Interpretation as conflict resolution

Abstract

Interpreting words, sentences and discourse is a process of resolving conflicts between the requirements of various general constraints on the correspondence between form and meaning and the interaction between lexicon and context. In this paper the fruitfulness of taking an optimality-theoretic approach to semantic conflict resolution by constraint ranking is illustrated with four case studies from the Dutch research project ‘Conflicts in Interpretation’ (anaphora resolution, the polysemy of the spatial preposition round, negative concord and the acquisition of indefinites).