ABSTRACT
Language users routinely face the problem of making sense out of language: Speakers must design utterances that listeners can understand, and listeners must interpret utterances the way they were intended. Because ambiguity is pervasive in language use, pragmatic theories assume that speakers and listeners should strive to speak and understand against the background of a mutual perspective. However, our findings indicate that speakers and listeners are egocentric to a surprising degree. With respect to many current frameworks in psycholinguistics, these findings are anomalous: They suggest that language users are not properly designed for the task of making sense. Our goal in this chapter is to review these findings and to try to sketch out a new framework against which such egocentric behavior makes more (theoretical) sense. We propose that language users can rely on simpler mechanisms than current theories require because the work they are assumed to do to achieve a mutual perspective is actually distributed among processes in the language use environment.
