Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages

258 Pages·2014·3.98 MB·English

by  Barbara Hemforth

Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 44
Barbara Hemforth
Barbara Mertins
Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen Editors
Psycholinguistic
Approaches to
Meaning and
Understanding
across Languages
Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning
and Understanding across Languages
STUDIES IN THEORETICAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Volume44
ManagingEditors
LynFrazier,Dept.ofLinguistics,UniversityofMassachusettsatAmherst
ThomasRoeper,Dept.ofLinguistics,UniversityofMassachusettsatAmherst
KennethWexler,Dept.ofBrainandCognitiveScience,MIT,Cambridge,Mass.
EditorialBoard
RobertBerwick,ArtificialIntelligenceLaboratory,MIT,Cambridge,Mass.
MatthewCrocker,SaarlandUniversity,Germany
JanetDeanFodor,CityUniversityofNewYork,NewYork
AngelaFriederici,MaxPlanckInstituteofHumanCognitiveandBrainSciences,Germany
MerrillGarrett,UniversityofArizona,Tucson
LilaGleitman,SchoolofEducation,UniversityofPennsylvania
ChrisKennedy,NorthwesternUniversity,Illinois
ManfredKrifka,HumboldtUniversity,Berlin,Germany
HowardLasnik,UniversityofMaryland
YukioOtsu,KeioUniversity,Tokyo
AndrewRadford,UniversityofEssex,U.K.
Forfurthervolumes:
http://www.springer.com/series/6555
Barbara Hemforth • Barbara Mertins
Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen
Editors
Psycholinguistic Approaches
to Meaning and
Understanding across
Languages
123
Editors
BarbaraHemforth BarbaraMertins
ParisDiderotUniversity UniversityofHeidelberg
Paris,France Heidelberg,Germany
CathrineFabricius-Hansen
UniversityofOslo
Oslo,Norway
ISSN1873-0043
ISBN978-3-319-05674-6 ISBN978-3-319-05675-3(eBook)
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-05675-3
SpringerChamHeidelbergNewYorkDordrechtLondon
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Foreword
At the first linguistics conference I attended as a student, one of the keynote
speakersheldforthonthesyntacticanalysisofEnglishcleftsentences.Duringthe
discussion period,membersof the audiencequestionedthe grammaticalityof one
ofthespeaker’sexamplesentences.Thereensuedapoliteexchangeofintrospective
judgments, which ended when the speaker declared that, be all as it may, the
sentence in question was perfectly well-formed in his idiolect of English. Much
to my surprise, this settled the matter straight away, and the discussion turned to
morepressingissues.
I wouldhave beensurprisedin anycase, butwhatmadethe incidentpositively
surreal, at least to my mind, was the fact that the speaker was Japanese and quite
audiblynotanativespeakerofEnglish.
From the 1960s onwards, the accepted methodology in theoretical linguistics
wasbrazenlyautobiographical.BasedonedictsemanatingfromtheMassachusetts
InstituteofTechnology,itwastakenaswritthatitisthelinguist’sjobtoprobehisor
herpersonal“competence”.EvenasatimidstudentduringtheReaganera,Ihadthe
uncannyfeelingthatthiswasn’tso mucha methodologyasa recipefornonsense,
butitwasthereceivedview,andittookawhilebeforeitsinfluencestartedtowane.
Thingshavedefinitelychanged,andeveniftheautobioapproachremainsalive,
it’skickingalotlessthanitusedto.Ithasbecomewidelyacceptedthatquantitative
methodscanbeusefuleventothoseofuswhosecorebusinessisdesigningtheories
of language, and the chapters of this volume demonstrate, both separately and
collectively,howfruitfulquantitativemethodscanbe,especiallywhenwieldedby
researcherswhoknowwhatthey’redoing.
The following chapters cover an impressive variety of semantic and pragmatic
topics, ranging from reference and aspect to coordination and conversational
implicatures,informationstructure,andspeechreports.Theexperimentalmethods
broughttobeararenolessdiverse,includingastheydovariouskindsofquestion-
naireandcorpusstudies,self-pacedreading,andeyetracking.
Andthere’smore.Oneofthechiefdogmasofgenerativelinguisticsusedtobe
thatallhumanlanguagesareessentiallythesame.Itwasclaimedinallearnestness
thataMartianscientistvisitingourplanetwouldhavetoconcludethatallEarthlings
v
vi Foreword
speak the same language, save for the obvious fact that their lexicons diverge.
Nowadays it stretches belief that even in the recent past this view was taken
seriously, but it has been extraordinarily influential both within linguistics and
without, and perhaps it goes some way to account for the fact that most studies
in semanticsand pragmatics,theoreticalas well as experimental,have been about
oneandthesamelanguage,thatistosay,English.(Anotherpartoftheexplanation,
I fear, is that language researchers are as lazy as the next person.) This, too, has
begun to change. There is an increasing awareness that the interpretative systems
even of closely related languages like English and German are different in many
fascinatingways,andeverysinglechapterinthisvolumeatteststotheimportance
oftheplurilingualapproach.
UniversityofNijmegen BartGeurts
Nijmegen,TheNetherlands
Preface
The idea/plan for this book evolved during a 1-year (2010/2011)research project
“Meaning and Understanding across Languages”, funded by the Centre for
Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (see
http://www.cas.uio.no/research/1011acrosslanguages/index.php) and headed by
Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen. The editors and four other contributors (Bergljot
Behrens,OliverBott,LynFrazier,andTorgrimSolstad)participatedintheproject,
whichbroughttogetherresearchersrepresentingdifferentinterestsanddisciplines:
theoreticalsemanticsandpragmatics,contrastivelinguisticsandpsycholinguistics.
Half of the chapterspresentcollaborativeresults fromthat enterprise.We want to
thankCASforthewonderfultimewespentthere,andforenablingthepublication
of this book. We are also grateful to anonymous reviewers, whose comments on
earlierversionsoftheindividualpapershavebeenextremelyuseful,andwethank
StigOppedalforhisefficientandconscientiousproofreading.
Paris,France BarbaraHemforth
Heidelberg,Germany BarbaraMertins
Oslo,Norway CathrineFabricius-Hansen
November2013
vii

Contents
Introduction:MeaningAcrossLanguages .................................... 1
BarbaraHemforth, BarbaraMertins,
andCathrineFabricius-Hansen
Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic
ExperimentalApproach......................................................... 23
BergljotBehrens, BarbaraMertins, BarbaraHemforth,
andCathrineFabricius-Hansen
Pairing Form and Meaning in English and Norwegian:
ConjoinedVPsorConjoinedClauses? ........................................ 53
BergljotBehrens,CathrineFabricius-Hansen,andLynFrazier
Cross-LinguisticVariationintheProcessingofAspect...................... 83
OliverBottandFritzHamm
ReferringExpressionsinSpeechReports..................................... 111
KajaBorthen, BarbaraHemforth, BarbaraMertins,
BergljotBehrens,andCathrineFabricius-Hansen
TheRoleofGrammaticalityJudgmentsWithinanIntegral
ApproachtoBrazilianPortugueseBareNominals........................... 143
AlbertWall
InformationStructureandPronounResolutioninGerman
andFrench:EvidencefromtheVisual-WorldParadigm.................... 175
SaveriaColonna,SarahSchimke,andBarbaraHemforth
Conversational Implicatures in Anaphora Resolution:
AlternativeConstructionsandReferringExpressions....................... 197
PeterBaumann,LarsKonieczny,andBarbaraHemforth
FromVerbstoDiscourse:ANovelAccountofImplicitCausality.......... 213
OliverBottandTorgrimSolstad
ix