Title: What about the context?

A few years ago, I had a student whose answer to every point I was making was, “Well, that depends on the context. ” You will understand that after a while I became quite fed up with this “argument, ” so in this paper, I will try to show how the role of context is often overestimated in linguistic (and argumentative) analysis, how utterances create their own (basic) context, and how their “real,” “material, ” or “factual ” context hardly influences the interpretation and understanding of those utterances. The person to be blamed for the invention of this sleazy concept is Bronislav Malinowski. In his 1923 work, “The problem of meaning in primitive languages, ” he disturbingly claims the following: Exactly as in the reality of spoken or written languages, a word without linguistic context is a mere figment and stands for nothing by itself, so in the reality of a spoken living tongue, the utterance has no meaning except in the context of situation. Since this unfortunate statement, the concept of context has only expanded