No utterance or written text is ever fully explicit, completely freestanding. To be understood, any text must be read in the light of prior knowledge, background information, expectations about genre and about sequence — all the aspects often considered together as “context”. Many of these factors are culturally specific, varying across languages and even within the various English-speaking communities and nations of the world. Oscar Wilde once called England and the United States “two countries divided by a common language”, and any American who has ever been asked by an English host or hostess when he or she would like to be “knocked up in the morning” knows that the common language can divide and lead to some potentially disastrous misunderstandings. We expect problems when communicating with speakers of other languages; more startling, however, is that such problems often occur between speakers of the same language.

These problems grow more acute when one is dealing with written texts, since the opportunity for clarifying discussion disappears, and they grow yet more acute with literary texts, which tend to lack some of the specifying contexts that head off misunderstandings in non-literary forms of discourse.

Internet::<https://www.jstor.org/stable/462488> .