Sous-minimalité, planification et effets de contexte sur la représentation sémantique

Abstract

Two little studied effects of context on the representation of semantic content are discussed, and their implications for linguistic semantic models generally are considered. In cases of semantic subminimality, the hearer does not have to represent an expression’s full literal meaning in order to achieve contextually appropriate understanding, since the context already supplies the information necessary for successful linguistic interaction. Second, there are persuasive, though speculative, reasons to believe that the nature of semantic representation varies along with the discourse context, particularly as concerns the contrast between planned and free contexts of utterance. These two contextual effects raise questions about the empirical status of the rich representation typically assumed in linguistic semantics, and supplement the inventory of context–meaning interactions that arguably need to be considered in attempts to develop a naturalistic theory of semantic competence.

Keywords

• attention
• semantic representation
• literal meaning
• context-dependence
• pragmatic interpretation
• semantic processing