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The process of linguistic understanding

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Abstract

The majority of our linguistic exchanges, such as everyday conversations, are divided into turns; one party usually talks at a time, with only relatively rare occurrences of brief overlaps in which there are two (or more) simultaneous speakers. Moreover, conversational turn-taking tends to be very fast. We typically start producing our responses before the previous turn has finished, i.e., before we are confronted with the full content of our interlocutor’s utterance. This raises interesting questions about the nature of linguistic understanding. Philosophical theories typically focus on linguistic understanding characterized either as an ability to grasp the contents of utterances in a given language or as outputs of this ability—mental states of one type or another. In this paper, I supplement these theories by developing an account of the process of understanding. I argue that it enables us to capture the dynamic and temporal aspect of understanding and reconcile philosophical investigations with empirical research on language comprehension.

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Notes

  1. Of course, to say that 0.2 s is the length of a typical gap in conversation is a vast generalization. A lot depends on such factors as the type of the upcoming turn. For example, Kendrick (2015) observes that turns involving repair appear approximately 0.7 s after the preceding ones. However, even 0.7 s is still a short enough gap to support the argument presented in what follows.

  2. It is important to keep in mind that linguistic understanding that is the subject of this paper should not be identified with communicative success. Arguably, communicative success may, in specific situation, be achieved despite the lack of linguistic understanding (or in the case of only partial understanding). Thus, linguistic understanding is not identical with the communicative success, although might (and typically does) contribute to it.

  3. In this essay, I focus on the understanding of speech (spoken linguistic input). I think that it will be relatively easy to extend my proposed account to the written word, although I do not undertake this task here.

  4. I outline my view on states of understanding in Grodniewicz (ms). Moreover, in Sect. 4, I discuss the hypothesis that the process of understanding is constituted out of states of (partial) understanding.

  5. I will discuss the differences between these notions in the next section.

  6. Other authors pick different terminological conventions. For example, Crowther (2011) uses the term “process” for what I, following e.g., Vendler (1957) and Rothstein (2004), call “activity.”

  7. Cf. Rothstein (2004).

  8. For an exhaustive and illuminating discussion of the difference between activities and accomplishments see (Crowther 2011).

  9. That does not mean that they have the same temporal structure. More on this topic in Sect. 4.

  10. Certainly, analyzing the recording of Goldberg Variations may continue long after the playing and hearing are finished (in fact, it may take place over the course of multiple playings and hearings), while understanding an utterance typically finishes right after the vocalizing and hearing.

  11. See Jørgensen (1991) for a discussion of progressive uses of predominantly stative verbs including “understand.”

  12. Notice also, that (in the accomplishment sense) the sentence “Anne was understanding what Tom was saying” is consistent with its never being the case that she understood what Tom was saying. If Tom was saying “The results clearly indicate that the asteroid is going to hit us in 16 h.” but he was wrong, and the asteroid hit right after he vocalized the word “asteroid” annihilating all life on earth, Anne was understanding what Tom was saying but she never understood it. We can say that she understood a part of it, but we can say the same thing about Alice who, when the asteroid hit, was building a house (a classical example of an accomplishment). Alice never built the house (achievement), even though she built a part of it, for example, just the walls.

  13. Notice that the garden-path data is complementary to the turn-taking data. Fast turn-taking alone could result from interlocutors being simply uninterested in what others have to say and merely waiting for their chance to speak. Garden path data, however, proves that hearers build interpretations of what speakers say based on fragments of utterances which they have already perceived. This is why they are surprised when the actual continuations of utterances do not meet their predictions.

  14. Even though the way that conversation analysis characterizes linguistic actions is different from the way philosophy of language typically characterizes speech acts, I take the two enterprises to be complementary. The primary interest of conversation analysis is a statistical classification of countless patterns observable in human linguistic activity (Schegloff 1992, 2007). Speech act theories, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with constitutive features (either conventional, intentional, functional, expressive or normative) of selected speech acts. Nevertheless, even though the list of speech acts studied in philosophy is shorter than the list of linguistic actions studied in conversation analysis, there can be little doubt that whatever work has already been done in relation to, e.g., asserting, asking, promising, etc., is but the tip of the iceberg of all the speech act types that figure in our everyday linguistic activity. More than anything, it might be a matter of fine-grainedness; maybe speech act theory will come up with a shorter list of more general speech act types that could then be used as scaffolding for the classification of the myriads of subtypes of linguistic actions. As Austin himself already admitted in his foundational work (1962): “I am not suggesting that this is a clearly defined class by any means” (p. 99).

  15. As I have suggested above, the process of understanding is involuntary. It is widely recognized that linguistic understanding is not an intentional action (Hunter 1998) and that it is mostly performed by our cognitive system “sub-personally” and independently of our will (Pettit 2010). We cannot prevent our understanding of a sentence spoken in a language we understand in the dispositional sense, once we hear it. We cannot decide not to trigger the understanding process. Moreover, even though there is an extensive range of actions that we can perform to improve our understanding (in some cases we can facilitate it by, e.g., repeating an exceptionally complicated sentence aloud or writing it down and parsing it), the occasions on which we actually do so constitute but a tiny portion of our omnipresent linguistic activity. Typically, the understanding process initiates automatically, compulsorily and does not require any personal-level action (see, e.g., Marslen-Wilson and Tyler 1981; Fodor 1983).

  16. For simplicity I assume here that the utterance is represented in the subsequent states word-by-word. Competing models, e.g., phoneme-by-phoneme, are also possible.

  17. For more about the nature of experiential processes see Soteriou (2013, 2018).

  18. Longworth’s account of linguistic understanding is very elaborate (Longworth 2008a, b, 2010, 2018), and I could not hope to address all its subtleties in the present paper. Here, my only goal is to suggest that by paying special attention to the process by which the states of understanding are generated, we might collect additional data worth taking into consideration while investigating the nature of these states.

  19. I discuss these issues in Grodniewicz (ms).

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Derek Ball, Liz Camp, Mark Jary, Aleksandra Krogulska, Palle Leth, Manolo Martínez, Michele Palmira, Paul Pietroski, Krzysztof Posłajko, Adam Sennet, and Abel Suñé for helpful comments, questions, and objections. Special thanks to Bartłomiej Czajka, Manuel García-Carpintero, Grzegorz Gaszczyk, and Josep Macià for numerous detailed conversations on the topics of this paper, and an anonymous referee for this journal for excellent suggestions.

Funding

Financial support was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2016-80588-R.

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Correspondence to J. P. Grodniewicz.

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Grodniewicz, J.P. The process of linguistic understanding. Synthese 198, 11463–11481 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02807-9

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