This volume is aimed at advancing the debate on the notion of context in linguistics by aggregating diverse viewpoints on the concept. The contributions are collected into two sections: the first reviews how context is and has been conceptualized in theoretical pragmatics, neurolinguistics, clinical pragmatics, interactional linguistics, and psycholinguistics, and the second presents case studies of particular linguistic phenomena in relation to context. Specifically, contributors to the second section consider idioms, unarticulated constituents, argument linking, and quantifier expressions from the point of view of figurative language theory, frame semantics, discourse representation theory, and optimality theory, respectively.
After the introductory chapter in which the editors frame the volume, Jörg Meibauer in Ch. 2 summarizes contemporary theories of context in the pragmatic literature, specifically contrasting the notion in discussions of minimalism vs. contextualism. The author relates these traditional theoretical pursuits to experimental research, emphasizing the value of psycho/neurolinguistic methods for investigating the semantics/pragmatics divide. In Ch. 3, Petra Schumacher reviews electrophysiological experiments targeting the effect of context on language comprehension. These studies converge on a view of context as operating in two discrete stages: first an expectation-driven mechanism, then a discourse-updating mechanism. Louise Cummings in Ch. 4 examines research in clinical pragmatics to develop an argument against the possibility of theorizing context, contending that the very pursuit of a complete account renders unintelligible the notion of context. In Ch. 5, Kasia Jaszczolt analyzes how context is approached from both two-dimensional formal semantics and post-Gricean contextualism, then uses default semantics to assess the claim that epistemic context is reducible to a metaphysical construct. Anita Fetzer in Ch. 6 reviews how context is approached from interactional, sociolinguistic, and discourse perspectives, in particular relating the ways in which context is understood as static/dynamic, product/process, speaker-/hearer-/collective-centered, and subjective/individual. In the following chapter, Pia Knoeferle and Ernesto Guerra discuss nonlinguistic visual context from the vantage point of real-time language comprehension. The psycholinguistic research they review suggests that a notion of nonlinguistic visual context should be expansive enough to capture the effect of material objects (both immediately and recently available), speaker's gaze and gestures, and other nonlinguistic cues.
The second section deals with case studies on context. Rita Finkbeiner opens this section arguing from experimental evidence on a German idiom that such idioms are context-creative and context-evocative, and therefore lie on the semantics/pragmatics interface. A related argument is made by Kristen Börjesson in the following chapter, in which she advocates for conceptual framing in the interpretation of utterances, insofar as frames invoke certain thematic roles as potential discourse referents, which may be explicitly identified or remain implicitly available. Udo Klein focuses on the interaction between grammar and world knowledge, specifically the role of each in linking clausal arguments to semantic roles in a formal analysis of the (causative path) resultative construction. Another formal account appears in the final contribution to the volume, in which Chris Cummins and Napoleon Katsos take a constraint-based approach to explicitly model context in the usage of quantifiers.
