Types of contexts and their role in multimodal communication

In this paper the idea is presented that human communication is carried through messages that are the result of the integration of a set of communicative acts, some of which are, in a traditional view, contextual phenomena with respect to a main (linguistic) communication act. A formalisation of the notion of communicative situation is attempted, which eliminates the distinction between context and main communication acts. The ideas presented in this paper come from a re-thinking of a prototype implemented in 1989 for the ESPRIT Project 527, CFID whose main features are presented in Section 4.