ABSTRACT
Ultimately, context is nothing less than the human world in which language use takes place and in relation to which language structure is organized. Unfortunately, even in the focal points of explicit expression, the value of context can be opaque. The opacity might involve the meaning of an utterance, the nature of the setting, the current identity of an interlocutor, or any number of other factors. We cannot mechanically equate close with clear and far with fuzzy. A meaning component that is defeasible is one that changes under a change in discourse context. A different sense of creativity comes from defining semantic units as themselves contextual products. To a degree this is in the spirit of the versions of contextual semantics. The phenomenologists achieved this break in a distinctive way, rather different from that of modern semantics.
