What Is the “Context” for Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition?
William J. Rapaport · 2003
“Contextual ” vocabulary acquisition is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from context, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. But what is “context”? Is it just the surrounding text? Does it include the reader’s background knowledge? I argue that the appropriate context for contextual vocabulary acquisition is the reader’s “internalization ” of the text “integrated ” into the reader’s “prior ” knowledge via belief revision. 1... every linguistic representation of some circumstance is in principle incomplete and must be supplemented from our knowledge about the circumstance.