Factors causing overspecification in definite descriptions

Abstract

Speakers often overspecify their target descriptions and include more information than necessary for unique identification of the target referent. In the current paper, we study the production of definite target descriptions, and explore several factors that might influence the amount of information that is included in these descriptions. First, we present the results of a large-scale experiment investigating referential overspecification as a function of the properties of a target referent and the communicative setting. The results show that speakers (both in written and oral conditions) tend to provide more information when a target is plural rather than singular, and in domains where the speaker has more referential possibilities to describe the target. However, written and spoken referring expressions do not differ in terms of semantic redundancy. We conclude our paper by discussing the implications of our empirical findings for pragmatic theory and for language production models.