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Underspecification of cognitive status in reference production: some empirical predictions
Jeanette K Gundel1, Nancy Hedberg, Ron Zacharski
1Linguistics, 205 Elliott Hall, 75 E. River Parkway, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. gunde003@umn.edu
Topics in Cognitive Science
|March 6, 2012
Summary
The Givenness Hierarchy framework explains how referring expressions convey information about referents. This study clarifies that it is not a hierarchy of salience, but accurately accounts for reference processing without extra assumptions.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- The Givenness Hierarchy framework posits that referring forms encode conceptual and procedural information about referents.
- Procedural information relates to the addressee's assumed cognitive status of the referent, often conveyed by determiners and pronouns.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of cognitive status underspecification in reference processing.
- To re-evaluate the Givenness Hierarchy's relationship with salience and accessibility in language comprehension.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of existing literature on reference processing and the Givenness Hierarchy.
- Examination of experimental results concerning the encoding of cognitive status in referring forms.
Main Results:
- Cognitive status underspecification effects were explored.
- Salience and accessibility are important but the Givenness Hierarchy is not a direct measure of these.
- The framework successfully explains experimental data without needing form-specific constraints.
Conclusions:
- The Givenness Hierarchy framework provides a robust account of reference processing.
- It is not a hierarchy of salience/accessibility, challenging previous interpretations.
- The model's explanatory power is confirmed for various experimental findings.
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