In Herre van Oostendorp & Susan Goldman (Eds.), The construction of mental representations during reading. Chapter 5 (pp. 123-148). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999."Linguists, discourse analysts, and psychologists generally agree that context crucially influences the structures and processing of text and talk. However, whereas they have developed sophisticated theories of discourse structure and comprehension, the detailed structures of context and how these constrain language use have received much less explicit attention.
If context is taken into account in the psychology of text processing at all, it is usually reduced to one or more independent variables that are assumed to affect text understanding, such as goals, task demands, previous knowledge, gender, age, or different types of readers. Although interest in contextual constraints is increasing in psychology, contextual analysis itself remains marginal when compared to the attention to the role of variable text structures and genres, inferences, knowledge, and their mental processing.
Against this background of theory formation in psychology, linguistics, and discourse analysis, the present chapter first argues that, strictly speaking, contexts do not directly influence discourse or language use at all. Rather, it is the subjective interpretation of the context by discourse participants that constrains discourse production, structuration, and understanding.
That is, given a communicative event in some social situation, its participants actively and ongoingly construct a mental representation of only those properties of this situation that are currently relevant to them. Herbert Clark (1996) recently developed a theory of some elements of such represented situations in terms of the common ground participants share and extend during joint discursive and other action".
