Demeco · Default meanings in compound interpretation

Default meanings in compound interpretation

Languages always change, and existing words are constantly combined into novel combinations such as the compound nouns ‘trout pout’ (lips injected with collagen) or ‘bucket list’ (things to do before you die). Surprisingly, little is known about the actual processes and resources humans use to understand these novel combinations when they encounter them for the first time. This project investigated a central question in the field of linguistics, namely the extent to which people rely on inherent meanings of words in combination (lexical semantics), compared with the extent to which they infer meaning from context (pragmatics). Focussing on English noun-noun compounds, we proceeded in two steps. We first investigated how humans interpret new compounds when they see them in the absence of any context. In particular, we wanted to know whether, for a given group of language users, some compounds show more variation in interpretation than others, and if so, what determines the amount of variation shown. Secondly, we investigated how twenty of these combinations were interpreted in context. Using contexts designed to bias the reader towards unusual interpretations of the compounds, we were interested in how reading time varied between compounds that have a clearly preferred reading in isolation (a ‘default’ interpretation) as opposed to compounds that do not have clearly preferred readings in isolation. This design was intended to enable us to evaluate two rival theories about the relative importance of different information sources to language users. In the theory of generalised conversational implicatures, any default interpretation is expected to arise automatically in the minds of speakers, and therefore needs to be ‘cancelled’ if not compatible with the context. According to this theory, the stronger the default interpretation in isolation, the longer it should take to read a compound when the context requires a different interpretation, because of the effort involved in over-riding the default. In contrast, in the theory of default semantics, default interpretations only arise in the minds of speakers when they are compatible with the context. According to this theory, interpretations given out of context should have no effect on reading time for compounds in context. A better understanding of how language works is potentially useful in a wide variety of applications, including language teaching, speech and language therapy, translation and all interactions of humans with computers.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз