Patterns of Context

Human language in its performances is not to be considered without taking into account the environment in which it takes place, i.e. its physical, social, or cultural setting. A description of the regularity or pattern driven character of this relationship is, however, still a desideratum for modern pragmatics. The contributions of the book in hand set out to show how such a conception may be achieved. In so doing they enhance the pragmatic agenda by regarding the context-based nature of utterances from a variety of perspectives, in which the identification of pairs of utterance type and utterance situation as well as the interactive build-up of shared scenarios for interpretation are viewed as part of the linguistic and cultural competence of the speaker / hearer.The approaches united in this volume have in common that they all model the complex, dynamic relationship between the utterance, the context and common ground using patterns, templates or schemas as core notions. It is assumed that such dynamic, scalable models are fundamental units of human interaction, and they are described in terms of forming relatively stable entities. The emergence, usage and scope of these complex entities is elaborated in a variety of theoretical and analytical approaches, including corpus studies on modern day communication and online communication.