Answerspace

The answerspace is the imaginary set of reasonable answerlines that are suggested by context like a question's pronoun, difficulty, and clues. It does not refer to the full set of possibilities (which is the canon) but to the subset evoked by how the question is actually written.

A question with a very small answerspace may be transparent to experienced players who can read the writer's mind and buzz without having any knowledge of specific clues used.

The Yaphe method is a way of answering questions that relies entirely on a player's ability to accurately construct and narrow the answerspace.

Theory

The answerspace is subjective because it depends on an individual's knowledge base, assessment of difficulty, and game knowledge. Thus it is useful to imagine the idealized answerspace of the man on the Clapham omnibus or of the community as a whole.

The most practical definition of context is "any information that a player notices but does not buzz on". This excludes clues because those only ever point to one answer and will instantly collapse the answerspace to one when the player recognizes them.

There are two desirable properties for the answerspace to have:

1. The most important thing is it should not narrow too quickly to avoid transparency.
2. It would also be good if it got narrower over time but this is lower priority.

Examples

Pronouns

There is a very wide range of context that can be communicated by a pronoun. This is especially true when considering non-standard pronouns incorporating phrases, which can even be written as clues for style or to save space. Changing the pronoun to be increasingly specific is often used by a writer to intentionally narrow the answerspace. For example, a question on Liszt could say change from this composer to this Hungarian composer or this subject of a namesake mania as it goes on.

It is not uncommon for the best choices of pronoun for a question to be too vague. For instance, questions on answerlines as varied as tides and prejudice share the pronoun this phenomenon because there is no better alternative.