Rethinking context : an introduction / Charles Goodwin and Alessandro Duranti -- The indexical ground of deictic reference / William F. Hanks -- Language in context and language as context : the Samoan respect vocabulary / Alessandro Duranti -- Context contests : debatable truth statements on Tanna (Vanuatu) / Lamont Lindstrom -- Contextualization, tradition, and the dialogue of genres : Icelandic legends of the kraftaskáld / Richard Bauman -- Assessments and the construction of context / Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Harness Goodwin -- In another context / Emanuel A. Schegloff -- Contextualization and understanding / John J. Gumperz -- Contextualization in Kalapalo narratives / Ellen B. Basso -- Radio talk-show therapy and the pragmatics of possible worlds / Frank Gaik -- The interpenetration of communicative contexts : examples from medical encounters / Aaron V. Cicourel -- The routinization of repair in courtroom discourse / Susan U. Philips -- The negotiation of context in face-to-face interaction / Adam Kendon -- Indexing gender / Elinor Ochs
Summary:
The past decade has seen a fundamental rethinking of the concept of context. Rather than functioning solely as a constraint on linguistic performance, context is now analyzed as a product of language use. Language and context are seen as interactively defined phenomena. The essays in this collection, written by many of the leading figures in the social sciences, critically reexamine the concept of context from a variety of different angles and propose new ways of thinking about it with reference to specific human activities such as face-to-face interaction, radio talk, medical diagnosis, political encounters and socialization practices. The editors have provided introductions to each essay as well as a general overview of the issues under debate.
