This? No, that! Constructing shared contexts in the conversational dyad

The article focuses on the role of the hearer in the process of constructing context. Her position towards the speaker determines the choices which may be used to structure the dyad of conversation into several sub-spaces. The research on spoken language use is based on Spanish and Polish data (Jungbluth 2005, 2009). Three parts build the ‘whole’ of the conversation: the acoustically perceivable utterances, the parts not uttered but meant by the speaker and the parts not uttered but interpreted by the hearer (Coseriu 1980). The whole is never the same for everyone involved in conversation, as subjects are different from one another (Humboldt 1836, Wittgenstein 1914). The anchoring of context to the uttered and interactively perceived parts of dialogue does compulsorily show up these differences