Tripartite Structures and the Guided Use of Context

Abstract

To this point, the discussion has emphasized questions of sentence-internal interpretive processes. But clearly a theory of sentence interpretation must also cope with effects of sentence-external context. Sentences are typically processed in a discourse context. The goal of sentence comprehension, I assume, is to recover the speaker/author’s intention in producing a sentence in a particular context. This observation, or assumption, has significant ramifications for the study of sentence interpretation. If it is correct, it raises the possibility that perceivers generally compute speaker meaning, not sentence meaning directly with inferences about speaker meaning occurring only as a late optional stage of analysis. This interweaving of semantic and pragmatic processing may hamper the empirical investigation of semantic processes.