http://charbonniers.org/2009/03/06/up-the-garden-path/ A blog on consciousness by Janet Kwasniak Fri, 18 May 2012 04:27:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2.1 http://charbonniers.org/2009/03/06/up-the-garden-path/#comment-244 JoseAngel Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:14:27 +0000 http://charbonniers.org/2009/03/06/up-the-garden-path/#comment-244 In a way all discourse processing is made up of continual garden-pathing—these cases of abrupt syntactical revision are only the most outstanding cases. If we project in advance the possible outcomes of a sentence, a piece of reasoning, a text, a plot... chances are that most of the time we will have to revise what we expected we'd be getting in the light of what we actually get. I'm quite interested in this dynamics of prospection / retrospection. And I suppose that's in part what Schleiermacher meant when he argued that all use of speech involves a hermeneutic circle. In a way all discourse processing is made up of continual garden-pathing—these cases of abrupt syntactical revision are only the most outstanding cases. If we project in advance the possible outcomes of a sentence, a piece of reasoning, a text, a plot… chances are that most of the time we will have to revise what we expected we’d be getting in the light of what we actually get. I’m quite interested in this dynamics of prospection / retrospection. And I suppose that’s in part what Schleiermacher meant when he argued that all use of speech involves a hermeneutic circle.

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