ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews selected empirical research on the meanings of words in context. A word considered without context permits many interpretations. When considered in context, its meaning is further articulated in a process of inferential interpolation based on knowledge of the world. Words vary in the extent to which, without context, they constrain interpretation. Full comprehension of most utterances requires people to form a representation that is more particularized than could be generated solely on the basis of the abstract semantics of the constituent words. Without context, every word places some boundaries on possible instantiations. Instantiation entails "deep" processing, but people sometimes are content to process discourse at a "shallow" level. A pervasive effect of context is to allow people to narrow or focus the encoded representation of a word, a process that we have termed instantiation. A most important difference is that a context is less rich with instantiation-guiding information.
