Informational Sources and Discourse in the Generation and Maintenance of Alternatives

Successful language communication requires comprehenders to not only process what speakers say, but also infer what speakers mean. Many of these inferential processes are thought to rely on alternatives to what is said. By making specific choices in utterances when alternative options were available, speakers can guide comprehenders to draw inferences about the status of those alternatives. But how do comprehenders identify these alternatives given that they may not be currently in mind and might only be implicitly related to the utterance? This chapter addresses the mechanisms that comprehenders use to recover and encode the relevant set of alternatives, focusing on how different sources of information trigger different processes and lead to differences in comprehension over time. Gaps in our theories of alternative generation and maintenance are highlighted, with the hope to spur future research and bring us closer to a complete theory of language comprehension.