Discourse, Context and Co-text

It has been stressed several times so far that the important element of the practical discourse analysis is the reference to the context in which the discourse is appearing. On the top of that it should be referred not only to the general context but also to so-called co-text. How may be these two terms distinguished one from the other?

Basically, everything that is referred to in the discourse is considered to be a context; nevertheless, if the referred item is inside the text or the discourse it has a linguistic reference and as that it is marked as a co-text or linguistic context. The context in its broader meaning, i.e. everything outside the text, is marked as the context of situation or extra linguistic context (Dontcheva-Navrбtilovб; Glossary). The co-text, moreover, helps to interpret the meaning because it simply narrows the possible interpretative meanings for particular word or sentence (Yule; ch. 3). These words or sentences would be misguiding for the analyst unless they are placed in the discourse environment; only then the analyst is able to decode their correct meaning and he may feel to be deceived otherwise (Halliday and Hassan 301).

The extra linguistic context operates within the domains of field, tenor and mode. The field, also referred as the domain, helps to narrow the interpretative meanings according to the activity (e.g. in our case political speech). The tenor defines the relations between the speaker/writer and hearer/reader, e.g. their statuses predetermine whether the discourse will be polite or familiar, formal or informal etc. And finally, the mode is predefined by variation according to the part the language is playing and according to the participants expectations in this situation; in other words, the key elements are the rules of written and spoken, interactive or non-interactive communication, but also the text structure and organization and communicative purpose of the writer/speaker (i.e. to deliver a speech). It is worth to point out that the identification of registers and styles is to a large extent dependent on domain. However, tenor and mode are highly important for both stylistics and discourse analysis (Dontcheva-Navrбtilovб; Ch. 2).

The context of situation, or the meaning which is gained from this context, furthermore, belongs to the culture rather than to the language (Caldas-Coulthard 35). It is not thus surprising that such analysis may be a hard task to do but responsible sociolinguistic researchers have proved that the order and structure may be found even in the situations where these phenomena had been perceived to be messy and on the periphery of previous analyses. Pragmatic rules, beside the fact that they deal with cultural standards such as formality or distance, point to more general assumptions about the social and culture environment. If they would not do this, they would seem to be meaningless (Keesing 28).