Cognitive and pragmatic factors in language production: Evidence from source-goal motion events

Abstract

In order to talk about an event they see in the world, speakers have to build a conceptual representation of that event and generate a message that selects the pragmatically appropriate (e.g., informative) parts of that event that they want to talk about. To further understand the relationship between a speaker's conceptual representations and the pragmatic factors that influence message generation, this work investigates the extent to which different aspects of an event could be affected by pragmatic constraints. We focus specifically on source-goal motion events (e.g., a butterfly flying from a lamppost to a chair) because the conceptual structure of these events is well-understood, but the role that those representations play in message generation is yet unclear. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the pragmatic status of the source (e.g., the lamppost) – in particular, whether starting points of motion were or were not already known to an addressee. We found that sources were mentioned significantly more in the latter case, where they provided new, previously unknown information to the addressee. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether the same pragmatic factors could affect goals, or endpoints of motion events (e.g., the chair), in the same way; results showed that they could not. We conclude that conceptually peripheral elements of an event (i.e., sources) are more susceptible to communicative factors than those elements which are conceptually privileged (i.e., goals). We consider the implications of our findings for the relationship between event cognition and pragmatics and discuss how theories of event cognition can be integrated into current models of language production. We also discuss the implications of our work for open issues in the domain of event cognition.