J. Flowerdew (ed.): Discourse in Context

Abstract

Numerous works have been published that are concerned in some way with the analysis of discourse. However, there are to date few that concentrate specifically on context from a discourse analytic perspective. Discourse in Context presents a collection of research papers that focus particularly on the discourse–context relation. ‘Context’, as the editor explains in his opening chapter of this recent addition to the Bloomsbury series in Contemporary Applied Linguistics, operates on different levels, and ‘discourse’ is interpreted both in its ‘little d’ and ‘big D’ forms as language use in context and as systems of knowledge and beliefs ( Gee 1999 ). This edited collection constitutes a much-to-be-welcomed addition to the existing literature on discourse analysis and applied linguistics in general. The volume comprises 15 chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction where John Flowerdew provides the reader with a comprehensive yet succinct account of some important notions related to the study of context in the analysis of discourse. In addition to examining critically concepts such as those listed above, he discusses the dynamic nature of context and contextualization. Following this, he outlines some important approaches to the study of context, from the code model of communication, Saussurean linguistics, and Chomskyan linguistics to Gricean pragmatics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and multimodal discourse analysis. This opening chapter prepares the ground for the chapters that follow, where studies are presented using a broad variety of approaches to the discourse–context relation.