Language in context

Abstract

Traditional transformational grammar attempts to define the conditions on the applicability of grammatical rules on the basis of superficial syntactic environment alone. This paper discusses a number of examples in several languages that show that such a goal is unattainable—that, in order to predict correctly the applicability of many rules, one must be able to refer to assumptions about the social context of an utterance, as well as to other implicit assumptions made by the participants in a discourse.