What does contextual meaning mean?

Contextual meaning, also known as "contextual meaning" or "situational meaning", is a term about the relationship between speech and the situation in which speech is expressed. The comprehension and memory of sentences largely depend on the mastery of contextual meaning. The experiment of aubert and J. Franks points out that sentence comprehension is a process from semantic structure (sentence meaning) to communicative structure.

Understanding the words in a sentence according to general concepts will bring difficulties to complete understanding, and only with the help of context and background knowledge can we correctly understand the sentence. According to Onlaud's research, when reading a sentence, people need to use all their knowledge (including external knowledge and the theme of the sentence) and intelligence.

Extended data

The intervention of context (cultural background, emotional scene, space-time environment, etc.). On the one hand, it makes polysemous language symbols tend to be single, on the other hand, it makes language symbols rock the boat and proliferates contextual meaning. Contextual meaning can even mask the meaning of language symbols and become the main information of communication. Context also controls the communicator's choice of language symbols.

The so-called contextual meaning here refers to the actual meaning of language symbols in the context, including endowed meaning and explanatory meaning. Context is the concept of language disciplines (linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, semiotics, etc.). ).