Editorial: Context in Communication: A Cognitive View

Context is a controversial concept. Research in philosophy of language, linguistics and cognitive science has shown that the communicative content of an utterance is not limited to the conventional content of what is said. The notion of context has been introduced in semantics and has assumed a central role in language studies with the pragmatic turn that has shifted the focus from meaning to speaker's meaning, a change of paradigm that can be traced back to Wittgenstein's conception of In this framework pragmatics deals with the intentional aspects of language use. The notion of context is then no more restricted to the interpretation of indexicals and demonstratives (Kaplan, 1989). More generally, it applies to what is presupposed as common ground among the participants in a conversation (Stalnaker, 2002, 2014). From a cognitive perspective communication is an inferential process based on mental states and shared knowledge (Clark, 1996). What contributes to interpret a communicative act beyond the spoken words may, broadly speaking, be included. Intuitively, context is the background for comprehension, what makes communication possible. This is a critical point. In fact, context both is an inescapable concept in the study of communication and eludes univocal definition. There is no one context but many. In launching this Research Topic we did not expect to find a final definition or to have the last say. We were interested in singling out the present lines of research in this field. The papers we have collected attack the problem from different perspectives and using different research methodologies. The paper by Faber and León-Araúz is aimed at, if not final, a comprehensive and detailed definition of context. They propose a taxonomy based on scope: local, spanning typically five items before or after the term occurrence; and global, such as a whole text or all that goes beyond the text such as the communicative situation. They apply this distinction to syntax, semantics, and pragmatics even if, as they note, at this level the boundaries are fuzzy. The challenging enterprise of detailing what context is, becomes mandatory in formalizing specialized knowledge resources, but the results shed light on the structure of context in general language. On the way of clarifying what context constitutively is, García-Carpintero addresses Stalnaker's notion of context as common ground, mentioned above, showing certain weaknesses. The Stalnakerian view of common ground as sets of propositions reveals unsatisfying in cases of expressions with rich illocutionary …