How do you understand the word "indexed" in the first sentence of the following passage? If asked to replace it with a word or some words, what could it be?
Understanding a message requires the receiver to possess a sensitivity, which is “…indexed at a particular moment according to the context of an utterance and the specific goals they are trying to achieve.” (Giampapa 2001) For communication to be successful, all contextual information related to the message must be shared knowledge between the sender and receiver. As Halliday (XXX) notes the context involves distinct linguistic, physical and cultural contexts, and different combinations of these various contexts create different messages with varying pragmatic force (Halliday, 1978: 48). As such, the same word or combination of words can carry a very different message in different contexts. Context is thus crucial for clarifying ambiguities, and taking the various contextual variables (time, place, environment, etc.) into consideration (Flores, 2001) is vital to process meaning accurately.