Topic 6: types of contexts and contextual relationships in oral discourse

6.1. Text, Context and Discourse

Oral communication, in the same way as written, always takes place in a certain context or communicative situation. This situation in its turn is embedded in the macro–context of communication, which includes extra–linguistic factors of the “world” such as cultural, social, economic, political, historical, religious, etc. In linguistics there are many scholars expressing different points of view, however most of them agree that oral and written texts function in a certain discourse. Most of them also agree that meaning of language units is a purely linguistic phenomenon (meanings of words and phrases are registered in dictionaries and, therefore, belong to the sphere of language), while sense is generated in a communicative situation as a result of interaction of linguistic and extra–linguistic contextual factors mentioned above and belongs to the sphere of speech.

For practical reasons of oral bilingual interpretation we will assume working definitions of text and discourse as they are given below.

Text is any verbalized (i.e. expressed by means of human language) communicative event performed via human language, no matter whether this communication is performed in written or in oral mode.

It means that we will consider all complete units of oral verbal communication to be texts.

Discourse is a complex communicative phenomenon, which includes, besides the text itself, other factors of interaction (such as shared knowledge, communicative goals, cognitive systems of participants, their cultural competence, etc), i.e. all that is necessary for successful production and adequate interpretation (comprehension and translating/interpreting) of the text.

Therefore text is embedded in discourse and both of them are “materialised” in a communicative situation, which, in its turn, is embedded in the macro context of interaction, i.e. cultural, social, economic political, historical, religious and other contexts of the world.

6.2. Types of Contexts and Contextual Relationships

The above–mentioned observations allow us to distinguish between the macro context (global context), communicative context and micro context (local context), i.e. the context of a particular utterance. In practice, interpreters deal with these three types of overlapping contexts every time they have to perceive, understand and interpret messages of the SL speaker. These overlapping contexts are shown on the scheme below.

Messages “operate” within three types of contexts, which “surround” each particular message in space and in time. Therefore, elements of meaning of each message have to be related to these surrounding contexts in some way. It is generally assumed that such contextual relationships of messages may be of three kinds:

a) anaphoric or “backward” relationships, which occur when the meaning of a linguistic unit acquires sense through the reference to the preceding units of the micro or communicative context, for example:

China's President continues his visit to former Soviet republics – this time to Ukraine. It's the first official visit by China's leader to the independent Republic.

In this example the sense of the independent Republic is determined by the word Ukraine in the previous sentence.

b) cataphoric or “forward” relationships, which occur when the meaning of a linguistic unit acquires sense through the reference to the oncoming, anticipated units of the micro or communicative context, for example:

Russian and American troops have been taking part in “Peacekeeper–94” – the first Russian–American joint military exercise.

In this example the meaning of “Peacekeeper–94” acquires sense from the rest of the utterance.

c) exophoric or “outward” relationships, which occur when the meaning of an element acquires sense through the reference to the macro context, i.e. to the background knowledge, cultural and subject field competence of the addressee and to the knowledge about “the world”, for example:

Veteran Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal has been awarded one of Poland's top decorations by President Walesa. The 85–year old Auschwitz, death camp survivor is in Poland at Walesa's invitation.

In this example general cultural competence will help to render Auschwitz death camp (the Nazi death camp located in the Polish town of Oświęcim) as ma6ip cмерті Ocвенцім.