Clearmeaning

Clearmeaning is a concept in semantics and communication studies describing how much a statement yields an unambiguous interpretation for an audience. It is distinct from linguistic clarity, which concerns style and syntax, and from truth-conditions, which concern what a sentence commits to be the case. Clearmeaning emphasizes recoverability of intended content from context and background knowledge.

Origin and usage: The term has appeared in contemporary discussions about how people derive intended messages from utterances. It is not tied to a single theory but is used heuristically to discuss ambiguity, context, and communicative effectiveness.

Factors: The degree of clearmeaning depends on lexical choices, syntactic structure, discourse context, interlocutor knowledge, and pragmatic cues. Ambiguity arises from polysemy, attachment, ellipsis, and implicature. Assessments include human rating and automatic measures of ambiguity and surprisal; in NLP, clearmeaning aligns with disambiguation and faithful generation metrics.

Examples: “She gave her dog biscuits” is typically high in clearmeaning when referents are known; “I'll meet you by the bank” has lower clearmeaning without context.

Applications and implications: In education, legal drafting, and user interfaces, maximizing clearmeaning helps reduce misinterpretation. In AI and language generation, systems aim for clearmeaning by providing unambiguous outputs and explicit disambiguation when readings diverge.

Critique: The concept is subjective and context-dependent; overemphasis on unambiguity can suppress nuance and pragmatic meaning, and interpretations can differ across cultures.

See also: clarity, semantic disambiguation, ambiguity in language.