Context

Context. The ways in which surroundings inform acts and artifacts of meaning. The relation of meaning to context varies according to the dynamics of its materialization in likeness (resemblance), directedness (pointing), and abstraction (symbolism). Context is determined in part by kinds of participation in meaning, according to the uses to which meanings are put in acts of representation, communication, or interpretation. Context can be specified as position: time and place. Context also supplies media of particular kinds, the means of the materialization of meaning, affording shape to meaning in speech, sound, body, object, space, image and text. Meanings may connect with each other in context by association: serially, by scaling, or through expressive causality. And meanings can, by the conventions of genre, be patterned in similar ways.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27-28.