Semantic Anomaly from a Psychological Perspective
Early psycholinguistic investigations were based on linguistic theory (primarily Chomsky's transformational theory) as a model of competence. Recent studies have suggested that naive language users neither make the same linguistic judgments as the theorizing linguists nor productively follow the linguistic rules, and that nonlinguistic knowledge may be involved in the interpretation of sentences. Thus, psychologists are beginning to question the feasibility of using linguistic theory as the model of competence and have turned instead to developing comprehensive theories that include competence and performance, linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge, and contextual effects. If this broader psychological approach is focused on the interpretation of anomalous sentences, anomaly may well be replaced by interpretability, and interpretability may well be affected by a given context, or by imaginatively providing a context, as well as by the application of linguistic rules. A pilot study is reported, and further research questions are outlined. (Author)
Microform, English, 1974