Dear Xu Hancheng,
on 02.03.2001 2:23 Uhr, Xu Hancheng at hanch-xu@jlonline.com wrote:
> Hi, everybody,
>
> ...
>
> I am writing my dissertation on implicature phenomena in Russian dialogistic
> speech. When I read a book of our English professor, his "renzhi yujing"
> puzzled me. I read also "Relevance. Communication and Cognition" (1986). I see
> that "cognitive environment" is used along with "cognitive context". I think
> "cognitive environment" is easier to be accepted. If we intend "cognitive
> context" to mean the same as "cognitive environment", the term should
> interpreted specially (for example, the situation in which communication
> events take place). I have to decide to follow our English professor or to
> adapt another translation (for example, "renzhi huanjing" - "huanjing" means
> environment). I searched Internet with keywords "cognitive context" and
> "cognitive environment", hits with "cognitive context" were more. And I
> thought perhaps Sperb and Wilson prefer "cognitive environment" and other
> cognists turned to "cognitive context" as science developed.
'Cognitive environment' and 'context' is _not_ the same thing. The cognitive
environment of a person is the set of all assumptions which the individual
is capable of representing at that moment (whether he actually does so or
not). The context is the set of assumptions which are brought to bear on the
interpretation of an utterance on a given occasion. It is necessarily a
(relatively small) _subset_ of all the assumptions represented in the
interpreter's (i.e. Hearer's, reader's) mind, which again is a subset of the
_mutual_ cognitive environment of communicator and audience. No utterance is
ever interpreted against the totality of everything one knows or beliefs,
that would lead into a computationsal explosion.
The choice of context is part and parcel of the utterance interpretation
process. For every utterance, the context needs to be chosen anew, the
context is not given in advance.
The contextual assumptions which are brought to bear on the interpretation
of an utterance can come from various sources: from the outcome of the
interpretation of previous utterances in the discourse (either explicatures
or implicatures of former utterances, or simply contextual assumptions which
proved to be useful earlier), they can come from the (representation of)
external situation, they can come from memory, etc.
There is still some confusion about what context is, and some continue to
distinguish between context (situational) and co-text ('linguistic' context,
i.e. The 'text before'), but these distinctions are - in my opinion -
epiphenomenal rather than real. Context is a cognitive notion: the set of
assumptions which are brought to bear on the interpretation of an utterance
at a given time.
(On 'cognitive environment' see Sperber & Wilson 1995/1986 _Relevance_ p.
38-46. On context and context choice, see Sperber & Wilson 1995/1986 p.
132-142.)
Best,
Christoph
Christoph Unger
Mozartstr. 26
D-35625 Huettenberg
Germany
Phone: (49) 6403 73782
Fax (and office phone): (49) 6403 78066
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