In the humanities and social sciences, context is one of those terms which is frequently used and frequently referred to, but hardly made explicit. This book proposes a model for describing the multifaceted connectedness between language and language use, and between cognitive context, linguistic context, social context and sociocultural context and their underlying principles of well-formedness, grammaticality, acceptability and appropriateness. Combining a range of theoretical frameworks in linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and philosophy of language, Fetzer goes beyond the unilateral conception of speech and argues for a dialogue outlook on natural-language communication based on dialogue principles and dialogue categories. The most important ones are cooperation, joint production, micro and macro communicative intentions, micro and macro validity claims, co-suppositions, dialogue-common ground and communicative genre.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements ix 1. Introduction 1–31 2. Grammaticality and context 33–88 3. Context and appropriateness 89–229 4. Conclusion: Sentence grammar and dialogue grammar revisited 231–238 5. References 239–252 Name index 253–254 Subject index 255–267