Experimental Evidence for Speakers ’ Sensitivity to Common vs. Privileged Ground in the Production of Names

The distinction between shared and privileged information is important for the production of referring expressions: in order for a referring expression to be felicitous, it has to be based on shared information. But determining what information is shared and what is privileged requires gathering information from multiple sources, and constantly coordinating and updating them, which might be computationally too complex to affect production in real time. Previous work has found that speakers produce over-informative referring expressions which violate Grice’s Maxim of Quantity, concluding that this is because they do not track the distinction between shared and privileged. We demonstrate that speakers are in fact quite effective in tracking this distinction and they mark it in the form of their utterances: under certain circumstances speakers choose to over-specify