This book departs from the premise that context represents a complex relational configuration which can no longer be conceived as an analytic prime but rather requires a parts-whole perspective to capture its inherent dynamism. The edited volume presents a collection of papers which examine the connectedness between context, contextualization and entextualization. They address the questions how meaning and speech acts are situated in context, how both are influenced by context, how context influences speech acts and meaning, how context is imported into the discourse, and how context is entextualized in discourse. The papers cover institutional and non-institutional contexts, the language of Greek laws, political discourse, confrontational media discourse and task-oriented face-to-face and back-to-back interactions. They reflect current moves in pragmatics and discourse analysis to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating relevant premises and insights, in particular cognition, adaptive action, negotiation of meaning, sequentiality, recipient design and genre.

Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, University of Lodz, in Journal of Pragmatics Vol. 53 (2013):
Context and Contexts: Parts meet whole? is a fine collection with a great potential for many audiences, from individually focused research beginners to experts with the highest level of expertise in the field. The volume covers diverse theoretical commitments, but eventually, partly due to its ‘‘part/whole’’ perspective (acknowledged in the subtitle), offers a consistent picture of context as a reliable, coherent and theoretically sound phenomenon with its own field of study. It reconfirms that context can no longer be seen as an analytic prime, but rather as a dynamic and relational phenomenon. Naturally, the book does not exhaust the topic, but enriches the field and documents the need for methodological compositionality and interdisciplinary. In summary, Context and Contexts, edited by Anita Fetzer and Etsuko Oishi, is a book recommended to all readers interested in discourse studies and pragmatics.