Referring Expressions in Speech Reports

International audienceWhen choosing among various referring expressions, speakers typically choose a form that reflects the audience’s mental representation of the intended referent. For instance, a speaker will most likely use a definite rather than indefinite description when introducing an entity that the addressee can uniquely identify. However, also considerations other than referent accessibility and the mental state of the addressee may affect the choice of nominal form. For instance, in a speech report such as Mary asked whether he had seen a dog, the choice of the expression a dog is influenced by the speaker’s intention to truthfully report on what was originally communicated as well as considerations about the representation of the referent in the mental model of the present addressee—and more than one nominal form may be valid. This paper reports on a pen-and-pencil experiment conducted to test how specific indefinites are reported on in direct and indirect speech in the four languages Czech, English, German, and Norwegian. The experiment supports the claim that indirect speech allows for a wider range of nominal forms than direct speech when the speaker reports on a speech event that originally contained a specific indefinite. Nevertheless, the study shows that the subjects prefer to use an indefinite description to report on a specific indefinite in indirect speech, even though also other forms are valid. This suggests that speaker’s effort, and not only hearer’s processing cost, may be crucial for the choice of nominal form. The comparison of the four languages reveals that general cognitive constraints related to reference assignment interact with language-specific conditions; examples are constraints on discourse type and considerations of processing economy following from the language’s lexical and morpho-syntactic inventory