When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to "overinformative" referring expressions

Judith Degen1, Robert D Hawkins1, Caroline Graf2

  • 1Department of Psychology, Stanford University.

Psychological Review
|April 3, 2020
PubMed
Summary

Speakers rationally balance utterance costs and information, explaining why referring expressions are often redundant rather than overinformative. This model captures various overmodification phenomena in language use.

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