kontextunabhängigen

Kontextunabhängig is an adjective in German that describes something as not dependent on the surrounding context. The inflected form kontextunabhängigen appears in phrases such as kontextunabhängige Merkmale or kontextunabhängigen Merkmalen, depending on grammatical case and number. The term is common in technical and scholarly language.

In linguistics and semantics, kontextunabhängig refers to readings or meanings that do not require knowledge of the immediate discourse or situation. By contrast, kontextabhängig (context-dependent) elements rely on factors like speaker intention, discourse context, or situational cues. Examples often cited are mathematical truths or invariant definitions, which can be considered kontextunabhängig, versus deictic expressions like hier (here) or jetzt (now), which are inherently context-dependent.

In computer science and logic, kontextunabhängige or context-free constructs are those whose behavior or truth conditions depend only on explicit inputs, not on external state or calling context. Such context-independence supports referential transparency and forms a basis for formal reasoning and program verification. Pure functions, for instance, are typically described as kontextunabhängig because they yield the same output for a given input regardless of when or where they are invoked.

Etymologically, the term is a compound of Kontext and unabhängig, reflecting its core idea. It is widely used in German technical writing to distinguish features, meanings, or behaviors that are stable across contexts from those that vary with context. See also kontextabhängigkeit, pragmatics, semantics, and context-free concepts.