Conflicts in Interpretation applies novel methods of constraint interaction, derived from connectionist theories and implemented in linguistics within the framework of Optimality Theory, to core semantic and pragmatic issues such as polysemy, negation, (in)definiteness, focus, anaphora, and rhetorical structure. It explores the hypothesis that a natural language grammar is a set of potentially conflicting constraints on forms and meanings. Moreover, it hypothesizes that competent language users not only optimize from an input form to the optimal output meaning for this form, or vice versa,...

Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, this book draws on linguistic theory, psycholinguistic studies and computational modeling to examine resulting asymmetries between the production and comprehension of language.