Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. Introduction: Meaning Across Languages

   • Barbara Hemforth, Barbara Mertins, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen

   Pages 1-21

3. Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Approach

   • Bergljot Behrens, Barbara Mertins, Barbara Hemforth, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen

   Pages 23-51

4. Pairing Form and Meaning in English and Norwegian: Conjoined VPs or Conjoined Clauses?

   • Bergljot Behrens, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen, Lyn Frazier

   Pages 53-81

5. Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect

   • Oliver Bott, Fritz Hamm

   Pages 83-109

6. Referring Expressions in Speech Reports

   • Kaja Borthen, Barbara Hemforth, Barbara Mertins, Bergljot Behrens, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen

   Pages 111-142

7. The Role of Grammaticality Judgments Within an Integral Approach to Brazilian Portuguese Bare Nominals

   • Albert Wall

   Pages 143-173

8. Information Structure and Pronoun Resolution in German and French: Evidence from the Visual-World Paradigm

   • Saveria Colonna, Sarah Schimke, Barbara Hemforth

   Pages 175-195

9. Conversational Implicatures in Anaphora Resolution: Alternative Constructions and Referring Expressions

   • Peter Baumann, Lars Konieczny, Barbara Hemforth

   Pages 197-212

10. From Verbs to Discourse: A Novel Account of Implicit Causality

    • Oliver Bott, Torgrim Solstad

    Pages 213-251

Reports on joint work by researchers from different theoretical and linguistic backgrounds offer new insights on the interaction of linguistic code and context in language production and comprehension. This volume takes a genuinely cross-linguistic approach integrating theoretically well-founded contrastive descriptions with thorough empirical investigations. Authors answer questions on the topic of how we ‘encode’ complex thoughts into linguistic signals and how we interpret such signals in appropriate ways. Chapters combine on- and off-line empirical methods varying from large-scale corpus analyses over acceptability judgements, sentence completion studies and reading time experiments. The authors shed new light on the central questions related to our everyday use of language, especially the problem of how we construe meaning in and through language in general as well as through the means provided by particular languages.

• Anaphoric contexts in Brazilian Portugese
• Bare nouns
• Conversational implicatures in anaphora resolution
• Cross-linguistic studies
• Experimental linguistics
• From verbs to discourse
• Pairing form and meaning in English and Norwegian
• Understanding coordinate clauses in Czech and English
• understanding coordinate clauses in German and Norwegian

"Although experimental work is becoming an increasingly influential methodology in semantic and pragmatic research, much of the evidence grounding this research is still drawn from a very small pool of languages. This intriguing book is exemplary in showcasing the benefits of combining experimental work with a comparativist approach. A variety of fundamental topics (ranging from anaphoric resolution, aspectual coercion, and coordination, to discourse coherence, ellipsis, and quotation) in 9 languages are represented, studied with a variety of experimental techniques. An excellent addition to the library of any researcher in semantics or pragmatics." (Jonathan Ginzburg, UFR d'Études anglophones, Université Paris-Diderot , France)

• Paris Diderot University, Paris, France

  Barbara Hemforth

• University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

  Barbara Mertins

• University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

  Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen

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