Context and Appropriateness: Micro Meets Macro

273 Pages·2007·1.16 MB·English

by  Anita Fetzer (ed.)

Context and Appropriateness
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS)
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and
its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work
covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within
language sciences.
Editor
Andreas H. Jucker
University of Zurich, English Department
Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland
e-mail: [email protected]
Associate Editors
Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren
University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation,
Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Shoshana Blum-Kulka Susan C. Herring Emanuel A. Schegloff
Hebrew University of Indiana University University of California at Los
Jerusalem Angeles
Masako K. Hiraga
Jean Caron St.Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Deborah Schiffrin
Université de Poitiers Georgetown University
David Holdcroft
Robyn Carston University of Leeds Paul Osamu Takahara
University College London Kobe City University of
Sachiko Ide
Foreign Studies
Bruce Fraser Japan Women’s University
Boston University Sandra A. Thompson
Catherine Kerbrat-
University of California at
Thorstein Fretheim Orecchioni
Santa Barbara
University of Trondheim University of Lyon 2
Teun A. van Dijk
John C. Heritage Claudia de Lemos
Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
University of California at Los University of Campinas, Brazil
Angeles Richard J. Watts
Marina Sbisà
University of Berne
University of Trieste
Volume 162
Context and Appropriateness. Micro meets macro
Anita Fetzer (ed.)
Context and Appropriateness
Micro meets macro
Edited by
Anita Fetzer
Lueneburg University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Context and appropriateness : micro meets macro / edited by Anita Fetzer.
p. cm. -- (Pragmatics & beyond new series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 162)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Discourse analysis. 2. Context (Linguistics) 3. Speech acts (Linguistics) 4.
Acceptability (Linguistics) 5. Pragmatics. I. Fetzer, Anita, 1958-
P302.C6225 2007
306.44--dc22 2007015637
isbn 978 90 272 5406 1 (Hb; alk. paper)
© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Introduction
Context, contexts and appropriateness 3
Anita Fetzer
Part I. Bridging problems between context and appropriateness
Similar situations 31
Varol Akman
Appropriateness and felicity conditions: A theoretical issue 55
Etsuko Oishi
Appropriateness: An adaptive view 79
Thanh Nyan
Party II. Bridging problems between communicative action
and appropriateness
If I may say so: Indexing appropriateness in dialogue 115
Anita Fetzer
The appropriateness of questions 147
Annette Becker
Cooperative conflict and evasive language:
The case of the 9–11 commission hearings 167
Lawrence N. Berlin
vi Table of contents
Part III. Bridging problems between micro and macro
The attenuating conditional: Context, appropriateness and interaction 203
Johanna Miecznikowski and Carla Bazzanella
Collaborative use of contrastive markers: Contextual
and co-textual implications 235
Francesca Carota
Index 261
Introduction

Context, contexts and appropriateness
Anita Fetzer
University of Lueneburg, Germany
Communication is both context-creating and context-dependent
(Bateson 1972)
Introductory comments
The papers collected in this edited volume on ‘Context and Appropriateness’ re-
sult from a panel organized on this topic at the 9th IPrA Conference held in Riva
del Garda in the year 2005.1 As was the case with the presentations invited for the
panel, this volume addresses context and appropriateness from a variety of theo-
retical and applied perspectives. Thus, the papers range from the research para-
digms of philosophy of language, speech act theory, sociopragmatics, cognitive
pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. The variety of topics, which the indi-
vidual contributions cover, allows for a refined bottom-up and top-down analysis
of the concepts of context and appropriateness as well of their multifaceted con-
nectedness. It is the purpose of this introduction to examine and contextualize
the concepts of context, contexts and appropriateness, to give an overview on how
the notions are reflected in different – if not sometimes diverging – approaches to
language and language use, and to locate the individual papers’ contributions in
the overall statement made with this book.
1. Contexts in context
Context has become a major field of research in information technology, engi-
neering, science, and in the social sciences, arts and humanities, to name but a
1. The editor is deeply grateful to the participants of the panel, to the discussant Andreas
Jucker and to the audience for their helpful input. Special thanks go to Isja Conen of John Ben-
jamins and to the reviewers of the papers, for their insightful comments.