CHECKSUCCESS {MoLE}

Determine expected communicative success

Description

Check whether the hearer is likely to arrive at the intended role distribution and elaborate if not through explicit role marking.

Usage

CHECKSUCCESS(speakerID, proposition, situation)

Arguments

speakerID

Pointer to the speaker agent

proposition

The proposition that is to be conveyed

situation

The situation in which the event that the proposition refers to is embedded.

Details

Elaboration is necessary if best typing match leads to wrong distribution of roles, but not if (one of) the roles are marked one way or another First try if indexes are informative, next try appropriate pronominal case form, then check if word order is informative (if generalizations are made) N exceptions should minimally be 4(=8/ln(8)) for Yang's tolerance principle.

Value

A list, i.e. a checked and possibly elaborated proposition.

external

representation of the external argument

internal

representation of the internal argument, if identified

verb

representation of the action argument

target

target event to be described

Note

Often, the interpretation of an utterance follows automatically by world knowledge in which case no explicit marking is necessary (e.g. "man book read"). Role marking is only necessary if participants qualify for both roles equally well (e.g. "man woman see") or if a participant qualifies better for another role and outperforms the intended performer in this (e.g. "man pig kill", in which the pig is the intended actor).

Author(s)

Sander Lestrade

References

Levelt, W.J.M. 1983. "Monitoring and self-repair in speech". Cognition 14.41-104

Hurford, J. R. 1989. "Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device". Lingua 77:2.187-222.

Steels, L. 2003. "Language re-entrance and the inner voice". Journal of Consciousness Studies 10:4-5.173-185.

Blutner, Reinhard, Helen de Hoop \& Petra Hendriks. 2006. Optimal Communication. Stanford: CSLI.

Charles Yang (2016), The price of linguistic productivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

See Also

PREPARE

Examples

FOUND()
situation=SITUATION(1)
proposition=PROPOSITION(1, situation)
CHECKSUCCESS(1, proposition, situation)