The notion of context
We have already noted that comprehension involves very much more than
knowledge of phonological, syntactic and semantic rules. So much redundant
information is introduced into communicative situations by a combination
of linguistic and real world knowledge that it is often possible to produce an
appropriate response to an utterance· without any knowledge at all of the
structural rules underlying its production. For example, during a recent
visit to a rural area of Austria, I was able to comprehend a request (from a
shopkeeper) to shut the door even though I was quite unable (despite my
knowledge of standard German) to recognize in the utterance any familiar
syntactic patterns or even a single lexical item. A combination of cold
weather, gestural cues, and limitations on the kind of message likely to be
transmitted in a service encounter of that kind facilitated successful communication;
that is, an appropriate response was produced to the utterance.
It is of course a truism to assert that actual utterances are always interpreted
in context, and instances like this one seem to have encouraged linguists to
exaggerate the capacity of context to resolve ambiguity, while at the same
time not defining particularly closely what is meant by context. It is still
commonplace to find the term used freely without any more careful examination
of its scope. Yet, context-boundedness is an important inherent characteristic
of all natural languages and arguably should be accounted for
explicitly in any comprehensive linguistic theory, rather than being used as a
"terminological immunization" (Klein and Dittmar, 1979, p. 4) to cover up
problems of fitting data to theory.