meaningsmallness

Meaningsmallness is a term used in semantics to denote the degree to which the semantic content contributed by a linguistic expression is small or compact relative to its potential propositional load. It focuses on how much information about the intended meaning an expression carries in a given context, and how much is supplied by context or discourse rather than by the expression itself. The concept is typically framed in terms of content density, contextual dependence, and scope of the expressed proposition. Expressions with high meaningsmallness may contribute mainly functional or deictic information, while the surrounding context supplies most of the truth-conditional content.

Etymology: The term blends “meaning” with “smallness” and is a recent coinage in theoretical semantics to describe a property of expressions and their role in communication.

Theoretical usage: Researchers consider meaningsmallness when comparing lexical items, pronouns, determiners, discourse markers, and ellipsis cases. For example, function words like articles or pronouns often exhibit lower content density, implying higher meaning-smallness, whereas full content words typically contribute substantial semantic load. However, in many contexts, even content words participate in compact meaning when the discourse context is used to specify reference or inference. The property is sometimes analyzed along a spectrum from highly small to highly large, rather than as a binary state.

Measurement and debate: There is no universally accepted metric. Some approaches treat meaningsmallness as inverse information content relative to context (surprisal-based) or as a measure of the extent to which the context determines truth-conditions. The idea intersects with semantic bleaching, with pragmatic enrichment, and with theories of contextualism and minimalism.

See also: semantic minimalism, semantic bleaching, information theory in linguistics, contextualism, pragmatic enrichment.