CONTEXT IN COMMUNICATION: A COGNITIVE VIEW EDITED BY : Gabriella Airenti, Marco Cruciani and Alessio Plebe PUBLISHED IN : Frontiers in Psychology 1 March 2017 | Context in Communication: A Cognitive V iew Frontiers in Psychology Frontiers Copyright Statement © Copyright 2007-2017 Frontiers Media SA. All rights reserved. All content included on this site, such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, images, video/audio clips, downloads, data compilations and software, is the property of or is licensed to Frontiers Media SA (“Frontiers”) or its licensees and/or subcontractors. The copyright in the text of individual articles is the property of their respective authors, subject to a license granted to Frontiers. The compilation of articles constituting this e-book, wherever published, as well as the compilation of all other content on this site, is the exclusive property of Frontiers. 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Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: researchtopics@frontiersin.org 2 March 2017 | Context in Communication: A Cognitive V iew Frontiers in Psychology CONTEXT IN COMMUNICATION: A COGNITIVE VIEW Ancient Messene mosaic floor, Greece Photo © Borisb17 | Dreamstime.com Topic Editors: Gabriella Airenti, University of Torino, Italy Marco Cruciani, University of Trento, Italy Alessio Plebe, University of Messina, Italy Context is what contributes to interpret a communicative act beyond the spoken words. It provides information essential to clarify the intentions of a speaker, and thus to identify the actual meaning of an utterance. A large amount of research in Pragmatics has shown how wide-ranging and multifaceted this concept can be. Context spans from the preceding words in a conversation to the general knowledge that the interlocutors supposedly share, from the perceived environment to features and traits that the participants in a dialogue attribute to each 3 March 2017 | Context in Communication: A Cognitive V iew Frontiers in Psychology other. This last category is also very broad, since it includes mental and emotional states, together with culturally constructed knowledge, such as the reciprocal identification of social roles and positions. The assumption of a cognitive point of view brings to the foreground a number of new questions regarding how information about the context is organized in the mind and how this kind of knowledge is used in specific communicative situations. A related, very important question concerns the role played in this process by theory of mind abilities (ToM), both in typical and atypical populations. In this Research Topic, we bring together articles that address different aspects of context analysis from theoretical and empirical perspectives, integrating knowledge and methods derived from Philosophy of language, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Clinical Psychology. Citation: Airenti, G., Cruciani, M., Plebe, A., eds. (2017). Context in Communication: A Cognitive View. Lausanne: Frontiers Media. doi: 10.3389/978-2-88945-142-5 4 March 2017 | Context in Communication: A Cognitive V iew Frontiers in Psychology Table of Contents 06 Editorial: Context in Communication: A Cognitive View Gabriella Airenti and Alessio Plebe 09 Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context Pamela Faber and Pilar León-Araúz 29 Contexts as Shared Commitments Manuel García-Carpintero 42 Disagreeing in context Teresa Marques 54 Expressivism, Relativism, and the Analytic Equivalence Test Maria J. Frápolli and Neftalí Villanueva 64 Constructing the context through goals and schemata: top-down processes in comprehension and beyond Marco Mazzone 77 Context as Relevance-Driven Abduction and Charitable Satisficing Salvatore Attardo 89 Pragmatics as Metacognitive Control Mikhail Kissine 100 Theory of mind in utterance interpretation: the case from clinical pragmatics Louise Cummings 114 Playing with Expectations: A Contextual View of Humor Development Gabriella Airenti 126 Communicating numeric quantities in context: implications for decision science and rationality claims David R. Mandel 130 Pitch enhancement facilitates word learning across visual contexts Piera Filippi, Bruno Gingras and W. Tecumseh Fitch 138 Evoking Context with Contrastive Stress: Effects on Pragmatic Enrichment Chris Cummins and Hannah Rohde 149 Selecting Presuppositions in Conditional Clauses. Results from a Psycholinguistic Experiment Filippo Domaneschi, Elena Carrea, Carlo Penco and Alberto Greco 159 ‘But’ Implicatures: A Study of the Effect of Working Memory and Argument Characteristics Leen Janssens and Walter Schaeken 5 March 2017 | Context in Communication: A Cognitive V iew Frontiers in Psychology 172 Context in Generalized Conversational Implicatures: The Case of Some Ludivine E. Dupuy, Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst, Anne Cheylus and Anne C. Reboul 182 Disentangling Metaphor from Context: An ERP Study Valentina Bambini, Chiara Bertini, Walter Schaeken, Alessandra Stella and Francesco Di Russo 196 Who is respectful? Effects of social context and individual empathic ability on ambiguity resolution during utterance comprehension Xiaoming Jiang and Xiaolin Zhou 212 A Test for the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS): Normative Data and Psychometric Properties Giorgio Arcara and Valentina Bambini 225 Tapping into neural resources of communication: formulaic language in aphasia therapy Benjamin Stahl and Diana Van Lancker Sidtis 230 Bridging the gap between DeafBlind minds: interactional and social foundations of intention attribution in the Seattle DeafBlind community Terra Edwards EDITORIAL published: 06 February 2017 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00115 Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org February 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 115 | Edited and reviewed by: Manuel Carreiras, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Spain *Correspondence: Gabriella Airenti gabriella.airenti@unito.it Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology Received: 18 December 2016 Accepted: 17 January 2017 Published: 06 February 2017 Citation: Airenti G and Plebe A (2017) Editorial: Context in Communication: A Cognitive View. Front. Psychol. 8:115. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00115 Editorial: Context in Communication: A Cognitive View Gabriella Airenti 1 * and Alessio Plebe 2 1 Department of Psychology, Center for Cognitive Science, University of Torino, Torino, Italy, 2 Department of Cognitive Science, University of Messina, Messina, Italy Keywords: context, pragmatics, communication, common ground, theory of mind (ToM) Editorial on the Research Topic Context in Communication: A Cognitive View Context is a controversial concept. Research in philosophy of language, linguistics and cognitive science has shown that the communicative content of an utterance is not limited to the conventional content of what is said. The notion of context has been introduced in semantics and has assumed a central role in language studies with the pragmatic turn that has shifted the focus from meaning to speaker’s meaning, a change of paradigm that can be traced back to Wittgenstein’s conception of language use (Wittgenstein, 1953) and to the work of philosophers of language like Austin (1962), Grice (1975, 1978), and Searle (1969). In this framework pragmatics deals with the intentional aspects of language use. The notion of context is then no more restricted to the interpretation of indexicals and demonstratives (Kaplan, 1989). More generally, it applies to what is presupposed as common ground among the participants in a conversation (Stalnaker, 2002, 2014). From a cognitive perspective communication is an inferential process based on mental states and shared knowledge (Clark, 1996). What contributes to interpret a communicative act beyond the spoken words may, broadly speaking, be included. Intuitively, context is the background for comprehension, what makes communication possible. This is a critical point. In fact, context both is an inescapable concept in the study of communication and eludes univocal definition. There is no one context but many. In launching this Research Topic we did not expect to find a final definition or to have the last say. We were interested in singling out the present lines of research in this field. The papers we have collected attack the problem from different perspectives and using different research methodologies. The paper by Faber and León-Araúz is aimed at, if not final, a comprehensive and detailed definition of context. They propose a taxonomy based on scope: local, spanning typically five items before or after the term occurrence; and global, such as a whole text or all that goes beyond the text such as the communicative situation. They apply this distinction to syntax, semantics, and pragmatics even if, as they note, at this level the boundaries are fuzzy. The challenging enterprise of detailing what context is, becomes mandatory in formalizing specialized knowledge resources, but the results shed light on the structure of context in general language. On the way of clarifying what context constitutively is, García-Carpintero addresses Stalnaker’s notion of context as common ground, mentioned above, showing certain weaknesses. The Stalnakerian view of common ground as sets of propositions reveals unsatisfying in cases of expressions with rich illocutionary features. The most convincing cases are those of slurs and pejoratives, where attempts to flatten the content into declarative form, will deprive context of important dimensions of expressive meaning. Therefore, context, in addition to sets of propositions, should be extended to include shared propositional commitments. Although the case of pejoratives and slurs is the most convincing, the requirement for shared commitments appears 6 Airenti and Plebe Editorial: Context in Communication: A Cognitive View in other cases examined by Garcia-Carpintero as well: directives, questions, predicates of taste, pretense. Notably, the set of shared commitments proposed by Garcia- Carpintero includes aspects of the emotional state of the speaker. A step further inside the personal and interpersonal spheres is taken by Marques, investigating predicates of personal taste, aesthetic or moral values. A well known drawback afflicting contextual explanations is disagreement. If two conflicting judgments can be explained by simply augmenting the original sentences with propositions about the context of the two speakers, disagreement should disappear. Marques argues for contextualism, suggesting that disagreement can be addressed by taking into account differences in non-doxastic attitudes, and is enhanced by the evolutionary reinforcement of certain personal dispositions in social coordination. The main contender to the contextualist strategy defended by Marques is relativism, which is contrasted with expressivism in the paper by Frápolli and Villanueva. The idea is that there are two main ways to accommodate context dependence, by what they call building-block or organic models . The former, that gives prominence to the principle of compositionality over the principle of context, is proper to relativism, while the latter, that privileges context over compositionality, belongs to expressivism. While in the group of papers described so far, the main perspective under which context is studied is semantic, enriched with insights on mental phenomena, in the next group the cognitive perspective prevails, asking questions about how context is structured and accessed in the mind. Mazzone builds upon one of the most developed theories in cognitive pragmatics, Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986) and discusses how this theory succeeds in explaining the way relevant context is constructed during utterance understanding. He identifies a weakness in spelling out the mechanisms in place during the process of selecting the context, which, suggests Mazzone, can instead be identified in the combination of a bottom-up activation of schemata, especially goal-directed schemata, with a top-down activation of contextual information. This sort of mechanism is supported by what is currently known about the hierarchical structure of the frontal cortex. Relevance Theory is the starting assumption also for Attardo, in the search for a satisfactory context to explain utterances. He stresses how the exploration of relevance is largely abductive in nature, and remarks that the derivation of context requires additional mechanisms that counteract the expansive tendencies of relevance and abduction. Such bonding mechanisms, argues Attardo, can be construed under the principles of satisfaction and charity Paradigmatic in a cognitive perspective on context is the discussion about the so-called Theory of Mind (ToM), the set of skills that allow to attribute beliefs, goals, and percepts to other people: how essential is this ability in constructing the context necessary to understand utterances? The two contributions by Kissine and Cummings provide two contrasting answers. For Kissine there are grades of interpretative strategies to derive relevant implicatures of an utterance, and the lower levels, like the egocentric relevance , do not require any ToM. For Cummings utterance interpretation is highly dependent on attributing cognitive and affective mental states to the minds of language users, and she proposes that for the purpose of context derivation the best notion of ToM should encompass the rational, intentional, holistic character of interpretation. Both papers draw on studies with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) subjects to support their arguments. Kissine reports of subjects with ASD able to correctly discriminate between “ironical” and “literal” interpretations. Cummings reports clinical cases where ASD subjects exhibit deficits covering the three cornerstones of ToM she identified: rationality, intentionality, and holism. Airenti investigates young children’s ability to produce and understand different forms of humor. In particular she focuses on teasing, a form of humor already present in preverbal infants that is also considered a typical feature of irony. She proposes that the acquisition of specific communicative contexts enable children to engage in humorous interactions before they possess the capacity to analyze them in the terms afforded by a full-fledged ToM. In addition to increase our understanding, the cognitive perspective on context has important practical implications, as in the divergent interpretations of numeric quantities reported by Mandel. Subjects tend to assume large numerical quantities not as exact values, rather adopting a lower-bound at least or an upper-bound at most interpretation, depending on the context. Several papers fall within the domain of experimental pragmatics. Filippi et al. explore the role of prosodic cues in word learning. In natural situations learners have to identify words within a sequence of sounds and to relate them to specific referents extracted by the visual scene. Developmental research has suggested that adults’ use of exaggerated pitch might direct infants’ attention to specific elements in the context and guide learning. In their study the authors show that also adults exposed to an artificial language in different experimental conditions exploit pitch enhancement as a pragmatic cue. The role of intonation employed as an indicator of focus in pragmatic interpretation is treated in Cummins and Rohde. In Gricean pragmatics the interpretation of an utterance is based on the relation between what has been said and the potential utterances that would have been relevant to the current discourse purpose, had it been uttered. This set of relevant alternatives is defined in the notion of Question Under Discussion (Roberts, 1996/2012). The three experiments reported in this study showed that hearers used the intonation as an indication of which QUD is currently in play in the interpretation of scalar implicatures, presuppositions, and coreference. Domaneschi et al. maintain that for the analysis of context an important role is played by cognitive load. In fact, cognitive effort might have an effect on which presuppositions are activated. In their study they show this effect with presupposition selection in conditional sentences with a trigger in the consequent. The effect of cognitive effort in interpreting communicative utterances involving pragmatic enrichment is also the subject of Janssens and Schaeken’s paper. However, their study showed no influence of the working memory load on the performance in the task of inferring the implicatures from but , so and nevertheless . They also found that a major role in interpretation is played by the Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org February 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 115 | 7 Airenti and Plebe Editorial: Context in Communication: A Cognitive View content of the arguments suggesting that context and content are fundamental in the interpretation process. In their paper Dupuy et al. discuss how the context affects the interpretation of scalar implicatures. In particular, they focus on the pragmatic interpretation of some . They test two factors, the existence of factual information that facilitates the computation of pragmatic interpretations in the context, i.e., the cardinality of the domain of quantification, and the fact that the context makes the difference between the semantic and the pragmatic interpretations relevant. Their results suggest that the main factor that enhances pragmatic interpretation is the relevance of the contrast that in turn increases the salience of the cardinality. Two papers use event-related potential (ERP) electrophysiological technique to analyze the role of context in the comprehension of two important pragmatic phenomena, metaphor and referential ambiguity. Bambini et al. conducted two experiments in which EEG activity was recorded when participants were presented with metaphors in two different context situations, a minimal vs. a supportive context. Their results suggest the presence of two dissociable ERP signatures in the processing of metaphors. In fact, the N400 effect was visible only in minimal context, whereas the P600 was visible both in the absence and in the presence of contextual cues. From these data the authors argue that linguistic context reduces the effort in retrieving lexical aspects of metaphors but does not suppress later pragmatic interpretation efforts needed in order to derive the speaker’s intended meaning. Jiang and Zhou investigate how a comprehender resolves referential ambiguity in a conversation by using information concerning the social status of communicators in the context, and how empathic sensitivity to the social status information modulates ambiguity perception and the underlying neural activity. Electrophysiologically, they show the existence of differential neurocognitive processes underlying ambiguity resolution with different contextual cues. Two papers analyze communication in context as a diagnostic and clinical resource. Arcara and Bambini propose a test (APACS) to evaluate pragmatic abilities in clinical populations with acquired communicative deficits, ranging from schizophrenia to neurodegenerative diseases. The test consists of six tasks devoted to assess different pragmatic abilities in the domains of discourse and nonliteral communication. Their assumption is that while globally depending on context, different pragmatic aspects might involve different cognitive skills. Stahl and Van Lancker Sidtis analyze the contribution of formulaic expressions in clinical rehabilitation from speech and language disorders after stroke. For these patients formulaic expressions frequently remain one of the few resources available for communication. Therapy may support them in including these expressions within language games, i.e., communicative exchanges based on turn-taking. In this way the conversational context allows patients to exploit their residual resources in order to reestablish social interactions. Edwards deals with an extreme case of communication reporting her fieldwork with a community of deaf-blind people in Seattle. Edwards via the analysis of interactional sequences and subjects’ metapragmatic commentary shows how deaf- blind people use tactile-kinesthetic channels to overcome the difficulty to converge on objects of reference. She discusses two mechanisms that can account for this process: embedding in the social field and deictic integration. She argues that together they yield a deictic system set to retrieve a restricted range of values from the extra-linguistic context, thereby attenuating the cognitive demands of intention attribution. In summary, this research topic is a sampling of innovative efforts to address challenging issues on context, involving complex questions spanning from brain processes to social interactions and pragmatics. This sampling witnesses a growing, vibrant community of researchers attempting to integrate the knowledge, the methods, and the theory-building tools from philosophy of language, linguistics, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS Both authors contributed to the editorial and approved it. REFERENCES Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Grice, H. P. (1975). “Logic and conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics 3 : Speech Acts, eds P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (New York, NY: Academic Press), 41–58. Grice, H. P. (1978). “Further notes on logic and conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics 9 : Pragmatics, ed P. Cole (New York, NY: Academic Press), 113–128. Kaplan, D. (1989). “Demonstratives,” in Themes from Kaplan, eds J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 481–563. Roberts, C. (1996/2012). “Information structure in discourse: towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics,” in Papers in Semantics, Vol. 49 , eds J. H. Yoon and A. Kathol (OSUWPL Columbus: Ohio State University Department of Linguistics). Revised version in Semantics and Pragmatics, 5, 1–69. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts : An Essay in the Philosophy of Language . Cambridge: University Press. Sperber, D., and Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance Communication and Cognition Oxford: Blackwell. Stalnaker, R. (2002). Common ground. Linguist. Philos. 25, 701–721. doi: 10.1023/A:1020867916902 Stalnaker, R. (2014). Context . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations . Oxford: Blackwell. Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Copyright © 2017 Airenti and Plebe. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org February 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 115 | 8 HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY published: 23 February 2016 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00196 Edited by: Marco Cruciani, University of Trento, Italy Reviewed by: Elisabetta Lalumera, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy Rita Temmerman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Belgium Pius Ten Hacken, Universität Innsbruck, Austria *Correspondence: Pamela Faber pfaber@ugr.es Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology Received: 31 August 2015 Accepted: 01 February 2016 Published: 23 February 2016 Citation: Faber P and León-Araúz P (2016) Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context. Front. Psychol. 7:196. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00196 Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context Pamela Faber * and Pilar León-Araúz Department of Translation and Interpreting, University of Granada, Granada, Spain Though instrumental in numerous disciplines, context has no universally accepted definition. In specialized knowledge resources it is timely and necessary to parameterize context with a view to more effectively facilitating knowledge representation, understanding, and acquisition, the main aims of terminological knowledge bases. This entails distinguishing different types of context as well as how they interact with each other. This is not a simple objective to achieve despite the fact that specialized discourse does not have as many contextual variables as those in general language (i.e., figurative meaning, irony, etc.). Even in specialized text, context is an extremely complex concept. In fact, contextual information can be specified in terms of scope or according to the type of information conveyed. It can be a textual excerpt or a whole document; a pragmatic convention or a whole culture; a concrete situation or a prototypical scenario. Although these versions of context are useful for the users of terminological resources, such resources rarely support context modeling. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of context primarily based on scope (local and global) and further divided into syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic facets. These facets cover the specification of different types of terminological information, such as predicate- argument structure, collocations, semantic relations, term variants, grammatical and lexical cohesion, communicative situations, subject fields, and cultures. Keywords: context parameters, specialized knowledge, terminology, terminological knowledge bases INTRODUCTION According to Akman and Surav (1997) and Akman (2000), the denotation of context has become murkier as its uses have spread out in many directions to the extent that it has become a sort of ‘conceptual garbage can.’ For this reason, efforts are currently being made to parameterize and generally make sense of context and all that it implies. However, though instrumental in numerous disciplines, context has no universally accepted definition, because it can point to many different things. In the same way as the definition of any word, the definition of context can also vary depending on the field of application, such as Linguistics, Cognitive Science, or Computer Science (Bazire and Brézillon, 2005). Specialized knowledge is related to all of these three areas in the sense that (1) it is shared and disseminated through linguistic communicative acts (journal articles, conferences, etc.); (2) it is processed and acquired in the mind; and (3) it may be subjected to formalization. Therefore, the Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org February 2016 | Volume 7 | Article 196 | 9 Faber and León-Araúz Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context parameterization of context for specialized knowledge representation should be approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. Specialized knowledge can be represented in a variety of formats (i.e., ontologies, vocabularies, thesauri, controlled languages, databases, etc.) that may or may not support context, because knowledge resources are conceived for very different purposes (i.e., classification, reasoning, knowledge acquisition, standardization, harmonization, information retrieval, machine, or human translation, etc.). More specifically, terminological knowledge bases (TKBs) generally describe the concepts and terms of specialized knowledge domains for users with linguistic and/or cognitive needs. TKB users are most often human (e.g., translators, experts, technical writers), but computer applications can also benefit from terminological resources when it comes to automatically interpreting and/or producing specialized texts. Even though TKBs usually provide conceptual representations based on some sort of knowledge modeling mechanism, they rarely support context modeling. In other words, very few provide controlled partial information concerning conceptual entities by viewing them from different viewpoints or situations. This can be a problem because the meaning, designation, collocates, and location of a concept within a knowledge configuration or linguistic structure often vary, depending on context. Contextual information must thus be included in a TKB that aspires to being a knowledge representation resource. In this regard, it is timely and necessary to parameterize context in specialized knowledge domains with a view to more effectively facilitating knowledge representation, understanding, and acquisition. Nevertheless, matters are further complicated by the fact that context itself is a complex, multidimensional concept. Reasons for its conceptual fuzziness include the following: (i) there are various types of contexts; (ii) many types of data can be extracted from context analysis; (iii) contexts can also be used for a wide range of different purposes. Contextual information can be specified in terms of scope (local vs. global) or according to the type of information conveyed (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variables). As reflected in corpus analysis, when context is mentioned in a text, it is metaphorically conceived as a container or a bounded space, since an utterance can be “in context” or “out of context.” Context also frames or surrounds the utterance or object of analysis. In this sense, context bears a resemblance to Fauconnier’s (1985, 1997) mental spaces since the location of an utterance in this bounded space or container is what makes it meaningful. As a relational construct in texts, context helps to anchor linguistic designations to objective reality by providing background information, situating objects and processes, and explicitly relating them to each other as well as to the agents that manipulate them and act on them. It is thus a constraining factor that drives understanding. In other words, as stated by Leech (1981), the specification of context (whether linguistic or non- linguistic) has the effect of narrowing down the communicative possibilities of the message as it exists in abstraction from context. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The Section “What is Context?” reviews the notion of context as found in the literature of different areas. In Section “Context and Terminology,” context representation is described with regards to terminology and specialized knowledge. The Section “Context Parameters” proposes a taxonomy of context parameters from a local to a global scope further divided into syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic facets. These facets cover the specification of different types of contextually relevant terminological information, such as predicate-argument structure, collocations, semantic relations, term variants, grammatical, and lexical cohesion, communicative situations, subject fields, and cultures. The examples given are drawn from the domain of environmental science based on the experience acquired while building EcoLexicon (ecolexicon.ugr.es), an environmental multilingual TKB. The Section “Conclusion and Future Work” provides the conclusions derived from the parameterization of context for specialized knowledge representation. WHAT IS CONTEXT? Research communities envision context differently since they conceive it in relation to different entities. Thus, context may be the parts of discourse surrounding a word, sentence, or passage, also known as co-text (Textual Linguistics), the set of situational elements where the object being processed is included (Cognitive Psychology), or that which surrounds and gives meaning to something else (Computer Science). In Linguistics, context has long been regarded as an essential factor in the interpretation of linguistic utterances. It plays an important role in different tasks, such as meaning construction, inference, variation, modulation, sense disambiguation, etc. Quite often co-textual elements are sufficient to resolve ambiguity, but sometimes other context types also come into play. Apart from the co-text sense, context in Linguistics is also mentioned in relation to pragmatic and cognitive notions, such as speech acts (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), conventions (Gadamer, 1995), maxims (Grice, 1975), framing (Goffman, 1974), common ground (Clark, 1996), and mutual manifestness (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1990), which refers to what one is capable of inferring or perceiving even if one has not done so as yet. The sum of these shared assumptions constitutes the cognitive environment of a group of individuals, which provides the foundation for successful communication (Yus, 2006). These notions are related to sociocultural factors accounting for broader contextual variables, such as communicative settings, cultures, or world knowledge. Evidently, context has also been extensively studied in discourse studies, where it has been defined as the totality of conditions under which discourse is being produced, circulated and interpreted (Blommaert, 2005, p. 251). In the same area, Van Dijk (2005, p. 237) gives an even wider view by dividing context in different dimensions, namely, the cognitive, social, political, cultural, and historical environments of discourse. In Cognitive Science, since the emergence of situated cognition, background situations have also become an essential element in the analysis of context. This has had an impact Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org February 2016 | Volume 7 | Article 196 | 10 Faber and León-Araúz Specialized Knowledge Representation and the Parameterization of Context on cognitive linguistics, where meaning is thought to be based mostly on situational context and constructed on-line (Croft and Cruse, 2004; Evans and Green, 2006). Meaning thus does not exist without context. For example, the theory of situated cognition argues that knowledge is situated, and is partly a product of the activity, context and culture in which it is developed and used (Brown et al., 1989, p. 32). Clancey (1994) adds that the situated aspect of cognition is that the world is not given as objective forms. Rather, what we perceive as properties and events is constructed according to the context. Elman (2009, p. 572) highlights the importance of context in language comprehension and asserts that the meaning of a word is rooted in our knowledge of both the material and social world. Therefore, the meaning of a word is never ‘out of context’ even when we are not aware of what this context is. He also highlights the importance of larger knowledge structures: “events play a major role in organizing our experience. Event knowledge is used to derive inference, to access memory, and affect the categories we construct. An event may be defined as a set of participants, activities, and outcomes that are bound together by causal relatedness.” Consequently, all lexical units, apart from their micro-context in discourse, need to be understood within the context of a larger event. According to Yeh and Barsalou (2006, p. 350), knowledge of a larger event or situation restricts the entities and events likely to occur in it. Conversely, knowledge of current entities and events constrains the event or situation likely to be unfolding. Context thus plays a crucial role in knowledge understanding and acquisition since it can trigger one meaning while inhibiting another. Cognitive processing necessarily includes linking an utterance or object to the right context, something that the human brain does with relative ease. In this sense, according to Flowerdew (2014), speakers and writers are remarkably adept at knowing which features of context to rely on to make their utterances meaningful, and listeners and readers are equally adept at contextualizing what they read or hear in order to understand it. However, what is not so easy is to agree on how to characterize context types and describe how they interact with each other. In fact, context was for a long time omitted in linguistic accounts because it was considered to be too chaot