Synthese (2021) 198:11463–11481

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02807-9

The process of linguistic understanding

J. P. Grodniewicz1

Received: 28 February 2020 / Accepted: 22 July 2020 / Published online: 29 July 2020
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract
The majority of our linguistic exchanges, such as everyday conversations, are divided
into turns; one party usually talks at a time, with only relatively rare occurrences of
brief overlaps in which there are two (or more) simultaneous speakers. Moreover,
conversational turn-taking tends to be very fast. We typically start producing our
responses before the previous turn has finished, i.e., before we are confronted with the
full content of our interlocutor’s utterance. This raises interesting questions about the
nature of linguistic understanding. Philosophical theories typically focus on linguistic
understanding characterized either as an ability to grasp the contents of utterances in
a given language or as outputs of this ability—mental states of one type or another.
In this paper, I supplement these theories by developing an account of the process of
understanding. I argue that it enables us to capture the dynamic and temporal aspect
of understanding and reconcile philosophical investigations with empirical research
on language comprehension.

Keywords Linguistic understanding · Turn-taking · What is said · Language

processing · Knowledge of language

1 Introduction

According to conversation analysis studies, the majority of our linguistic exchanges,

such as everyday conversations, are divided into turns (Sacks et al. 1974). That is to
say that one party usually talks at a time, with only relatively rare occurrences of brief
overlaps in which there are two (or more) simultaneous speakers. This observation
would not be striking if it were not juxtaposed with another empirical result provided
by psycholinguistics: the gaps between subsequent turns are very short, only about
0.2 s (Stivers et al. 2009). Given that language production requires a minimum of

B J. P. Grodniewicz
j.grodniewicz@gmail.com

1 LOGOS/BIAP-Department of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, C/Montalegre 6-8,

08001 Barcelona, Spain

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