kontextbunden

Kontextbunden is a term used in linguistics and philosophy of language to describe expressions whose interpretation depends on features of the surrounding situation. Such expressions are sensitive to who is speaking, when and where the utterance occurs, and what has been said or assumed in the discourse. They contrast with context-free elements whose reference remains fixed across contexts.

In semantics and pragmatics, kontextbunden items include indexicals and deictics (for example I, you, here, now in many languages) as well as demonstratives such as this and that. Their reference is not determined solely by the linguistic form but by the communicative context. Theoretical treatments range from traditional truth-conditional semantics with context indices to dynamic or contextual theories like discourse representation or dynamic semantics, which model meaning as context change potentials.

Examples: I (jag), you (du), here (här), now (nu), this book (den här boken). Their readings shift with speaker, time, place, and discourse history, illustrating how interpretation anchors in interaction rather than in fixed denotations.

Applications: recognizing kontextbunden expressions is essential in natural language processing, machine translation, and dialogue systems, where coreference resolution and accurate interpretation require access to current discourse context. Cross-linguistically, languages differ in how they encode and mark deictic systems; some rely heavily on spatial and temporal deixis, others use grammatical person markers and demonstratives.

See also: deixis, indexical, anaphora, dynamic semantics, discourse representation theory.