Text, context and knowledge

Contemporary linguistics and discourse studies have largely focused on language use and discourse — and their structures — themselves, and ignored and neglected the theory of context and its relation to text and talk. If context was examined, this happened in a deterministic framework of objective ‘social variables’, such as ‘gender’, ‘class ’ or ‘ethnicity’. However, since situational and societal structures cannot directly affect the mental processes of discourse production and comprehension, we need a mental mediating device, that is, special mental models (context models) that represent the subjective ‘definition of the communicative situation ’ of the participants. These dynamic mental models, stored in episodic memory, control the production of variable structures at all levels and dimensions of discourse and have as their overall goal to make sure that discourse is situationally appropriate. This is also why a context theory is the basis of a theory of pragmatics. A crucial element of context models is the knowledge of the participants. It is assumed that a knowledge-device (K-device) calculates for each moment of discourse production what recipients (don’t) know. A number of epistemic strategies are being formulated that account for various situations in everyday life. On the basis of this theoretical framework some speculations are formulated about the nature of an automatic system of newswriting REPORTER. Finall