Summary

Abstract

Starting out with Shannon (1948), I developed the outlines of a model of active interpretation: a speaker transmits a message ϕ by uttering a sequence of words A₁ · … · A _n , thus sending an acoustic signal to the recipient. The recipient receives and decodes the signal. On the basis of the words that he recognises, he reconstructs the speaker’s message. Hypospeech on the part of the speaker, acoustic disturbances in the communication channel and attention deficits on the part of the recipient may lead to problems in recognition, so that the recipient recognises a sentence directed at him only partially. Hypospeech, acoustic disturbances and attention deficits occur regularly; incomplete recognition must therefore regularly be taken into account. In order to be able to reconstruct the message that an incompletely recognised sentence conveys, the recipient has to semantically enrich the sentence parts that he recognised.