Embodied contexts, transcontextuals, and the timing of speech acts

Abstract

The notion ‘context’ appears to be among the most widely used concepts in recent linguistics. Researchers in semantics and pragmatics argue that the performance of speech acts and the understanding of utterances depend upon situational circumstances of language use. Nevertheless, Erickson's statement that “our theoretical understanding of context is singularly undifferentiated” (Erickson 1980: 4) does not seem exaggerated. In contrast to other units of linguistics communication and analysis (e.g., phoneme, sentence, or speech act), contexts have rarely been subjected to empirical scrutiny, nor have they been defined as bounded and recognizable units of communicative behavior. The term ‘context’ generally serves as a waste-basket category under which any potentially relevant kind of extralinguistic factors is listed. Here, I will try to point out why the twi uses of ‘context’ which, in my opinion, predominate in discourse analysis and linguistic pragmatics (I will refer to them as the ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approaches, respectively; cf. Cicourel 1975), are unlikely to lead to a theoretically sound and empirically variable difinition of contexts as units. I then sketch an approach to context, based on the analysis of the behavioral organization of face-to-face interaction, which takes interactive territories and ‘embodiments’ (postural configurations) as its starting point. Through a detailed analysis of one incident in teacher-child communication I hope to show how the timing of speech acts with respect to postural configurations bears upon their interactive treatment, and how it affects the consequences of those acts. Postural configurations are public manifestations of a group's working consensus; they constitute the most immediate communicatively achieved contextual frames in terms of which talk is organized. The group's interactive responses to a participant's speech act depend, in part, on the issue whether or not the latter ‘fits’ into this consensus.