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This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else. Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults. Gathering contemporary insights from theoretical linguistic research, psycholinguistic studies and computational modeling, Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension presents a unified explanation of this phenomenon. “Through a lucid, comprehensive review of acquisition studies on reference-related phenomena, Petra Hendriks builds a striking case for the pervasiveness of asymmetries in comprehension/production. In her view, listeners systematically misunderstand what they hear, and speakers systematically fail to prevent such misunderstandings. She argues that linguistic theory should take stock of current psycholinguistic and developmental evidence on optionality and ambiguity, and recognize language as a signaling system. The arguments are compelling yet controversial: grammar does not specify a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning; and the demands of the mapping task differ for listeners and speakers. Her proposal is formalized within optimality theory, but researchers working outside this framework will still find it of great interest. In the language-as-code vs. language-as-signal debate, Hendriks puts the ball firmly in the other court.” Ana Pérez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Canada.

Language and languages. --- Language acquisition. --- Linguistics. --- Linguistics, general. --- Linguistic science --- Science of language --- Language and languages --- Acquisition of language --- Developmental linguistics --- Developmental psycholinguistics --- Language development in children --- Psycholinguistics, Developmental --- Interpersonal communication in children --- Psycholinguistics --- Foreign languages --- Languages --- Anthropology --- Communication --- Ethnology --- Information theory --- Meaning (Psychology) --- Philology --- Linguistics --- Acquisition

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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

Semantics. --- Pragmatics. --- Constraints (Linguistics) --- Optimality theory (Linguistics) --- Optimality (Linguistics) --- Optimization (Linguistics) --- Generative grammar --- Grammar, Comparative and general --- Linguistic analysis (Linguistics) --- Pragmalinguistics --- General semantics --- Language and languages --- Logic, Symbolic and mathematical --- Semantics (Philosophy) --- Formal semantics --- Semasiology --- Semiology (Semantics) --- Comparative linguistics --- Information theory --- Lexicology --- Meaning (Psychology) --- Philosophy

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Linguistics

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The mental representation of language cannot be directly observed but must be inferred and modelled from its effects at second hand. Linguists have traditionally responded to this in two ways, either going for a fairly data-light approach and valuing theoretical creativity, or pursuing just those goals for which data is available and trusting to data-driven descriptive work. More recently, advances in technology and experimental techniques have made data gathering easier and more accessible, so that a theoretically informed but empirically based approach is rapidly growing in popularity. This synthesis permits linguists to combine the intellectual hypothesis generation of the theoreticians with the ability to deliver hard answers of the empiricist. This volume is a collection of papers in this direction, using mostly experiment methods to yield insights into syntactic and semantic structures, language processing, and acquisition. Papers report corpus data, neurological investigations, child language studies, and fieldwork from minority languages.

Linguistics. --- Linguistic analysis (Linguistics) --- Analysis, Linguistic (Linguistics) --- Analysis (Philosophy) --- Grammar, Comparative and general --- Linguistic science --- Science of language --- Language and languages --- Psycholinguistics. --- Semantics. --- Syntax.