Conflicts in Interpretation

In this article we take an Optimality Theoretic approach to interpretation which integrates various factors into a set of typically conflicting constraints of varying strengths. The hypothesis that optimization is a leading principle in natural language interpretation strengthens the connection between linguistic theory and other cognitive disciplines. We will provide further support for this view from experimental research on computational and human sentence processing as well as on the acquisition of interpretation. We claim that our approach opens new perspectives for the study of natural language interpretation for several reasons. It has a clear view of the general relation between universal and language-specific properties (the constraints are universal, but the ranking of the constraints is language-specific). It is not modular, which allows us to locate variation in meaning not only in the semantic component proper, but in the syntax-semantics interface and the semantics-pragmatics interface. It can explain cross-linguistic variation in meaning by investigating how languages vary with respect to their weighting (ranking) of the constraints. Finally, the development of a bidirectional Optimality Theory allows us to separate the question of how to (best) formulate what you want to say, from the question of how to (best) interpret something that has been said, and this also provides us with a straightforward explanation of some facts concerning children’s interpretations of natural language.