Papers in this special issue were written upon invitation. They were then subjected to the usual refereeing process of the Journal of Pragmatics. While we have attempted to cover almost all important areas in which context is employed as a conceptual apparatus, our coverage is clearly limited in scope. Accordingly, instead of a general updated overview of the use of context in every conceivable specific field (let's say the state-of-the-art of interdisciplinary research on context: a colossal/impossible enterprise!), we will offer (...) the readers of this special issue an introduction to the problems involved in the study of context by way of eight papers encompassing eight different areas. These are (in alphabetical order): artificial intelligence, bilingualism, child development, cognitive science, conversation analysis, neuroscience, philosophy of language, and pragmatics. Our goal is to propose a multi-faceted view of context, and to stimulate further investigations of this fertile topic, which permeates our lives. (shrink)

In general, understanding requires cognitive and linguistic skills, encompasses cultural, social, contextual and individual aspects, and is characterised by gradualness and dynamicity. In this study, the intertwined set of relevant components involved in the complex process of understanding space deixis will be analysed in the specific context of face-to-face interaction. In everyday conversation, this process is unavoidably mutual and may include misunderstanding (which often opens up a way to understanding), repairs, reformulations and negotiation cycles, all of which eventually lead to (...) understanding and mutual comprehension or to communication failure. Many scholars have already pointed out several elements that influence interactants’ understanding in a positive or negative way: on the one hand, shared physical context, cotext, common ground, shared knowledge and avoidance devices; on the other, ambiguity, speakers’ failures, and interactants’ asymmetric features with regard to language and culture. The interactional context, the cotext and the use of multimodal resources (resorted to as co-speech or to substitute language) play a significant role in the dynamic process of understanding spatial deixis, often helping to overcome the difficulties related to peripheral cases of spatial deictics and other causes of misunderstandings, which can either work as a starting point for understanding or lead to communication failure. (shrink)

Recent studies on cortical processing of sensory information highlight the importance of multisensory integration, and define precise rules governing reciprocal influences between inputs of different sensory modalities. We propose that psychophysical interactions between different types of sensory stimuli and linguistic synaesthesia share common origins and mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, we compare neurophysiological findings with corpus-based analyses relating to linguistic synaesthesia. Namely, we present Williams' hypothesis and its recent developments about the hierarchy of synaesthetic pairings, and examine critical aspects of (...) this theory concerning universality, directionality, sensory categories, and usage of corpora. These theoretical issues are verified against linguistic data derived from corpus-based analyses of Italian synaesthetic pairings related to auditory and tactile modalities. Our findings reveal a strong parallel between linguistic synaesthesia and neurophysiological interactions between different sensory stimuli, suggesting that linguistic synaesthesia is affected by tendencies similar to the rules underlying the perceptual association of distinct sensory modalities. (shrink)

This paper deals with some of the issues raised about the use of context in language, that is,the pragmatic side of the problem; morespecifically it aims to stress the significanceand complexity of context. In real life context is exploited both in production and in comprehension.I will deal here mainly with comprehension:after briefly referring to cognitive contextsand their interaction with knowledge andcomprehension, and touching on the relationbetween language and context, I will analyzethe uses of an indexical pronoun, we,which may both include (...) and exclude speaker/sand/or interlocutor/s, and cannot beinterpreted without referring to an`integrated'' view of context. (shrink)