Meaning Effects of Context

Shulamith Kreitler*, Hans Kreitler

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Context exerts effects in a broad range of domains. We assumed that the element common to these effects has an impact on the input's meaning. Our purpose was to analyze the effects of context in terms of the meaning system (by Kreitler and Kreitler) that enables assessing meaning units, consisting of referent and meaning value, by means of four sets of meaning variables. In the reported studies, we used only one of the sets—meaning dimensions, which characterize the contents of the meaning units in terms of general content categories. Study 1, with 240 high-school students and undergraduates as subjects, focused on comparing the meanings of referents and meaning values presented separately and in context. The results revealed four kinds of effects of context on meaning of the referent and/or the meaning value: constancy that involves no change in meanings, contraction that involves a narrowing down of the meanings, expansion that involves adding new meanings, and transformation (mostly by metaphorization) that involves changing the meanings. The four effects differed in the number of meanings and in the meaning dimensions characterizing them. Study 2, with 126 undergraduates as subjects, focused on identifying the conditions under which the meaning changes occurred. The results showed that the four kinds of changes differed in scores of novelty, conventionality, and interestingness, and that the degree and kind of compatibility between the meaning value and referent were responsible for the different effects.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)429-449
Number of pages21
JournalDiscourse Processes
Volume16
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Oct 1993

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