Jeanette Gundel (University of Minnesota), Nancy Hedberg (Simon Fraser University) and I just had our paper, Underspecification of Cognitive Status in Reference Production: Some Empirical Predictions, accepted for publication in the Cognitive Science Society journal, Topics in Cognitive Science. To quote Nancy: “Hallelujia!!! … I am ecstatic!!!” That mirrors my feelings. I am grateful to the reviewers for their wonderful comments. Now there is a moderate amount of work to do to address the reviewers’ comments. Here is 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