|
Verbal or linguistic context of a word or expression is the actual lexical environment in which the unit occurs. It is distinguished from the situational or pragmatic context which involves the speaker and hearer of the utterance and various social and cultural factors, as well as what the lexical units refer to. Verbal contexts of a unit are often called its distribution or paradigm. As do units they vary in generality. For instance, “wife” is more specific than “world”. Co-occurrence of general terms will often result in what are called “vague” sentences or even truisms. In contrast, utterances made up of very specific words tend to become less intelligible.
|
