The Function of Context in Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis involves many aspects such as cohesion, coherence, adjacency pair, turn-taking, text type, and so on so forth. Among them context plays a key role in the analysis. So the present paper intends to focus its discussion on the functions of context in discourse analysis. Through study the paper finds full explanations about the function of context in the following aspects: firstly, context can help listeners or readers to define reference; secondly, it can also help to establish and accumulate presupposition; thirdly, context can help hearer detect conversational implicature. Those functions are very influential in discourse analysis as well as in language acquisition.