Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding Across Languages

ISBN-13: 9783319056746 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 251 str.

Barbara Hemforth; Barbara Schmiedtova; Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen

Opis

Reports on joint work by researchers from different theoretical and linguistic backgrounds offer new insights on the interaction of linguistic code and context in language production and comprehension. This volume takes a genuinely cross-linguistic approach integrating theoretically well-founded contrastive descriptions with thorough empirical investigations. Authors answer questions on the topic of how we 'encode' complex thoughts into linguistic signals and how we interpret such signals in appropriate ways. Chapters combine on- and off-line empirical methods varying from large-scale corpus analyses over acceptability judgements, sentence completion studies and reading time experiments. The authors shed new light on the central questions related to our everyday use of language, especially the problem of how we construe meaning in and through language in general as well as through the means provided by particular languages.

Spis treści

Foreword by Bart Geurts.- Chapter 1: Introduction: Meaning across Languages By Barbara Hemforth, Barbara Mertins, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen.- Chapter 2: Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Approach By Bergljot Behrens, Barbara Mertins, Barbara Hemforth, and Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen.- Chapter 3: Pairing Form and Meaning in English and Norwegian: Conjoined VPs or Conjoined Clauses? By Bergljot Behrens, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen, Lyn Frazier.- Chapter 4: Cross-linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect By Oliver Bott, Fritz Hamm.- Chapter 5: Referring Expressions in Speech Reports By Kaja Borthen, Barbara Hemforth, Barbara Mertins, Bergljot Behrens, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen.- Chapter 6: The Role of Grammaticality Judgments Within an Integral Approach to Brazilian Portuguese Bare Nominals By Albert Wall.- Chapter 7: Information Structure and Pronoun Resolution in German and French: Evidence from the Visual-world Paradigm By Saveria Colonna, Sarah Schimke, Barbara Hemforth.- Chapter 8: Conversational Implicatures in Anaphora Resolution: Alternative Constructions and Referring Expressions By Peter Baumann, Lars Konieczny, Barbara Hemforth.- Chapter 9: From Verbs to Discourse: A Novel Account of Implicit Causality By Oliver Bott, Torgrim Solstad.

Blurb

Reports on joint work by researchers from different theoretical and linguistic backgrounds offer new insights on the interaction of linguistic code and context in language production and comprehension. This volume takes a genuinely cross-linguistic approach integrating theoretically well-founded contrastive descriptions with thorough empirical investigations. Authors answer questions on the topic of how we ‘encode’ complex thoughts into linguistic signals and how we interpret such signals in appropriate ways.

Chapters combine on- and off-line empirical methods varying from large-scale corpus analyses over acceptability judgements, sentence completion studies, and reading time experiments. The authors shed new light on the central questions related to our everyday use of language, especially the problem of how we construe meaning in and through language in general as well as through the means provided by particular languages.

​“Language is there to construct meaning. But languages are different -- in their lexicon, in their morphosyntax, also in their ways of constructing discourse and in the extent to which they rely on implicit knowledge and on conversational rules. So, what does this tell us about the meanings constructed by language? Are they the same (as, for example, the two number expressions "1989" and "MCMLXXXIX" mean the same) -- or are they different, due to the way how meanings are constructed? This edited volume provides an ingenious way to discuss differences how meanings are constructed, by focusing on narrowly described phenomena and contrasting two languages per article. It seeks evidence for these differences not only from intuition of speakers and from linguistic corpora, but primarily from experimental studies. Thus, it provides an important contribution of our understanding what linguistic meaning is.” Manfred Krifka, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin & Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin