Audience design during referential communication /(the production of pronouns)

old_uid14817
titleAudience design during referential communication /(the production of pronouns)
start_date2014/12/12
schedule11h-12h
onlineno
summaryWhen referring, the same entity can be described with different degree of specificity. A horse can be described with a basic-level description like "horse", a more specific, subordinate-level description like "stallion" (Brennan & Clark, 1996; Levelt, 1989) or semantically reduced pronouns such as "he" or "it" (Ariel, 1990; Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharski, 1993). How do speakers decide which referring expression to use? For successful reference, the intended referent must be easily identifiable to the addressee (Grice, 1975), so speakers may choose referring expressions to help the addressee's comprehension or "audience design" (Clark & Murphy, 1982). But the extent to which audience design constrains their referential choice has remained controversial, as many studies have shown that speakers can be "egocentric" during referential communication (e.g., Bard & Aylett, 2005; Horton & Keysar, 1996; Jucks et al., 2008; Rossnagel, 2004). In this talk, I will discuss a series of studies that examined the audience design hypothesis for the use of pronouns.
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