opodstatnnost

Opodstatnnost is a theoretical notion in linguistics and philosophy of language used to describe the degree to which a statement carries substantive content beyond what is entailed by context or background knowledge. It is intended to capture how much information a sentence adds that is not predictable from the discourse situation.

The term appears to be a neologism drawing on Slavic roots related to substance and foundation. In scholarly use, opodstatnnost is treated as a spectrum, with low values for context-dependent or obvious statements and high values for assertions that are informative across contexts. It is discussed in semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis, and there is no single agreed-upon measurement.

Operational approaches typically combine judgments of informativeness, contextual independence, and assertional necessity. Examples help illustrate the idea. A high-opodstatnnost utterance might be "Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level," which conveys a precise, non-contextual fact. A low-opodstatnnost utterance could be "It is raining," in a context where rain is already assumed to be occurring, contributing little beyond the situation.

The concept intersects with related ideas such as informativeness, substantive content, and pragmatics, and it is relevant to fields ranging from theoretical linguistics to natural language processing.