Open AccessBook Chapter
Reference and Informativeness as cognitive processes in verbal communication
Catherine Davies,Napoleon Katsos +1 more
- 01 Mar 2016
3
TL;DR: Overspecification in reference is the provision of more information than is minimally required for a hearer to identify an intended referent, e.g. "the stripy bowl" in the context of a single bowl.
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Abstract: Overspecification in reference is the provision of more information than is minimally required for a hearer to identify an intended referent, e.g. ‘the stripy bowl’ in the context of a single bowl. Since this kind of referring expression is not predicted by traditional accounts of reference, this chapter reviews research documenting the frequency of such expressions in various contexts. Drawing together recent empirical findings, it proposes reasons for overspecified reference from both the speaker’s and the addressee’s perspective. The pragmatic, cognitive and social significance of overspecification is discussed, and applications of research in this area are considered. We close by suggesting promising future directions for this strand of research.
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Citations
Referential Choices in a Collaborative Storytelling Task: Discourse Stages and Referential Complexity Matter.
Marion Fossard,Amélie M. Achim,Lucie Rousier-Vercruyssen,Sylvia Gonzalez,Alexandre Bureau,Maud Champagne-Lavau +5 more
TL;DR: This study relies on a new, collaborative storytelling in sequence task designed to assess how speakers adjust their referential choices when they refer to different characters at specific discourse stages corresponding to the introduction, maintaining, or shift of the character in focus, in increasingly complex referentIAL contexts.
Do speakers and listeners observe the Gricean Maxim of Quantity
Karl G. D. Bailey,Paul E. Engelhardt,Fernanda Ferreira +2 more
- 01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: This paper examined the extent to which naive participants are sensitive to the Maxim of Quantity and concluded that people are only moderately Gricean, and used the Visual World Paradigm to assess listeners' moment-by-moment interpretations of over-described utterances.
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Children's (and Adults') Production Adjustments to Generic and Particular Listener Needs
TL;DR: Both adults and 4- to 5-year-olds performed generic adjustments but, unlike adults, children made listener-particular adjustments inconsistently; these and prior findings can be explained by assuming that particular adjustments can be costlier for children to implement compared to generic adjustments.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the As propose six implicationally related cognitive statuses relevant for explicating the use of referring expressions in natural language discourse, which are the conventional meanings signalled by determiners and pronouns, and interaction of the statuses with Grice's maxim of Quantity accounts for the actual distribution and interpretation of forms when necessary conditions for the use more than one form are met.
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