Abstract

Speakers often have more than one way to express the same meaning. What general principles govern speaker choice in the face of optionality when near semantically invariant alternation exists? Studies have shown that optional reduction in language is sensitive to contextual predictability, such that more predictable a linguistic unit is, the more likely it is to get reduced. Yet it is unclear whether these cases of speaker choice are driven by audience design versus toward facilitating production. Here we argue that for a different optionality phenomenon, namely classifier choice in Mandarin Chinese, Uniform Information Density and at least one plausible variant of availability-based production make opposite predictions regarding the relationship between the predictability of the upcoming material and speaker choices. In a corpus analysis of Mandarin Chinese, we show that the distribution of speaker choices supports the availability-based production account and not the Uniform Information Density.

Highlights

  • The expressivity of natural language often gives speakers multiple ways to convey the same meaning

  • What general principles govern speaker choice in the face of alternations that are semantically invariant? To the extent that we are able to provide a general answer to this question it will advance our fundamental knowledge of human language production

  • The above pattern of predictability sensitivity in optional reduction phenomena is predicted by both the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis (Levy and Jaeger, 2007), a theory which that the speaker aims to convey information at a relatively constant rate and which can be motivated via considerations of optimality from the comprehender’s perspective (e.g., Smith and Levy, 2013), and by the speaker-centric availabilitybased production hypothesis (Bock, 1987; Ferreira and Dell, 2000), which hypothesizes that the dominant factor in determining speaker choice is that the speaker uses whatever material is readily available when it comes time to convey a particular part of a planned message

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Summary

Introduction

The expressivity of natural language often gives speakers multiple ways to convey the same meaning. For well-studied cases of optional REDUCTION in language, the following trend is widespread: the more predictable a linguistic unit is, the more likely it is to get reduced. The above pattern of predictability sensitivity in optional reduction phenomena is predicted by both the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis (Levy and Jaeger, 2007), a theory which that the speaker aims to convey information at a relatively constant rate and which can be motivated via considerations of optimality from the comprehender’s perspective (e.g., Smith and Levy, 2013), and by the speaker-centric availabilitybased production hypothesis (Bock, 1987; Ferreira and Dell, 2000), which hypothesizes that the dominant factor in determining speaker choice is that the speaker uses whatever material is readily available when it comes time to convey a particular part of a planned message. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2018, pages 1997–2005 New Orleans, Louisiana, June 1 - 6, 2018. c 2018 Association for Computational Linguistics

Uniform Information Density and Availability-based Production
Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese
Data and Processing
Cleaning and deduplication
Extracting and filtering classifier-noun pairs
Model estimation
Results
Conclusion
Full Text
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