Publications

Publication details [#5163]

Jarvella, Robert J. and T. Russell Nelson. 1982. Focus of information and general knowledge in sentence understanding. In Ny, Jean-François Le and Walter Kintsch, eds. Language and comprehension. North Holland. pp. 73–86.

Publication type

Article in book

Publication language

English

Keywords

contrastiveness | expectation | focus | sentence, comprehension of | world knowledge

Annotation

J. and N. argue that listeners' expectations evoked lexically from general knowledge and conveyed structurally by contrastiveness typically work in a coordinated fashion. When brought into opposition, perceptual confusion arises in the absence of pragmatic constraints.