Contexts in interaction

The concept of context has undergone some fundamental rethinking in the scientific community, where it is no longer seen as an analytic prime. Rather than being solely looked upon as an external constraint on linguistic performance, context has been analyzed as a product of language use, as socio-cognitively construed, interactionally negotiated and constructed, and as imported and invoked. This is because communication is seen as both context-dependent and context-creating. The goal of this article is to investigate context in a research framework based on methodological compositionality, concentrating on the questions whether context is conceived of as (1) static or dynamic, (2) given or re-constructed, (3) speaker-centered, hearer-centered or collective-centered, and (4) subjective or individual, or social or objective.