Abstract
OPINION article Front. Psychol., 26 April 2013Sec. Language Sciences Volume 4 - 2013 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00236
Highlights
In 2006, I gave a series of lectures in Paris arguing for a set of rather general strategies governing language production
Hawkins, which argues that many morphosyntactic properties of languages can be explained in terms of how they facilitate processing
I have always felt uncomfortable about a number of the particular processing strategies Hawkins proposed, because they struck me as too focused on the problem of parsing—that is, on comprehension
Summary
In 2006, I gave a series of lectures in Paris arguing for a set of rather general strategies governing language production. A theory that relies too heavily on comprehension-based considerations to explain properties of languages must assume that speakers design their utterances primarily to accommodate their audience’s needs, rather than their own. I argued that ambiguity avoidance plays a much smaller role in shaping language structure than is generally assumed.
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