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Content and context in incremental processing: “the ham sandwich” revisited

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Abstract

The interplay of content and context is observable in a moment to moment manner as propositional content unfolds. The current contribution illustrates this through data from real-time language comprehension indicating that propositional content is not computed in isolation but relies in important ways on context during every step of the computation of meaning. The relevant notion of context that we have to adopt includes all aspects of possible worlds and draws on a variety of knowledge representations, which in a first processing phase serve to generate expectations for upcoming words. In a second phase, the discourse representation is assessed and if necessary updated by means of inferential reasoning and enrichment to reflect the speaker’s intended meaning.

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Notes

  1. Time-locking points to which ERPs were measured are indicated by italics in the following examples.

  2. This does not imply that the type mismatch is a necessary trigger for meaning shift. As Recanati (citing an example by Dan Sperber) points out in truth-conditional pragmatics, meaning shift may be required in grammatically congruent compositions as in the context-dependent interpretation of “The ham sandwich stinks” (Recanati 2010, p. 167).

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Acknowledgments

A version of this work has been presented at the Content, Context and Conversation Workshop at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the Georg-August University Göttingen in 2011. I would like to thank the organizers, Magdalena Kaufmann, Christian Beyer and Markus Steinbach, and the workshop audience for inspiring discussion. The research on meaning shift was carried out as part of a project funded by the German Research Foundation (BU 1853/2-1). I am grateful to Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (at that time at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig) for generously providing lab space to conduct this study in collaboration with the Clinic for Audiology and Phoniatry (Prof. Manfred Gross) of the Charité Berlin, and Katja Bruening, Elisabeth Dietz, Jona Sassenhagen, and Jan Patrick Zeller for their assistance at various stages of data preparation, collection and analysis.

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  1. Independent Emmy Noether-Research Group, Department of English and Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Jakob-Welder-Weg 18, 55099, Mainz, Germany

    Petra B. Schumacher

  2. Department of German Language and Literature, University Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Petra B. Schumacher

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Schumacher, P.B. Content and context in incremental processing: “the ham sandwich” revisited. Philos Stud 168, 151–165 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0179-6

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