Free Word Order and Discourse Interpretation

Fülszöveg

This monograph brings together a set of psycholinguistic studies that examine the mechanism of speech processing in Hungárián, a non-indo-European, agglutinative language, from a comparative, cross-linguistic point of view. The experiments investigate the role played in discourse comprehension by somé specific features of Hungárián grammar, that are typologically radically different from English, such as its free word order, its local rather than configurational encoding of underlying grammatical relations through bound morphemes, and its structural marking of the discourse (topic vs. focus) roles of constituents. The studies share a common focus: they all examine the functional role of the clause-boundary in processing complex subordinate constructions. The results provide converging support for the generál hypothesis that the processing concentrated at the end of the clause is due, in large part, to across-clause inferential processes involved in discourse interpretation. The... Tovább

Fülszöveg

This monograph brings together a set of psycholinguistic studies that examine the mechanism of speech processing in Hungárián, a non-indo-European, agglutinative language, from a comparative, cross-linguistic point of view. The experiments investigate the role played in discourse comprehension by somé specific features of Hungárián grammar, that are typologically radically different from English, such as its free word order, its local rather than configurational encoding of underlying grammatical relations through bound morphemes, and its structural marking of the discourse (topic vs. focus) roles of constituents. The studies share a common focus: they all examine the functional role of the clause-boundary in processing complex subordinate constructions. The results provide converging support for the generál hypothesis that the processing concentrated at the end of the clause is due, in large part, to across-clause inferential processes involved in discourse interpretation. The studies demonstrate the central role played by focus-based elaborative inferences in integrating clausal propositions into a discourse model. It is shown that such discourse inferential processes are jointly determined by (i) topic-focus structure, (ii) inter-clausal semantic relations, and (iii) pragmatic knowledge. The monograph should be of interest for researchers as well as for students working in the fields of psychology of language, linguistic theory, or artificial intelligence. Vissza