Strategies and Structures: The processing of relative clauses (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)

Baker, Will,Prideaux, Gary D.

ISBN 10: 9027235406 / ISBN 13: 9789027235404

Published by John Benjamins Publishing Compan, 1987

About this Item

Volume 46 No dust jacket. Good hardcover with some shelfwear; may have previous owner's name inside. Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # mon0000059387

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Strategies and Structures: The processing of relative clauses (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)
• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Compan
• Publication Date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027235406
• ISBN 13: 9789027235404
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

In this monograph, the nature of processing strategies is explored in some detail, with an attempt to cut through the maze of often contradictory and confused proposals concerning the nature and form of various strategies. Once a preliminary conception of the nature of cognitive strategies and a hypothesis of how they interact with linguistic structures has been reached, it will be explored how such strategies are employed by examining experiments which address the role played by certain of these strategies in the comprehension and production of sentences. The authors draw a distinction between a strategy on the one hand and a grammatical structure on the other. They argued that, in principle, strategies ought to be formulated as language-independent, cognitively based operations which are involved in cognitive domains other than language, but which, in language processing, interact with language-specific structures to facilitate processing. Moreover, strategies are not linguistic rules, since, unlike rules, they permit exceptions and express tendencies rather than firm yes-no choices.

Synopsis

Investigating certain of those processes involved in the comprehension and production of language, this book adopts the perspective that these processes involve the interaction of certain strategies with the knowledge of linguistic structures. The thrust of the book is two-fold. First, it focuses on those strategies devoted to the processing of complex sentences. The argument is advanced that these can be reduced to a small set of quite general cognitive strategies which, although independent of the particulars of a given language, interact with the structures of that language during the processes of comprehension and production. Secondly, a series of studies is reported, including experiments dealing with comprehension and production, text analyses and cross-language experiments, in which the empirical predictions associated with the strategies are investigated. It is concluded that certain of the strategies are indeed operative in language processing while others must be discarded as having no empirical content.