Most semantic (and pragmatic) theories of context-sensitive interpretation are based on the (mostly implicit) assumption that there is the utterance context; i.e. that there is one utterance context per utterance. In this project, I will challenge this assumption of “monocontextualism”, as it may be called, by collecting many problematic cases. This will lead us to abandon this basic assumption in favor of multicontextualism: for the interpretation of many natural language utterances, we need more than one context in order to get the interpretation right.

However, instead of throwing semantic theories of context dependency like Kaplan’s framework overboard because of these challenges, I suggest an expansion of Kaplan-style approaches by what may be called multicontexts, by which I understand a macrocontext that includes a multitude of “classical” microcontexts and thus can solve the problems while keeping the overall interpretational strategies. This will lead to a view on contexts and context-dependent interpretation that is also suitable for interpreting utterances in more complex conversational situations than idealized dialogues and can account for linguistic means to manage linguistic interactions in multi-agent discourses.