MEANING CONSTRUCTION

Current theory rejects the idea that readers and listeners are passive and represents them as actively engaged in a task of meaning construction. An ‘effort after meaning’ impels them to impose an interpretation even on an obscure text, and to keep updating it as new information comes in. They do not ‘receive’ the message encoded by a speaker/writer; they have to reconstruct it from the material of the utterance.

Central to meaning construction is the distinction between: (a) the words on the page or in the ear; (b) the propositional information that a text contains (loosely, its literal meaning); and (c) the enriched and selective interpretation which a reader or listener takes away. In processing a text, a comprehender performs a number of operations. At sentence level, they:

extract propositional information;

make any necessary inferences;

enrich the interpretation by applying world knowledge;

integrate the new information into their mental representation of the text so far;

 monitor their comprehension in case of misunderstanding.

At discourse level, they also have to:

recognise the hierarchical structure of the text;

recognise patterns of logic which link the parts of the text;

determine which parts of the text are important to the speaker/ writer or relevant to their own purposes.

A number of accounts of discourse comprehension attempt to describe the way in which text information is built into an overall meaning representation:

The early Kintsch and Van Dijk models (Van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983) feature higher-level units of meaning, termed macro-propositions, which are achieved through the reader making judgements about which items of information are central to the text. Meaning construction operates in three stages. There is a surface level which takes the form of the actual words used in the text. There is a text-base level at which propositional information is established on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Finally, there is a situational level which brings in external knowledge; it is at this stage that propositional information is transformed into macro propositions. Kintsch et al. attempted to support this theory experimentally by constructing texts based upon sets of propositions, which they categorised at several levels according to how critical they were deemed to be to the development of the text. They recorded that the more important propositions were more likely to be recalled.

The two-step Construction-Integration model (Kintsch, 1988) updates the earlier theories, relying more heavily on ‘bottom-up’ information from the text. At the construction stage, meanings are activated in the form of a loose network of associations. At the integration stage, a boost is given to information which is contextually relevant, so that a coherent text base can be created. Textual cues lead readers to give added weight to some sections: they might, for example, pay more heed to the opening sentence of a paragraph.

The theory of mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983) also postulates two stages: one at which propositional information is available and one at which an enriched interpretation is achieved through the listener/ reader making inferences and bringing world knowledge to bear. A mental model is the representation of a text which they hold at any given moment. Whenever the latest proposition appears to make no reference to entities in the current model, the listener/reader initiates a new model. Similarly, two models are combined when the proposition seems to refer to entities that feature in both. Throughout, propositions are tested to ensure that their truth conforms to the truth of the model as a whole.

The Memory Focus Model (Sanford and Garrod, 1981) has developed from work on anaphor resolution. At any given moment, a reader has a model of a text, in which there is an explicit focus upon the elements of the text that are currently foregrounded and an implicit focus upon other information being carried forward. The processing of a text is selective and can be shallow or deep. In some circumstances, top-down notions of the purpose of the text may override information at local level. Hence the Moses illusion: asked the anomalous question How many animals of each kind did Moses put in the Ark?, many subjects answer ‘Two’.

The Structure Building Framework (Gernsbacher, 1990) also provides a model of how readers build a coherent representation of a text. Here, the first stage of comprehension consists of laying a foundation, which is why reading times are longer for the first word of a sentence or the first sentence of a paragraph. The reader maps incoming information on to a current information substructure if it coheres with what is there. If it does not, the reader employs a shifting process which involves creating a new information substructure. Less-skilled comprehenders are said to shift too often because they do not make the appropriate connections. As a result, they build meaning representations at a very local level and fail to construct more global ones.

See also: Focus, Mental model, Proposition, Schema theory, Story grammar

Further reading: Garnham (1985: 152–82); Gernsbacher and Foertsch (1999); Kintsch (1994: 729–36); Stevenson (1993: Chap. 5).

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

وفد العتبة العباسية المقدسة يهنئ الأمين العام للعتبة الكاظمية المقدسة بمناسبة تعيينه

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تنظم دورة في الإسعافات الأولية لعدد من ملاكاتها

في مستشفى الكفيل.. فريق طبي ينجح بمعالجة مسن يعاني من انسداد القناة الصفراوية

المجمع العلمي يقيم جلسةً قرآنية لتعليم أحكام التلاوة في النجف الأشرف

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

الأطعمة الحارة.. "سر صغير" يغير صحة قلبك وعقلك

وباء صامت.. الملايين حول العالم مصابون بالسكري دون أن يعلموا !

لماذا ينصح بتناول تفاحة يوميا؟

8 فواكه طبيعية تمنحك نوما هنيئا.. وتخلصك من الأرق

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

ثلاث علامات على وجود مشاكل خطيرة في محرك السيارة ؟

ماذا نعرف عن اللقاح الروسي ضد السرطان؟

مركبة فضاء تعثر على دليل عن وجود حياة قديمة على المريخ

لتدريب الذكاء الاصطناعي.. الصين تخطط لإنشاء شبكة حوسبة موحدة

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE (MLU)

McGURK EFFECT

MASKING

MARKEDNESS

MAPPING (FORM-MEANING)

LOWER-LEVEL PROCESSING

LONG-TERM MEMORY (LTM)

LOGOGEN

LISTENING: HIGHER-LEVEL PROCESSES

LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY

LEXICAL STRESS

LEXICAL STORAGE