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Underspecification of Cognitive Status in Reference Production: Some Empirical Predictions
Author(s) -
Gundel Jeanette K.,
Hedberg Nancy,
Zacharski Ron
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
topics in cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.191
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1756-8765
pISSN - 1756-8757
DOI - 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01184.x
Subject(s) - underspecification , referent , salience (neuroscience) , hierarchy , cognition , cognitive psychology , psychology , psycholinguistics , linguistics , computer science , cognitive science , natural language processing , philosophy , neuroscience , economics , market economy
Abstract Within the Givenness Hierarchy framework of Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993), lexical items included in referring forms are assumed to conventionally encode two kinds of information: conceptual information about the speaker’s intended referent and procedural information about the assumed cognitive status of that referent in the mind of the addressee, the latter encoded by various determiners and pronouns. This article focuses on effects of underspecification of cognitive status, establishing that, although salience and accessibility play an important role in reference processing, the Givenness Hierarchy itself is not a hierarchy of degrees of salience/accessibility, contrary to what has often been assumed. We thus show that the framework is able to account for a number of experimental results in the literature without making additional assumptions about form‐specific constraints associated with different referring forms.