Most English native speakers interpret the sentence No head injury is too trivial to be ignored to mean that All head injuries, no matter how trivial they appear, should be treated ( Wason & Reich, 1979). As an extension of the overloading hypothesis, we suggest two heuristic processes that may ultimately yield the incorrect reading when compositional processing is suspended for strategic reasons. Overall, the data are consistent with specific variants of the ambiguity and overloading hypotheses while providing evidence against other variants. To our knowledge, our experiments are the first to explore the on-line processing profile of depth charge sentences.
INSURMOUNTABLE IN A SENTENCE SERIES
In a series of five experiments, we investigate whether the depth charge effect is better explained by processing failure due to memory overload (the overloading hypothesis) or by the existence of an underlying grammaticalized construction with two available meanings (the ambiguity hypothesis). However, it has recently been argued that the preferred interpretation arises not because of a prevailing failure of the processing system, but rather because the non-compositional meaning is grammaticalized in the form of a stored construction ( Cook & Stevenson, 2010 Fortuin, 2014). The semantic inversion that is observed for sentences of this type is the strongest and most persistent linguistic illusion known to the field ( Wason & Reich, 1979). So-called “depth charge” sentences ( No head injury is too trivial to be ignored) are interpreted by the vast majority of speakers to mean the opposite of what their compositional semantics would dictate.
0 kommentar(er)
