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A Cross-Linguistic Perspective on Discourse Context and Syntactic Processing in Language Production

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Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 25))

Abstract

Communication is a co-operative process. The speaker’s purpose is to convey some information to the listener. The listener’s task is to extract this information and integrate it with existing knowledge. Although considerable progress has been made in studying the listener and the mechanisms responsible for information extraction and integration, much less is known about the mechanisms which underlie the speaker’s production of language. In particular, much of the existing evidence is limited to the production of isolated sentences. This chapter is, like Heydel and Murray’s chapter (this volume), concerned with the way in which previous context can affect syntactic processing during cross-linguistic language production. Our particular focus is on the relationship between features of the discourse context and the syntactic structure that a speaker assigns to a sentence. We will be especially concerned with the relationship between pragmatic theories and processing theories, and whether processing mechanisms which have been proposed for the production of isolated sentences can also account for context effects in production.

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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Branigan, H.P., Prat-Sala, M. (2000). A Cross-Linguistic Perspective on Discourse Context and Syntactic Processing in Language Production. In: De Vincenzi, M., Lombardo, V. (eds) Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Language Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3949-6_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3949-6_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0292-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3949-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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