Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

Predictability has been found to influence language production at multiple levels of linguistic structure – e.g., phonetics, morphology, and syntax. In this talk, I will focus on the question of whether expected linguistic content is also expressed using reduced linguistic forms at the discourse level, focusing specifically on coherence relations and referring expressions. Coherence relations can be made linguistically explicit by means of connectives (e.g., but, because) or cue phrases (e.g., on the other hand, which is why), but can also be left underspecified or implicit. Referents in a discourse can be referred to by means of a full NP, but also by means of a pronoun.  Discussing both corpus-based studies and experimental studies, I show that evidence for expectation influencing language production at the discourse level is mixed.