Context

Context may be understood as a series of figure–ground relationships that influence the ongoing construction of communicative meaning. Take the utterance “Pass the salt.” On the surface, the semantic content and grammatical structure convey a straightforward message. However, if the ground (or situation) in which this utterance (the figure) occurs is altered, different meanings may result. Imagine a family dinner table conversation in which the parents are telling their daughter they will no longer pay for college unless her grades improve, and she responds by saying, “Pass the salt.” Her reply has little to do with procuring a food seasoning. Rather, the utterance conveys her negative reaction and resistance to the admonishment of her parents about her school performance.

In a different situation, suppose that the daughter had uttered, “Pass the salt” in response to a parent who is warning her that a dish being served requires seasoning. Here, the meaning aligns more straightforwardly with what one expects the utterance to convey. However, the parent then reacts by stating, “I knew it; you hate my cooking,” a meaning the daughter did not intend to communicate. Here, an examination of context reveals that conversational meaning can take on a life of its own beyond the intentions of a speaker.

On a more granular level, there are also specific words in language that reference different contextual relationships with respect to time (e.g., now/then, before/after), location (e.g., here/there, up/down), and social distance (e.g., informal and formal personal pronouns in languages such as French [tu/vous], German [du/Sie], and Spanish [tu/usted], to name a few. These terms may not only be useful in efforts to change the nature of the context (e.g., the attempted use of an informal pronoun to lessen the social distance between interactants); their use may shift depending on to the contexts in which they are uttered (e.g., here or there are differentially selected for use based on the distance of speakers from an object being referenced).

In other words, there is a mutually constitutive relationship between language and context in the construction of meaning. Beyond this, there are contextualization cues that are part of the delivery of utterances, that can frame how messages are to be interpreted. For example, suprasegmental features such as pitch, rhythm, and stress can influence whether or not an utterance such as “It’s nice to see you” is interpreted as a sincere, positive statement or as a mocking comment singling out an individual who has not arrived for a meeting on time.

To make matters more complicated, the meanings of contextualization cues are not cross-cultural constants—for instance, a similar pattern of intonation and stress on the same utterance may be interpreted differently in different communities. When interactants do not share the same meanings for these cues, something they may be unaware of, serious miscommunications may ensue. John Gumperz, a sociolinguist, found that a lack of common understandings of contextualization cues could lead to judgments of incompetence between interlocutors and reinforce more deeply rooted social biases.

For language to become intelligible, as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski noted, it must also be positioned more broadly according to the cultural context of situation within which it occurs. For example, Keith Basso, a linguistic anthropologist, described his puzzlement while doing fieldwork among the Western Apache during a cattle drive. A cowboy (Talbert) had just arrived and asked for his job back after behaving badly (see “Ethnographic Approaches in Research,” this volume). Another cowboy replied by saying, [Page 485]“So! You’ve returned from Trail Goes Down Between Two Hills!”

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