Malapropism: Difference between revisions

In his essay "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs", philosopher [[Donald Davidson (philosopher)|Donald Davidson]] suggests that malapropisms reveal something about how people process the meanings of words. He argues that language competence must not simply involve learning a set meaning for each word, and then rigidly applying those semantic rules to decode other people's utterances. Rather, he says, people must also be continually making use of other contextual information to interpret the meaning of utterances, and then modifying their understanding of each word's meaning based on those interpretations.<ref>{{cite book |last=Davidson |first=Donald |chapter=A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs |chapter-url=https://www.google.com/books/edition/Philosophical_Grounds_of_Rationality/sHWK4Lz37sAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA157 |pages=157–174 |editor=R. Grandy and R. Warner |title=Philosophical Grounds of Rationality |year=1986 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-824464-9 }}</ref>