Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages

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.

Combinations of very well studied and understudied languages offer new perspectives on the pairing of meaning and form Cross-linguistic experimental approaches combined with syntactic-semantic theoretical underpinnings and cross-disciplinary collaborative work Novel insights on the interaction of linguistic code and context in language production and comprehension

Inhalt

Foreword.- Chapter 1: Introduction: Meaning across Languages.- Chapter 2: Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Approach.- Chapter 3: Pairing Form and Meaning in English and Norwegian: Conjoined VPs or Conjoined Clauses?.- Chapter 4: Cross-linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect.- Chapter 5: Referring Expressions in Speech Reports.- Chapter 6: The Role of Grammaticality Judgments Within an Integral Approach to Brazilian Portuguese Bare Nominals.- Chapter 7: Information Structure and Pronoun Resolution in German and French: Evidence from the Visual-world Paradigm.- Chapter 8: Conversational Implicatures in Anaphora Resolution: Alternative Constructions and Referring Expressions.- Chapter 9: From Verbs to Discourse: A Novel Account of Implicit Causality.