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Identifying speech acts from contextual and linguistic information
L Abbeduto1, L Furman, B Davies
1Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison 53706.
Language and Speech
|July 1, 1989
Summary
Listeners interpret indirect speech acts based on answer obviousness and contextual knowledge. This study confirms that people consider the direct meaning before understanding indirect speech acts.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Investigating the comprehension of ambiguous interrogatives.
- Examining how contextual information influences speech act interpretation.
- Addressing the debate on processing direct versus indirect sentence meanings.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test Clark's (1979) answer obviousness rule in sentence comprehension.
- To identify contextual information used by listeners in interpreting speech acts.
- To gather data on whether listeners process literal meanings before indirect interpretations.
Main Methods:
- Experimental design to analyze comprehension of ambiguous interrogatives.
- Controlled study focusing on listener interpretation strategies.
- Data collection on sentence processing and contextual cues.
Main Results:
- Listeners adhere to the answer obviousness rule.
- Contextual knowledge of objects and actions is crucial for interpretation.
- Listeners do evaluate the direct meaning before inferring indirect speech acts.
Conclusions:
- The answer obviousness rule guides the interpretation of indirect speech acts.
- Listeners leverage world knowledge to resolve ambiguity in language.
- Evidence supports a model where direct meanings are assessed during indirect interpretation.