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D ;;jl:g1tffl~~~Context Theory and the Foundation of Pragmatics

Teun A. van Dijk
Pompeu Fabra Uni versity
The new theory of context (van Dijk, 2008, 2009) a llows for a reformulation of the foundations of pragmatics defined as the (sub) discipline that accounts for the situational appropriateness of language use
and discourse. Whereas pragmatics until now is a rather heterogeneous collection of directions ofresearch, e.g., on speech acts, politeness and conversational postulates, its general domain is a specificstudy of the relationship between discourse and context, which does not collapse with socioli nguistics,
psycholinguistics or anthropological linguistics. Thus, taking the crucial notion of appropriateness as thegeneral normative notion defin ing the aims and domain of pragmatic theory, it is crucial to have an
explicit theory of context that subsumes and explains the traditional appropriateness conditions, e.g., of
speech act theories. It is shown that tradi tional concepts of contexts (e.g. , as social parameters such as
gender, class, age or ' race' ), as used in sociolinguistics, are misguided because they presume a direct
and objective relation between discourse and social reality. The new theory of context proposes that
contexts are subjecti ve definiti ons of the ongoingly relevant and dynamically changing properties communicative situation as the participants represent them in context models in episodic mem01y. These
context models control all discourse production and comprehension and make sure that discourse structures (or the ir interpretations) are adapted to the communicati ve situation as it is interpreted by the participants. The structures of these context models prov ide the basis for the appropriateness cond itions of
discourse as communicative action, and at the same time provides the basis for new sociolinguistic
approaches to variation, as well as for theories of register, style and genre- all defined in terms on relations between text, talk and context.
Keywords: discourse, language use, pragmatics, appropri ateness, appropriateness conditions, context,
context model, defining the situation, communicative situation, episod ic memory, sociolinguistics.

1. Introduction
In thi s paper we explore the relations between pragmatics and our new theory of context. Our argument will be that pragmatics needs an explicit and general foundation, ageneral theory of the relations between language use or di scourse, on the one hand, andrelevant properties of the social situation, on the other hand.
Our account of context provides just such a theory (*Van Dijk, 2008, 2009), because
it coherently deals with the relevant theoretical notions that have been used so fru· in various approaches to pragmatics, such as language users and their identities and relations,face and politeness conditions, relevance as well as the general conditions of speech acts,
such as the intentions and knowledge of the pruticipants, runong others. In other words,

2

the theory of context provides an explicit account for the appropriateness conditions of
discourse, as is also one of the aims of pragmatic theories (*Fetzer, 2004, 2007; *Leech,
1983; *Levinson, 1989; *Mey, 1993; *Verschueren, 1996).
Crucial of our theory is that these appropriateness conditions are not objective properties of social situations, as is usually assumed in pragmatics and sociolinguistics, but
subjective mental constructs of participants. Such definitions of the communicative situation will be made explicit in so-called Context Models.

2. Towards a new theory of context
The traditional account of context in lingui stics, discourse analysis, psychology andthe social sciences assumed that language variation and discourse properties are directlyconditioned by social properties of situations, such as age, gender or ethnicity of speakers.
Our recent work on context theory (Van Dijk, 2008, 2009) has shown that thisassumption is misguided. Rather, social situations and their properties do not directly
influence text and talk at all, but such influence is due to a sociocognitive interface consisting of 'definitions of the situation' of the participants. These subjective definitions of
the communicative situations explain, among many other things, why the 'same' social
situation may affect the production and comprehension of discourse of different participants in different ways. More generall y, such a relative concept of context accounts formany other aspects of the relations between society, situations and discourse.

Context Models
Subjective definitions of communicative situations may be represented as Context
Models in episodic memory (the personal, experiential part of Long Tenn Memory, see*Tulving, 1983). Such models consist of simple a schema of culturally variable categmies used by language users in the interpretation and representation of the communicative situation, such as a spatiotemporal Setting, Participants and their different identities
and roles, ongoing social Action, Goals and current Knowledge.
Context models must be relatively simple and hence are assumed to be organized bya schema that will be applicable to many situations, because language users are unable,mentally, to manage a Context Model consisting of dozens or hundreds of categories(*Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) . For the appropriate production of all aspects of everyday
discourse (infmmal conversations, work-related talk and text or service encounters), language users need to maintain the Context Model in working memory together with muchother, grammatical and discursive information, such as clause structure, current proposition and cun·ent topic. For extra-ordinary cases or problems, language users will be able
to have recourse to special categories, rules and constraints.
Context models are dynamic and adapt to previous parts of text or talk as well as tochanges in the situation, such as changes of knowledge, goals and identities of, and rela-

Context Theory and the Foundation of Pragmatics

3

tions between participants. As is the case for the more general experience models that
control our everyday lives, also Context Models are ongoingly construed and adapted tothe changing situation.
This is especially so because by definition the knowledge of the recipients is constantly being updated by the discourse and its possible inferences. This also explains why
it is usuaiJy not approp1iate to repeat the same proposition over and over again in a news
report, lecture or even a conversation: The appropriateness conditions of the speech act
of assertion require that 'S knows that p,' and 'H does not know that p.' This means thatsuch conditions must hold in the Context Model-again, not as an objective condition ofknowledge, but as subjectively construed (assumed) by the speaker. We see here how
appropriateness conditions of speech acts may and should be formulated in the more general framework of Context Models.
Context models explain how language users adapt their discourse to the current
social and communicative environment, and define the notion of appropriateness (see also
*Fetzer, 2004, 2007). In other words, Context Models constitute the basis of a theory ofpragmatics. Hence we may also call them pragmatic models.
In a strategic theory of discourse production (Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), Context
Models exercise a fundamental global and local control function in the way properties of 'discourse are produced, in such a way that the discourse remains appropriate in the current situation.
As suggested above, Context Models are a specific type of more general experiencemodels, that is, models that represent our ongoing conscious experiences in everyday life
and that control our ongoing actions. Context models are strategically construed in social
situations as soon as one or more participants (form the goal to) engage in verbal interaction or communication. In this process of Context Model construction, participants
strategicall y (but generally automatically) analyze the cunent social situation, and selectthose properties that are relevant for appropriate verbal interaction, such as the speaker'ssocial identity or role, goals and assumptions about the (lack of) knowledge of recipients.
That is, a theory of Context Models embodies a theory of relevance.
Context models are not built and updated from scratch dming a conversation.
E specially in institutional discourse, they may partly be prepared previously, as we dowith a lecture: we already know the setting, participants, action, and goal, and knowledgeof the participants and will adapt our actual discourse to feedback from the real communicative situation- such as nonverbal signals or questions from an audience.

Context models and discourse processing
In discourse production, Context Models take semantic information as input from
episodic mental models about personal, biographical expetiences, situations, events or
actions, as in storytelling (*Neisser & Fivush, 1994), or from models of social and political events, such as in news discourse (*Van Dijk, 1988), or more general, 'semantic'
knowledge, as in expository discomse. Just as the Context Models, also these semantic

4

event models are socially based, but subjective interpretations/definitions of social events(Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).
Note though that these models of personal experiences or public events are seman-tic models, and not pragmatic models: they account for the way participants subjectively
interpret or represent the events or situation talked about or referred to, and do not represent the situation in which participants are now interacting or communicating.
This well-known but sometimes bluned distinction between semantics and pragmatics is important to maintain, even when semantic and pragmatic models may sometimes
overlap. This happens when participants explicitly speak about or refer to aspects of thecunent communicative situation in which they participate, as we know from the use of
deictic expressions such as !, me, mine, you, yours, etc.; now, today, yesterday, past,
future, modem; here, there, etc.
Pragmatic Context Models control which. and how such semantic information ofsemantic models should be appropriately formulated in discourse. That is, Context
Models control the selection of speech acts, genres, overall topics (semantic macrostructures), local semantic strategies (such as level, explicitness, precision, etc. of descriptions), as well as the syntactic, lexical and ultimately phonetic, visual or otherwise sentiotic expression.
For instance, if the social relation between the participants is (defined by the speaker to be) formal, the Context Model will tend to select forma1 forms of address, pronouns
and specific topics instead of others, as expression of specific speech acts (say requests
instead of demands) rather than others, and as part of a given discourse genre, rather thananother (for instance a speech in parliament rather than a phone call to MPs).
Context constraints and discourse genres are closely related: For instance the genre
of a news report in the press is contextually controlled by spatiotemp01:al dimensions of
the setting category of the Context Model (a specific day/date of writing, a location of thejournalist), the Social Identities or roles of the participants (editor, reporter, conespondent, etc.; readers, etc.), the Intentions of the writer (to inform the public), relevant current Knowledge (about recent news events, foreign policy, etc.) and possibly his or her
ideologies (professional, social, political, etc.). Many properties of the news report itself
are controlled by such contextual constraints as represented by the participant journalists.
The theoretical sign~ficance of Context Models
The theory of Context Models, thus summarized, explains many aspects of language
use that hitherto were ignored, dealt with in separate theories, or accounted for in ad hoc
terms. Most fundamentally, the theory accounts for the way language use and discourse
are embedded in, and adapted to, the environment and the everyday lives of languageusers as social and cultural members and citizens.
More specifically, the theory shows how a pragmatic and sociolinguistic theory oflanguage use is to be related to the semiotics, semantics and grammar of language:

Context Theory and the Foundation of Pragmatics

5• Classical speech act theory and the appropriateness conditions of speech acts are can
now be coherently accounted for in terms of the schematic structure of Context
Models.
• The subjective nature of Context Models also rejects the determinism of traditionalsociolinguistic approaches to language variation in terms of fixed social 'variables'.
• Discourse genres are not only, and not so much, defined by discursive properties, butrather by aspects of the social situation (such as a parliamentary Setting, roles as MPsof participants, political action, goals and specialized knowledge and ideologies of
MPs as defining characteristics of the genre of parliamentary debates) and hence
should be accounted for by Context Models.
• Finally, at the local level of sentence production and comprehension, Context Models
control the uses of specific lexical items, syntactic constructions, rhetorical figures aswell as many of the details of local semantics, such as which information should beasserted, reminded, presupposed or left implicit, or the level (general vs. specific),amount of detail or degree of granularity of descriptions, among many other properties of discourse.
'I~

In sum, an explicit theory of context plays a fundamental role in completing the theory of discourse with a dimension that establishes how language use adapts to its socialand cultural environment in the everyday lives of social members.
In the cognitive psychology of discourse processing, as well as in much classical AI,

research was initially focused on lexical, syntactic and semantic sentence production andcomprehension. This research was later extended to also account for the processing of(more complex) text and talk. However, with the exception of some aspects of discourse,such as deictic expressions, context and situational appropriateness of discourse werelargely ignored until recent work on Context Modeling, which however defines context invery restricted ways (for instance in terms of time or space). In psychology, discourse
processing was studied in the laboratory and seldom in real life situations, or in highly
restricted forms of context, such as Question-Answer interaction.

3.

Context theory and pragmatics

It has repeatedly suggested above that the new theory of context offers a generalfoundation for pragmatics defined as the study of language use and its relation to thesocial environment. Since such a definition also holds for sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and critical discourse analysis, among other directions of research, we may want
to define pragmatics in more specific terms, so that it does not dissolve into what decades
ago was called the wastepaper basket of linguistics. One way to do so is by limiting pragmatics to the (normative) study of speech acts, or illocutionary acts, and their appropriateness conditions (*Searle, 1969). Similarly, pragmatics has been associated specifically with the theory of politeness and more generally with conditions of impression or face

6

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. ·I

management in conversation- thus overlapping with Conversation Analysis (Brown &Levinson , 1987). A different perspective again is offered by the study of conversational
postulates and maxims by *Grice (1989), although some of these do not pertain to context conditions, but to prope11ies of text and talk: truth, style (conciseness, etc.).
We see that what today counts as pragmatics is not so much defined by a coherent
theory of basic concepts, but rather by a rather heterogeneous collection of approaches
that set themselves apart from formal sentence grammars, much in the same way as was
the case for sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and conversation analysis in around 1970.
If there is one notion that combines many of these approaches, and that is definitely different from grammatical notions, it is the concept of (inter)action, sometimes related to other cognitive or social properties of language users, such as knowledge, intentions,face and social identity.
These various notions may be combined and further extended by associating them tothe structures of communicative situations, featuring such categories as time, place, participants and their roles and mutual relations, ongoing actions, as well as the intentions
or knowledge of the participants, among others. In other words, in such a broader perspective pragmatics is the study of the way the structures of communicative situations
influence, and are influenced by, properties of discourse or language use.
However, as suggested above, this may also be a definition of sociolinguistics, andwe may therefore restrict pragmatics, as is the case for semantic and syntax, and thus inline with the theory of semiotics, to a specific dimension of these relationships, namelythat of appropriateness.
As is the case for syntactic well-formedness and semantic meaningfulness and referentiality, pragmatics more specifically deals with the normative knowledge of languageusers about what discourse properties are (more or less) appropriate in specific communicative situations. It is this normative knowledge of participants about communicative
events that is being made explicit in a theory of context and its relation to text and talk.
That is, unlike sociolinguistics, pragmatics and a theory of context is not only studying
the social dimensions of social situations and their influence on language variation, but
how language users define or construe them-on the basis of their pragmatic knowledge.
Also, pragmatics is not limited to an account of language (grammar) variation, but studies all aspects of text or talk that may influence its appropriateness.
Of course, just as sociolinguistics also deals with the way sounds and syntax may
actually vary in different speech communities, there is also an empirical basis of pragmatics in the sociolinguistic study of how appropriateness may have different conditions
in different communities. Indeed, promises or commands, politeness or conversational
maxims and their conditions may vary in different communities.
Similarly, we may have a psycholinguistic study of the actual cognitive processes
involved in the construction, application or activation of Context Models, and how
Context Models actually control all levels and dimensions of text and talk.
Of course, today, some of these distinctions may have become Jess relevant inContext Theory and the Foundation of Pragmatics

7

increasingly multidisciplinary research, in which distinctions between formal, normative,
empirical, linguistic, sociological, anthropological and psychological approaches tend tomerge or disappear, for instance in such transdisciplines as discourse studies, semiotics or
cognitive science-as well as an integrated 'social science' that still needs to be integrated with cognitive science. It is therefore rather for practical reasons that we define (andhence limit) pragmatics to the study of appropriateness, that is, the study of the rules that
adapt text and talk to the constraints of their social environment.

4.

Contextual conditions of discursive appropriatenessLet us finally briefl y examine some of the structures of discourse that are controlled
by the ways language users constme their environment as dynamic Context Models. We
already have given some examples above, but may do so more systematically, as follows.
We shall do so by selecting some prominent categories of Context Models and summarize what discourse categories they control.
Setting

Spatiotemporal information defines language users' ongoing awareness of where
they are, what time or part of the day it is, what date or part of the year, and so on.
Information in this category may be reduced by the usual seven-plus-or-minus-two constraint on working memory. For instance, time awareness is usually limited to a handfulof culturally variable scalar categmies, such as seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks,months, years and centuries in much of western culture.
Such categmies multiply control text and talk, such as beginnings and endings ofconversations and sessions, time one may have the floor, the day one writes a letter or anews report, the month or year one gives classes or the time of government or legislation,and so on.
The same is true for space and place, which also may be graded from close to far
from the speaker-right here, in this room, house/building, street, neighborhood, city,
state/province, country, region/continent and planet. These categories not only define theinterpretation of fuzzy location deictics (such as ' here' ), but also many types of descriptions, for instance in the news, also metaphorically, as is the case for talking about people or parties being on the Left or on the Right-which obviously presupposes the position (both spatially as well as ideologically) of the Speaker, and hence his or her Context
Model.
Participants
It goes without saying that the contextual representation of participants, as well as

their social identities, roles and relationships control many properties of text and talk. In
most institutional or ritual discomse, only specific participants may use or engage in specific genres, speech acts, topics, styles, intonations or words. Categories of gender, age

8or ethnicity-as socially construed!- in most cultures control many aspect of discourse,such as who may talk when and where and with whom, about what, in what style or intonation. Most work in sociolinguistics and ethnography has documented the role of these
constraints. Politicians, journalists, teachers, scholars, police officers, and so on for all'symbolic' occupations of society have access to specific genres (laws, news, lessons, articles, etc.), speech acts (commands), lexical style (specialized words), more or less formal
syntax, and so on . Social roles such as mothers, fathers, lovers, friends or enemies similarly may allow or limit specific speech acts, topics or styles, which would be inappropriate for others. Social relations of power and solidarity, including those of position, status, fame, and so on, have been shown to multiply control nearly all levels and dimensions of talk and text, as is the case for politeness, deference or authority in the selectionof speech acts, genres, topics, style and so on. In sum, a theory of context providing
insight into the possibly relevant kinds of participants and participation structure is crucial for a pragmatic theory of appropriateness.
ActionModern pragmatics was founded with Austin's slogan that we do things when we
use words (*Austin, 1962). As was reminded above, action is the central concept of pragmatics, and also a central category in the way language users construe communicative situations as Context Models.
Obviously, such action , first of all is the action of discourse ' itself,' vmiously
described as verbal interaction, conversation, talk, text or communi cation-possibly further differentiated in terms of locutionary, formulating, meaning, referential or illocutionary acts, among others, as well as their different forms, formats and modulations (shouting, whispering, etc.).
Beyond these familiar distinctions, it should be recalled that people may engage inmany social, political and cultural actions, at many levels, by engaging in such verbal
interaction, such as discriminate, denounce, manipulate, seduce, govern, and so on.
The point is that each of these speech acts and other social actions control (and arecontrolled by) specific discourse structures. As we know, promi ses and predictions
require a discourse semantics of future actions and events. Threats presuppose specificrelations between participants, and are typically expressed with reference to future negative action, specific words, pitch or volume as well as specific face- and bodywork.
People may discriminate by using racist slurs or by representing Others negatively in thenews. Manipulation may control the management of explicit or implicit infmmation indiscourse, whereas seduction is being accomplished by a complex gamma of speech acts(compliments, etc.), genres, topics, style, intonation, etc.
Thus, as is the case for participants, their actions are systematically related to what
they say and how they say it for these discourses (or these actions) to be appropriate.

Context Theory and the Foundation of Pragmatics

9

Intentions, plans and goals
Traditionally, actions are defined as goal-directed human behavior or-in less behaviorist terms-as intentional conduct. For all practical purposes, goals, purposes and intentions should be analyzed in cognitive terms, for instance as mental models of planned orobserved conduct, although the notion of ' intention' is controversial in some contemporary interactionist approaches to conversation. In our view, as well as in that of most cognitive scientists, discourse and (inter)action in general must be accounted for also in the
cognitive terms of goals, intentions or plans. We therefore assume that Context Models
also have an important Intention category that represents what current action languageusers are now engaging in, and what they want to obtain with their action/discourse.
Conversely, recipients need to attribute intentions to speakers in order to be able to understand their utterance as a specific kind of action. Obviously, such an attributed intention
need not be the same as the intention of the speaker, and hence misunderstanding may be
the result.
Since the criterion of all context categories is that they may systematically influence
properties of text and talk, also the Intention category must control such propeltiesbesides being the cognitive basis of cunently petformed actions. In discourse intentions
are expressed in a large number of global and global strategies, for instance when newspaper stories provide examples, quotations or fi gures with the intention to be more credible or to discredit the president. Many communicative actions can only be defined in
tem1s of the goals speakers want to reach, as is the case for persuasion and manipulation.
Similarly, speakers may make their intentions explicit when problems of interpretation(may) mise: "I mean..", or "I did not mean that".
Knowledge
Finally, of the cognitive dimensions of pm·ticipants as represented in their Context
Models, lawwledge plays a central role. Speech acts, such as assertions and questions,require that speakers and hearers have or lack specific knowledge.
More generally, discourse is unthinkable without speakers making assumptions about
the knowledge of the recipients. They do so by means of fast strategic heuristics, suchas assuming that recipients of the same epistemic community know more or less the sameas what they know as speakers, except recent personal experiences (as in personal stories)
or public events (as in news). Much of the semantics of discourse is controlled by suchknowledge management, as is the case for implications, entailment and presuppositions.
Such control also shows up in grammar, for instance in the use of (in)definite pronouns, and in many discursive moves, such as reminders, such as "As I told you yesterday ... ", or "As we reported yesterday ...." When such epistemic conditions are not satisfied, interaction problems may occur, and recipients may ask "Whom are you talking
about?" to resolve such problems. Within a broader epistemological perspective, we may
thus empirically define social knowledge as the beliefs that are presupposed in public discourse.

5.

The relevance of context theory for pragmatics

From this brief discussion of a number of central categories that define Context
Models, we see that such models control many properties of discourse. Summarizing, wehave found that by these constraints the wrong person, with the wrong role, may say thewrong things to the wrong persons, in the wrong way, at the wrong time or the wrong
place. In more sophisticated terms, this means that the domain of pragmatics includes allconditions that define the degree of (in)appropriateness of any aspect of text or talk that
may vary, that is, chosen by the speaker or writer.
We have seen that the classical conditions of the appropriateness of speech acts aredefined in terms of the categories of Context Models, such as what the speaker and thehearer intend, want or know, as well as the (power or other) relations between participants
as is the case for commands. Instead of a brief series of abstract conditions, context theory more explicitly and more empirically reformulates such conditions in terms of theproperties of mental models, and how these control actual discourse production.
Theories of politeness and deference, for instance in terms of the positive or negative 'face' of participants, may within this broader framework be reformulated in termsof social properties and relations of participants as defined by the participants themselves.
Thus, it is not so much what infringes the interests or the rights of recipients that defines
actual negative politeness, but rather what speakers and hearers define such to be the case-obviously under social and cultural constraints of the community. This also means that
context theories must feature specific social properties of, and relations between participants, beyond those of power or status, in order to account for culturally variable subtleties of deference and politeness.
We already suggested that several aspects of Grice's maxims and conversational postulates are not so much pragmatic as semantic and stylistic. Similarly, implicatures areinferences of meaning, and hence semantic, although their conditions may be contextual.
Our theory of context is at the same time a much more elaborate theory of relevancethan cunent approaches abstractly defining contexts in terms of set of propositions(*Sperber, 1995). Rather, the explicit definition of what for participants is relevant in acommunicative situation is provided by their Context Models. These models have internal schematic and categmical structure, and are empirically grounded in a theory of
episodic memory, and of how such models control all aspects of discourse production andcomprehension. In this respect, our theory is at the same time a pragmatic, as well as asociolinguistic and psycholinguistic theory.
Other applications of context theory
Context theory accounts for much more than for speech acts, politeness and relevance.
First, such a theory is the basis of a theory of genre, because genres are not only
defined in discourse properties, but rather in terms of situational parameters such as set-

Context Theory and the Foundation of Pragmatics

11

tings, participant properties and relations, type of activity, goals and knowledge. Thus,
as we saw a above, a parliamentary debate is defined in tenns of the place of the parliament as building, the time of the session, participants who are politicians, MPs and party
members, and related as government vs. opposition, who have the goal to make politicaldecisions, laws, etc.
Within a broad conception of pragmatics, this also means that genres come with conditions of appropriateness, for instance the ways own party members or opposition members are addressed in the British House of commons, or that news reports in the press generally should not feature personal expetiences of reporters, or that editorials on the othershould feature opinions of editors, and so on for all genres.
Secondly, context theory accounts for style and register, and more generally for theconditions of rule-based language variation, such as the use of more fonnal style (lexicon, syntax) in parliament, or a grammatical register that prefers modal verbs (we must,
we should, etc.), plural pronouns (we vs. them), future verbs (as in policies and promises), and so on. Personal and social style signal personal or social properties of the speaker, such as her personality, authority or social position, as well as the relations with theaudience, as is also the case for politeness and deference.
Though distinct, style, register and genre are thus intticately related manifestationsof the same underlying Context Models, all contributing to making text or talk more orless appropriate in the communicative situation.
Whereas style and register usually are defined for grammatical and discursive form,
Context Models also control meaning, such as global topics that are more or less appropriate (obligatory, possible, taboo) for specific situations, genres or speakers. Although
informal conversations in principle have few constraints beyond those of general culturalones, depending on the category and role of the participants, most ritual and institutional
discourse is rather strictly limited to specific topics. News must be about important recentsocial or political events, scholarly articles about scientific topics, doctors' consults about
medical problems of the patient, and so on. Again, deviation here is not ungrammaticalor meaningless but inappropriate, and hence falls under the domain of pragmatics.
Even local semantics moves may be controlled by Context Models. In some situations it is appropriate to be succinct, in others one must be detailed and elaborate. In
some situations one may be vague and general, whereas in others one must be precise andspecific-again often associated with specific genres. We have seen that contextual
knowledge management is at the basis of the complex organization of what is asserted,presupposed, or reminded in discourse, and what is said explicitly or implicitly, because
implicitness presupposes that recipients are able to make intended inferences.
Appropriateness is again the nonnative notion that applies here: For instance, being elaborate in a situation where succinctness is required, as we know from Grice's maxims, isan inapproptiate form of knowledge management.
We may wonder whether the same holds for discourse schemas or superstructures.
Opening or ending a conversation without a greeting or leave-taking, respectively, may be12defined as inappropriate, in a sense, as is the case for a news report that does not tell about
recent events, or does not quote news actors.
Yet, we here are at the boundaries of pragmatics and appropriateness, because inthese cases such categories may be defined as normatively obligatory properties of thesegenres, so that there is no variation involved. In the same way, sentences without verbs
are formally ungrammatical, and not (in)appropriate. A story without a Complication is
not an inappropriate story, but not a story at all. An argument without a conclusion is not
an argument and not an inappropriate argument or a fallacy.
In sum, conventional schemas or formats of specific genres are obligatory in some
culture, and hence rather should be described in terms of well-formedness rules than interms of degrees of appropriateness.
Finally, rhetorical structures such as metaphors, euphemisms or irony and othermoves and strategies used to enhance the intended effects of discourse may be examined
for their context dependency and hence their appropriateness. As is the case for style, theuse of such ' figures of speech' indeed depends on the context, such as the beliefs of therecipients, on the one hand, as well as on the social properties and relations of the participants and their goals. Irony and euphemism are common moves in the managementof negative and positive face of recipients, both as persons, as well as of group members-as we also know from the use of racist labels and slurs. Metaphors may be used tomake complex, abstract meanings more concrete, and hence are typically used in scholarly discourse and popularization literature. Contextually they thus need to be defined interms of the knowledge of the participants, and hence as epistemic moves.

6.

Concluding remark

In sum, besides the 'obligatory' structures of sentences and discourses, contexts andtheir categories appear to control viitually all variable structures at the level of phonology, syntax, lexicon, semantics, stylistics, rhetoric, genre theory and so on. Indeed, theform and content of each discourse needs to be adapted to the social environment as it isdefined by the participants, and on the basis of social and cultural norms, that is in termsof Context Models. Any property and variation of text and talk that is thus controlled byContext Models may be described as more or less appropriate, and hence as within thescope of a broadly conceived, empirical pragmatic theory.

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13

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