This volume explores how the effectiveness of communication is shaped by aspects of semantics and pragmatics such as compositionality, the role of the speaker and hearer, and the acquisition of meaning. "Optimal Communication "surveys recent research in the fields of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and draws from optimality theory to argue that optimal meanings result from a compromise between competing constraints. "Optimal Communication" will be an invaluable resource for students in cognitive science, linguistics, and natural language semantics.

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.