{
  "id": "marginal.spatial",
  "term": "marginal",
  "sense": "spatial",
  "pos": "adjective",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 12,
  "arena": "abstract spatial reasoning",
  "domain": "window ontology",
  "style": "window",
  "definition": "Near a wall, in the narrow band where small drift decides whether a thing persists though its parts remain.",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "window.range",
      "wall.range-end",
      "drift.aimless",
      "parameter.condition",
      "narrow.spatial",
      "near.spatial",
      "small.size",
      "whether.conditional",
      "persist.continue",
      "part.relation"
    ],
    "interaction": "drift.aimless changes a parameter within a narrow.spatial range near a wall.range-end, where small.size variations determine whether.conditional persistence occurs within the window.range of allowable parameter.condition values, despite part.relation and persist.continue.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "proximity to boundary",
      "fragility of persistence",
      "sensitivity to minor drift"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The International Space Station maintains orbit just above atmospheric drag, requiring monthly reboosts to avoid decay.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "In 1986, Chernobyl's Reactor 4 operated despite safety protocols failing in the control room's edge zone.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "A sidewalk ice patch persists for hours in the narrow shadow of a building where sunlight barely reaches.",
      "domain": "everyday life"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "marginal",
    "marginals"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "retrofit:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.8,
    "sources": [
      "Sample/hundred-words-six-terms.md"
    ],
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "components",
      "note": "Added missing constitutive concepts from definition: near.spatial, small.size, whether.conditional, though.conjunction, persist.continue, part.relation. Definition remained correct; record was incompl"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-marginal.spatial"
}