RT journal article
T1 Garden-path utterances and relevance
A1 Merino Ferradá, María del Carmen
A2 Filología Francesa e Inglesa
K1 Garden-path utterances
K1 Lexical ambiguity
K1 Lexical access
K1 Relevance theory
AB An appropriate account of how the interpretation process of garden-pathutterances develops should include an analysis of those psycholinguisticaspects related to the recovery of the semantic representations of theutterance as well as a pragmatic explanation of how those representationsare used in the construction of a final interpretation. To investigate howlexical access could take place in the case of ambiguous words, twopsycholinguistic models are briefly reviewed: the selective model and theexhaustive model. An argument is put forward for the exhaustive model, thatis, for a modular view of the lexical processing system. Thus, we argue thatin the processing of a garden-path utterance, upon encountering anambiguous word, all of its meanings are initially activated. Once access hasbeen completed and the selection phase reached, pragmatic factors comeinto play, in the process of selecting one of the possibilities and building aninterpretation from it. Relevance theory, a cognitive-pragmatic account ofcommunication, explains why a given interpretation is initially selected, whyit is later rejected as contextually inappropriate and why the processor triesa second line of interpretation which will finally produce the desired results.
SN 1576-5059
YR 2002
FD 2002
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/34453
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/34453
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 05-nov-2026