The foundamental context categories in understanding communicative intention

We propose a taxonomy of the different categories of context which contribute to reconstruct the communicative intention of a speaker. In particular, we investigate the following categories: Access, Space, Time, Discourse, Move, and Status. We propose that different contexts pertaining to the same category make the hearer assign different communicative meanings to the same expressive act. We validate our expectations through an experiment on three groups of children aged 3–7 years. The results confirm our predictions and reveal that different context categories and within them, different contexts, play different roles in the reconstruction of the communicative intentions in children belonging to the different age groups.