Discourse and context

How do social situations influence language use, discourse and conversation? This book is the first monograph to present a multidisciplinary theory of context and the way context influences language use and discourse. Unlike in earlier approaches, contexts are not defined as objective social 'variables', such as gender or age. Rather, they are constructs of the participants themselves, that is, 'subjective definitions of the communicative situation' that are made explicit in the new sociocognitive notion of context models. These models dynamically control all language use, make sure that…