CONTEXT AND DISCOURSE PROCESSING

This article deals with context effects in discourse processing. It pr esents some of the theoretical problems that have arisen over the past twenty years from the ongoing interchange of ideas among the various branches of the cognitives sciences (linguistics, psycholinguistics, a nd artificial intelligence). Following a review of the different under standings of the term << context >>, particularly in linguistics and p sycholinguistics, the article discusses some of the fundamental issues raised when the concept of context is used as a basis for explaining how a speaker-listener processes language. The article then examines t he original theoretical work by Clark and Marshall (1981) and Sperber and Wilson (1986), whose contributions have made it possible within th e pest decade to precisely describe the role of context in discourse p rocessing. The article ends by bringing together some points likely to contribute to the advancement of formal theories in this field.