Jeanette Gundel (University of Minnesota), Nancy Hedberg (Simon Fraser University) and I just submitted a paper to the new journal topiCS (topics in Cognitive Science). This pretty much consumed my entire spring break. The title of the paper is Underspecification of Cognitive Status in Reference Production: Some Empirical Predictions. Here’s the abstract.
Within the Givenness Hierarchy framework of Gundel, Hedberg, & 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, which is encoded by various determiners and pronouns. In this paper, we focus on effects of underspecification of cognitive status, establishing that, while salience and degree of accessibility play an important role in reference production and understanding, the Givenness Hierarchy itself is not a hierarchy of degrees of salience/accessibility, contrary to what has often been assumed. The framework is thus able to account for a number of interesting experimental results in the literature without making additional assumptions about form-specific constraints