The Role of Social Context in Determining the Meaning

Abstract

Context is one of the important topics in linguistics because it plays an important role in determining the meaning. Context generally falls into two types: verbal context and nonverbal context. Social context is one of the nonverbal context types. It plays an important role in determining the meaning of linguistics units because meaning alone doesn’t consist of semantic units but also nonlinguistic components elements play the role in forming the meaning. Semantic units sometimes violate their conceptual meanings and have more than one meaning therefore context determines the intentional meaning. This study attempts to determine the meaning via social context. For this reason, proverbs have been taken because these proverbs were said in a particular time and place for a special intention in a society for a society so as to be proverbs and lessons for people. Therefore, to analyze and determine their meanings we have to resort to the contexts they occurred. Finally, it has been stated that social context plays a fundamental role in determining the meaning of proverbs.