Words, Articulations, and Utterance Plans

Abstract

Under what conditions does an externale (a sequence of speech sounds, a mark of ink) qualify as an articulation of a word? Standard approaches to the issue appeal to intentions and to the satisfaction of performance standards, but these treatments are challenged by the intuitive admissibility of unintentional and anomalous tokens. Recently, alternatives appealing to the role of lexical access in word production have been considered, but these, I argue, are threatened by counterexamples of their own. In this paper, I leverage formal and empirical insights into the architecture of utterance production to present a new hypothesis. The main idea is this: for an externale produced by a speaker to qualify as a token of a word, it must originate from the execution of an utterance score that incorporates the local standards over the word's form. I explain how this approach threads the needle between some key desiderata and can accommodate the case studies that challenge its competitors.