Context, Reference, Schema

All language involves context; its meaning is contextually constrained. There is always an interplay of text and context. Indeed, human consciousness is inherently responsive to context. For example, when the eye sweeps its environment, the peripheral visual system is continually sampling context while the central ocular attention shifts; the perceptual data of the former are buffered and used to update, in terms of a changing assessment of context, those of the latter. Likewise, in the use of verbal language, there is a continual retracing of the hermeneutic circle of sign and context, an attempt to ‘frame’ properly the associative scenario of the sign (the play of A. J. Greimas’s ‘semes’), to equilibrize the tension between its general (lexemic) and particular (sememic) meanings. Context, for human language, is very thick, and its specification seems constantly to invite an infinite regress, an endless recursive looping of the hermeneutic circle; but, just as a dog stops chasing its tail by an ineffable impulse, so that regress or recursion is somehow truncated. (The determination of that stopping point is a profound problem in the simulation of natural-language comprehension. It is interlinked with the problem of adequately specifying rhetorical ‘decorum’ in language use and the larger problem of formalizing linguistic performance as well as competence.) With these thoughts in mind, I would like to turn to a consideration of the problem of context in the machine modelling of semantic processing.