Things we can say, and the ways in which we can say them, compete with one another. And this has consequences: words we decide not to pronounce have critical effects on the messages we end up conveying. For instance, in saying Chris is a good teacher, we may convey that Chris is not an amazing teacher. How this happens is an unsolvable problem, unless a theory of alternatives indicates what counts, among all the things that have not been pronounced. It is sometimes assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that any word counts, as long as that word could have replaced one that was actually pronounced. We review arguments for going beyond this powerful idea. In doing so, we argue that the level of words is not the right (or at least not the only) level of analysis for alternatives. Instead, we capitalize on recent conceptual and associated methodological advances within the study of the so-called “language of thought” to reopen the problem from a new perspective. Specifically, we provide theoretical and experimental arguments that the relation between alternatives and words may be indirect, and that alternatives are not merely linguistic objects in the traditional sense. Rather, we propose that competition in language is significantly determined by general reasoning preferences, or thought preferences (preferences that may have forged the lexicons of modern languages in the first place, as argued elsewhere). We propose that such non-linguistic preferences can be measured and that these measures can be used to explain linguistic competition, non-linguistically, and more in depth.

我们可以说的话，以及我们可以说的方式，彼此竞争。这会产生后果：我们决定不发音的词会对我们最终传达的信息产生关键影响。例如，在说Chris 是一位好老师时，我们可能会传达出 Chris 不是一位了不起的老师。这是一个无法解决的问题，除非有替代理论表示在所有尚未发音的事物中什么是重要的。有时，明确或隐含地假设任何单词都很重要，只要该单词可以代替实际发音的单词。我们回顾了超越这个强大想法的论据。在这样做时，我们认为词的水平不是正确的（或至少不是唯一的）替代分析水平。相反，我们利用最近在所谓的“思想语言”研究中的概念和相关方法论的进步，从新的角度重新审视这个问题。具体而言，我们提供了理论和实验论证，即替代词和单词之间的关系可能是间接的，替代词不仅仅是传统意义上的语言对象。相当，我们认为，语言竞争很大程度上取决于一般推理偏好或思维偏好（如其他地方所讨论的，这些偏好可能首先塑造了现代语言的词汇）。我们建议可以测量这种非语言偏好，并且这些测量可以用来解释语言竞争，非语言的，更深入的。