Abstract
Contextual approaches to utterances (or other forms of texts) have been developed by scholars working within the pragmatic paradigm in linguistics. Defining and analysing different levels of context can be also of great use to an assyriologist, and it is my intention in this presentation to show how. Now that one has multiple editions of texts at our disposal, one can focus not only on a single type of context, such as historical, political or religious, but approach a text (or a group of texts) from various angles, combining information provided by the different levels of context
Highlights
The traditional, philological approach assumes that ancient Akkadian texts are studied for their meaning and that the analysis of their social and cultural significance is carried out within their respective genres
I would, like to propose after Verschueren (2012) that discourse – or language in use – is formed by a multitude of interacting and interconnected texts from different genres, and that investigating them within their communicative context, discoursive context, and genre context, as well as external social, cultural and political context can provide us with many new insights about the nature of communicative practices in the Ancient Near East, as well as shed new light on the new meaning of the texts themselves
When we take into account the contextual embeddedness of every act of communication, its entire background emerges from behind the cuneiform wedges: the speaker/writer, the addressee/reader, their agendas, the social mores that influence their behaviour, and the silent but powerful assumptions that they operate under
Summary
The traditional, philological approach assumes that ancient Akkadian texts are studied for their meaning and that the analysis of their social and cultural significance is carried out within their respective genres.
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