Contexts (Adjoining) Everywhere

Abstract

Let us start with some quotations from the article about Context in the recent Pergamon Press Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, [197]. “‘Context’ is one of those linguistic terms which is constantly used in all kinds of contexts but never explained.(...) The central role that context plays in linguistic theorizing may be inferred from the fact that one could systematize a history of recent linguistics by describing the role of context in successive theoretical systems. In the substitution of a new paradigm for an old one, and in most of the evolutions within one and the same approach from the 1960s onwards, the global changes generally have been from a very reductive treatment of context towards models which pay more and more attention to conditions of use.(...) In the course of its movement from a peripheral to a more central position in linguistic theorizing, context itself developed from a somewhat static conception in terms of one or more related utterances towards a more processual notion. Context is viewed as being built up in production as well in comprehension of text.(...)”