Need I say more? On factors causing referential overspecification

Abstract

We present the results of an elicitation experiment conducted to investigate which factors cause speakers to overspecify their referential expressions, where we hypothesized properties of the target and properties of the communicative setting to play a role. The results of this experiment show that speakers tend to provide more information when referring to a target in a more complex domain and when referring to plural targets. Moreover, written and spoken referring expressions do not differ in terms of redundancy, but do differ in terms of the number of words that they contain: speakers need more words to provide the same information as people who type their expressions.