The Speaker’s Perspective

Abstract

In the same way that listeners must take into account a hypothetical speaker to achieve successful communication, it is argued that speakers must take into account their hypothetical listeners to get their message across. Because child speakers are not yet able to accommodate their listener’s communicative needs, they often prefer the use of a potentially ambiguous pronoun to a more explicit full noun phrase. Mature speakers, on the other hand, are usually able to avoid misunderstanding. They tend to block the use of pronouns when using a pronoun will result in a non-intended interpretation. Also, they only deviate from canonical word order when the listener has other cues than word order to arrive at the intended meaning of the sentence. This pattern of production of pronouns and word order in discourse is accounted for by the same Optimality Theoretic grammar that was shown in previous chapters to account for the observed pattern of comprehension of pronouns and word order at the sentence level.