ABSTRACT
Alan Garnham Laboratory of Experimental Psychology\ University of Sussex, UK
INTRODUCTION
“I don’t know what you are talking about” is a common lament from the uncomprehending. It points to a fact about language that has rarely been at the forefront of psychological research on language processing: People talk and write about other people and things, and the events, states, and processes in which they take part. Language conveys information. It may convey that information via complex systems of phonetics and phonology (or orthography), morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but except in writings about language itself it does not convey information about those systems. Similarly, even if the mental mechanisms that underlie our ability to understand language make use of phonetic and phonological (or orthographic), morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic representations, these representations can only be intermedi aries in the process of conveying information about individuals and their interactions. It is the individuals and interactions that are represented in the products of comprehension we have conscious access to, and those mental representations are representations of situations (they are what have been called mental models), not representations of language. From the perspective of language production, a speaker or writer will want to convey information about a particular situation (in the broadest sense) and will need to find appropriate ways to talk about the individuals in that situation and the relations between them. From the perspective of language perception, a hearer or reader must determine what individuals
and relations the speaker or writer is talking about. To put it simply: Speakers and writers refer, and hearers and readers must work out to whom or to what they are referring.
