The field model of language and free enrichment

Dorota Zielińska

pp. 239-249

in: Alessandro Capone, Marco Carapezza, Franco Lo Piparo (eds), Further advances in pragmatics and philosophy II, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

More and more linguists claim that postulating encoding and inferencing alone is not enough to account for the interpretation of all utterances. Although copious evidence for that claim has been collected and classified, among these the phenomenon of free enrichment has been described, there are doubts as to the quality of the explanations offered. In this paper, I propose to account for some types of that data in a more rigorous way by postulating a cognitive mechanism of selective use of language, in addition to encoding and inferencing, and by testing quantitative implications of that model.