]. However, what does
cognitive context consist of? Xiong Xueliang (1999)cites van Dijk‘s argument ‘context is in your
mind’ and he further puts forward that cognitive context, which involves various kinds of information:
the perceptible information from outside; the information from long-term and short-term memory,
refers to the conceptualized and sturcturized systematic pragmatic knowledge and is the result of the
pragmatic factors internalized and recognized in people‘s mind, that is to say, the systemized
pragmatic knowledge is stored in participants‘ mind and is activated to participate in the
communication.
From cognitive point of view, the knowledge structure of human being is drawn from outside. The
often-used language characters and context units can be sturcturized in the mind of different
individuals. Liu Senlin (2000) claims that the manipulation of cognitive context is based on the basic
units called proposition, knowledge structure or mental schema. By this way, the original knowledge

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structures become the constituents of pragmatic logical inference, the original concrete context factors
turn into various relations in the mind. Cognitive context comes into being by cognizing and
structurizing these cognitive context factors.
3.12. Context versus Co-text
Allott (2010: 38) states that the context of an utterance signifies a source of information that assists
the hearer in finding out what the speaker wishes to express. Without taking the context of
words and phrases into consideration, it will not be likely to interpret the implicatures of an utterance.
Moreover, in numerous situations, it will be impossible to calculate the proposition conveyed or the
desired illocutionary force. Since pragmatics is interested in speaker’s meaning and how the hearer
interprets it, context is vital to pragmatics.
According to Song (2010: 876-877), context performs crucial functions that help interactants
in interpreting utterances. These includes removing ambiguity, specifying referents, and
distinguishing conversational implicature. Nevertheless, various types of context can be identified.
One type is designated as linguistic context or the co-text. The co-text of a certain word refers to all
other words that occur within the very phrase or sentence. It has a powerful influence on working
out the meaning of a particular word. Another type of context is the physical context in which
words are embedded. Here, the physical location guides the interpretation of meaning.(Yule,
1985: 98-99). Consequently, it can be said that pragmatics is concerned with the physical context
whereas discourse analysis has more to do with the co-text. The context relevant for a given act of
utterance is a composite of the surrounding co-text, the domain of discourse at issue, the genre of
speech event in progress, the situation of utterance, the discourse already constructed upstream and
the wider socio-cultural environment presupposed by the text. It is in constant development: the
discourse derived via the text both depends on it and at the same time changes it as this is constructed
on line.

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