Argument refers to a fact or statement used to support a proposition; a reason. It commonly describes a verbal dispute; a quarrel, a process of reasoning, and a series of propositions organized so that the final proposition is a conclusion which is intended to follow logically from the preceding propositions, which function as premises, which gives the term a broader and more practical sense than a single short definition would suggest. Depending on context, it can also point to the independent variable of a function, the phase of a complex number, and a value, or reference to a value, passed to a function, so the category can cover literal uses, related ideas, and more figurative extensions of the same core meaning. Taken together, these meanings present Argument as a flexible theme rather than a narrowly technical label, covering the central idea people usually mean when they use the word while still leaving room for closely related senses that appear in real language. Additional shades of meaning include a parameter at a function call; an actual parameter, as opposed to a formal parameter, any of the phrases that bears a syntactic connection to the verb of a clause, the quantity on which another quantity in a table depends, the subject matter of a discourse, writing, or artistic representation; theme or topic; also, an abstract or summary, as of the contents of a book, chapter, poem, and matter for question; business in hand, which reinforce how the category can stretch across adjacent but still recognizable uses of the same term.
