The context of utterance comes next in order of increasing abstraction and generality. The relationship between the situation and the utterance can be demonstrated by observing what happens when we attempt to place an utterance (1) in its situation and (2) in its context.
Consider the utterance
Pass me the oregano
If we were to ask in what circumstances this utterance was issued, satisfactory answers would be very different, depending on whether the question was about the situation or the context.
To provide an adequate answer in terms of the situation in which this occurred, we would need, given its uniqueness, to specify the particular participants and their behaviour, the time, place of the interaction and anything else that came to mind. Such a description would provide a listing of the components of the aggregate which, without a generalizing cultural dimension to them, does not lead to a specification of the situation as a whole.
By way of contrast, an adequate answer in terms of the context might be as laconic as
Cooking (a spaghetti bolognese)
The two types of 'fact' on which the description rests are of a different order from each other. The situation can be described in terms of brute facts which can be observed and reported by an uncomprehending outsider but the context can only be recognized by the knowing insider who can bring the brute facts together as social facts and recognize the cultural unity in the physical diversity, i.e. that a series of situations – different from each other as they undoubtedly must be – count as the same; here, an event which can be labelled‘cooking' in general terms.
The immediate situation of utterance requires the explicit spelling out of the physical details. The specification of the context of utterance can – unlike the description of the situation – be much more implicit, since it assumes the totality of the shared knowledge possessed by the participants in the communicative act.
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