Construal (Language, Speech and Communication) - Hardcover

Frazier, Lyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262061791 ISBN 13: 9780262061797

Publisher: MIT Press, 1996

Synopsis

Construal presents a new theory of sentence processing, one that allows a limited type of underspecification in the syntactic analysis of sentences. It extends what has arguably been the dominant theory of parsing (the garden-path theory developed by Lyn Frazier and colleagues) through the 1980s into new and previously unexplored domains, and greatly advances the potential for insights into how meaning is both made and understood. Frazier and Clifton, both pioneers in parsing theory, present new psycholinguistic theory and experimentation concerning how "nonprimary" phrases are analyzed in sentence comprehension. They define a process of "construal" and show how it accounts for cases in which the parser does not fully determine structure during the course of ordinary comprehension. The idea of construal arises in part through the authors' critical review of the challenges to their established framework for research on structural parsing. While they demonstrate that the principles of parsing theory remain valid for a wide variety of languages and grammatical constructions, they go beyond them to clearly identify those types of constructions built by the process of construal. Frazier and Clifton show that construal follows distinct principles, and they flesh out their hypothesis with previously unexamined evidence and new empirical tests.

About this title

Review:

"For the past 15 years research on human sentence parsing has beendominated by the work of Frazier, Clifton and their colleagues atUMass, Amherst. This stimulating monograph provides a wealth ofnew evidence and argument--all used persuasively to refine andupdate their theoretical position. It is a tour de force whichwill ensure that their research remains the focus of continuingdebate for another 15 years." Don Mitchell, University of Exeter "This is required reading for anyone interested in how we understandsentences we read or hear, and how we decide among the alternativeinterpretations of ambiguous sentences." Stephen Crain, University of Maryland at College Park

About the Author:

Charles Clifton is Professor Emeritus of the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0262061791
• ISBN 13: 9780262061797
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240