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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Semantics and Pragmatics

Context

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/ˈkɒntekst/nounCore term

In linguistics & grammar, context means: The situation, surrounding text and shared knowledge in which something is said or written, which help listeners and readers understand the intended meaning.

In Turkish: bağlam

How it is used

Central in pragmatics, discourse analysis and teaching (guess the meaning from context). Linguists separate the linguistic context, also called co-text, from the situational and cultural context.

Example sentences

  1. Without context, 'It's cold in here' might be a comment or a request to close the window.

  2. Try to work out the meaning of new words from context before you check the dictionary.

Common collocations

  • in context
  • out of context
  • context of situation
  • cultural context
  • from context
  • pragmaticsThe study of how context affects meaning: how speakers mean more than they actually say, and how listeners work out intended meanings, politeness and hints.
  • deixisThe use of words whose meaning depends on who is speaking, where and when, such as I, you, here, there, now, this and yesterday.
  • implicatureMeaning that a speaker suggests without saying it directly and that a listener works out from context, as when 'Some students passed' suggests that not all of them did.
  • discourseLanguage in use beyond the single sentence, such as conversations, lectures or newspaper articles, and the way these stretches of language are organized and connected.
  • ambiguityThe quality of having more than one possible meaning, caused either by a word with several senses or by a structure that can be analysed in more than one way.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Semantics and Pragmatics

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