Papilota-Diaz 61 events. Thus, the significant role of context in these discursive practices must be emphasized. The study of speech acts and implicatures does not only emphasize the role of social action in language use but also the contextual conditions of the appropriateness of utterances; that is why, the notion of context receives focus and analysis in its own right (van Dijk 2008, 6). According to Van Dijk (2008, 18), the fundamental function of a theory of context is to make sure that participants are able to produce text or talk appropriate to the communicative situation and understand the appropriateness of the text or talk of others. Likewise, a theory of context may explain how participants adapt their discursive interaction to the cognitive and sociocultural environments. It may also make explicit the felicity conditions of illocutionary acts and other dimensions of interaction. Contexts control the processes of discourse production and comprehension which are embedded in broader social conditions. Thus, a theory of context may provide a solid basis for various aspects and approaches in pragmatics. Hymes (in Brown and Yule 1983, 37) views the role of context in the interpretation of speaker’s meaning by limiting the range of possible interpretation and by supporting the intended interpretation. He specifies the features of context which may be relevant to the type of identification of speech event. A summary of these features is discussed in his rules of speaking (in Gumperz and Hymes 1986). Rules of speaking are the ways in which speakers associate particular modes of speaking, topics or message forms, with particular settings and activities. The components of speech can be grouped together mnemonically as SPEAKING: setting (time, place, physical circumstances), participants, ends (goals, outcomes), act sequences (means of expression, topic), key (tone, manner), instrumentalities (channels of speech), norms (specific behaviors and properties attached to speaking, belief system of a community), and genres (categories identified by formal characteristics). According to Hymes, a discourse analyst may choose from the contextual features those which are necessary to characterize a particular communicative event, and these features may be characterized in detail. According to Brown and Yule (1983, 40), the more the analyst knows about the