This contribution presents an investigation of Gumperz's concept of contextualization cue in a discursive framework. Following Gumperz, contextualization cues are anchored to context and contextual frames, and they are linguistically represented by "any aspect of surface form of utterances, which when mapped onto message content, can be shown to be functional in the signalling of interpretation frames." (1977:199)

The first part refines Gumperz's concept of contextualization cues by restricting these linguistic devices to indexical expressions which are categorized with regard to their micro-contextual references to (i) the interpersonal system manifest in references to the participation format and face (Brown & Levinson 1987; Goffman 1974; Levinson 1988) represented by interpersonal markers, (ii) the interactional system manifest in the principles of adjacency and conditional relevance (Levinson 1983) represented by discourse markers, and (iii) the textual system manifest in the linguistic representation of the speaker's intention (Grice 1975) represented by more-fuzzy and less-fuzzy hedges.

The second part discusses the communicative function(s) of these indexical expressions, which is calculated by spelling out their references to linguistic and social contexts. In English, interpersonal markers and discourse markers are employed both cataphorically and anaphorically, and more-fuzzy and less fuzzy hedges are generally employed anaphorically only. Furthermore, both interpersonal and interaction markers have wide scopes while more-fuzzy and less-fuzzy hedges have narrow-scope interpretations only (Ungerer 1988). The calculation of communicative meaning thus feeds on the grammatical concept of scope anchored to the grammatical unit of sentence and the conversation-analytic concepts of turn and turn-construction unit.

In conclusion, the communicative meaning of contextualization cues is calculated with regard to (i) references to social and linguistic contexts, (ii) semantic meaning and (iii) scope.

References

Brown, P. and S. Levinson (1987): Politeness. Cambridge

Goffman, E. (1974): Frame analysis. New York

Grice, H. P. (1975): Logic and conversation. In Syntax and Semantics, P. Cole & J.L. Morgan (eds.), 41-58. New York

Gumperz, J.J. (1977): Sociocultural knowledge in conversational inference. In Linguistics and anthropology, M. Saville-Troike (ed.), 191-211.Washington D.C.

Levinson, S. (1983): Pragmatics. Cambridge

Levinson, S. (1988). Putting linguistics on a proper footing: explorations in Goffman's concepts of participation. In Erving Goffman. Exploring the interaction order, P.Drew & A. Wootton (eds.), 161-227. Cambridge

Ungerer, F. (1988): Syntax der englischen Adverbialen, Tübingen