Conflicts in Interpretation

Linguistic optimality theory views the process of natural language interpretation as a process of optimization over a set of conflicting constraints. In this work, Hendriks (U. of Groningen, the Netherlands), Hoop (Radboud U. Nijmegen, the Netherlands), Kramer (Audiology Center Brabant, the Netherlands), Swart (Utrecht U., the Netherlnads), and Zwarts (Utrecht U. the Netherlands) investigate these conflicts in interpretation at the different linguistic levels of discourse, the sentence, and word meaning. Specifically, they examine rhetorical relations that hold between different clauses in a discourse, word order variation in Dutch, bidirectional analysis of word order variation as a general pattern in first language acquisition, the phenomenon of negation across languages, differences among languages in the interpretations of bare nouns such as jail (as in in jail, as opposed to in the jail), and the ways in which words can constrain each other's meanings. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Petra Hendriks is a Professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her publications include Breinmakers en Breinbrekers (Addison Wesley Longman, 1997) and (with Helen de Hoop and Reinhard Blutner) Optimal Communication (CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2006). Helen de Hoop is a Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her publications include editing (with Mengistu Amberber) Competition and variation in natural languages: the case for case (Elsevier, Oxford, 2005) and (with Petra Hendriks and Reinhard Blutner) Optimal Communication (CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2006). Irene Kramer is a Lecturer at the Iselinge School of Education, Doetinchem, The Netherlands. She was a guest editor of the journal Lingua, and co-edited the volume Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science, Amsterdam, 2007). Henriette de Swart is a Professor at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She is the author of Introduction to natural language semantics ( CSLI Publications, Stanford, 1998) and (with Donka Farkas) The semantics of incorporation: from argument structure to discourse transparency (CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2003). She co-edited the volumes Handbook of French Semantics (CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2004) and Perspectives on Aspect (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2005). Joost Zwarts is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is the author of The Phonology of Endo (LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics 59, 2004) and the co-editor of Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science, Amsterdam, 2007).