Context And Its Values From The Perspective Of The Communicators

The most fundamental value of language lies in its communicative value, i.e. it isthe most efficient way of communication among people. The conduction of verbalcommunication always involves three factors, that is, the participants, the utteranceand context. Human verbal communication is not abstract but concrete, and it alwayshappens in certain time and at certain place. Those factors that constitute theenvironment of communication are named context as a whole. As an indispensablefactor of verbal communication, context plays a very important role in verbalcommunication. Context is a multi-disciplinary issue that semantics, pragmatics,anthropology, philosophy and cognitive science and socio-linguistics, to name just afew, share their mutual interests. With the study on language going deeper and deeper,more and more linguists have been aware of the necessity of studying context. Theyhave dealt with context from their own perspectives and proposed a variety ofresearch methods and theoretical hypotheses about context study. Many scholars haveconducted their own studies on the functions of context and their categorizations aresomehow overlapped with each other. The restrictive and interpretative functions arethe most widely-accepted and the most studied functions of context. This paper, basedon the previous research achievements, tries to discuss the values of context in theprocess of verbal communication from the perspective of communicators (the speakerand the hearer), that is, the functions of context in the production and comprehensionof an utterance.There are quite profound studies of context conducted by linguists both fromhome and abroad. The development of context theories can be categorized into three phases, the static study of context, the dynamic study of context and the cognitivestudy of context, respectively. By synthesizing their studies, it can be concluded thatcontext is a collection of those factors that affect the participants’ successfulrealization of their communicative intentions. It includes both objective factors (theimmediate physical and social factors) and subjective factors of the communicators.Context in communication is actually a collection of common backgroundexperiences and knowledge which are aware and shared by the speaker and hearer, i.e.mutually ostensive to both the speaker and hearer. The context is a dynamic andcognitive concept rather than a static concept. It is constructed and is continuouslychanging both in scope and content in the process of communication.As a fundamental concept which is closely associated with verbalcommunication, context provides a common ground for the utterance production ofthe speaker and the utterance comprehension of the hearer. In order to realize thecommunicative intension successfully and efficiently, the communicators always takeadvantage of the contextual factors to the maximum extent. From the angle of thespeaker, context restricts the production of his/her utterance. Firstly, the contextrestricts the speaker’s choice of the content of an utterance including the choice oftopic, code, wording and style. Secondly, the context restricts the speaker’s choice ofthe manner of making an utterance. The speaker should:1) make the utterance botheconomic and effective;2) maintain the relevance between the utterance and thecontext;3) adopt suitable speech sounds. Except being restricted by the context, thespeaker can also control or manipulate certain factors of context to make those factorsostensive to the hearer and further affect the hearer’s cognition of context andcomprehension of the utterance. From the perspective of the hearer, context plays aninterpretative role by providing necessary information for the hearer to comprehendthe speaker’s utterance. Context helps the hearer comprehend the utterance meaning,specify the conversational implicature and determine the speech act composed in theutterance.Verbal communication is inseparable from specific context. Both sides ofcommunication should pay close attention to the status and values of context in verbal communication. The study of the values of context from the perspective of thecommunicators provides a quite different angle to study context and contributes to thedeeper and thorough understanding of context. Pragmatically speaking, it cancontribute to the language teaching and help the language learners to foster theircommunicative competence. It also provides some insights to the communicator tounderstand and take advantage of contextual factors in order to achieve theircommunicative intensions more efficiently in everyday verbal communication.