kontekstkrevende

Kontekstkrevende is an adjective used in Norwegian to describe phenomena, statements, or tasks that require contextual information for correct interpretation or performance. In practical terms, something kontekstkrevende cannot be understood or executed without considering factors such as prior discourse, social setting, culture, or background knowledge.

Etymology: The term is formed from kontekst (context) and krevende (demanding, requiring). In Norwegian usage it is a direct calque of the English context-dependent or context-sensitive, and it is common in academic and media discourse but less typical in everyday speech.

Applications: In linguistics, pronoun reference and polysemy are kontekstkrevende, as meaning depends on surrounding text or discourse. In AI and natural language processing, tasks such as sentiment analysis, sarcasm detection, and general language understanding require long-range context to disambiguate meaning. In film studies, journalism, and media criticism, interpretation of motifs, rhetoric, or headlines may be kontekstkrevende due to cultural references or audience familiarity.

Implications: Recognizing kontekstkrevende elements highlights limits of decontextualized analysis and motivates models and approaches that incorporate discourse history, world knowledge, and user-specific information. Methods include discourse analysis, corpus studies, and machine-learning approaches that use contextual representations, such as transformer-based models capable of attending to multiple sentences or documents.

See also: context-dependence; context-sensitivity; pragmatics.