8. Context dependent forms

One of the canonical phenomena analysed within pragmatics is reference. The felicitous production and interpretation of different referring expressions is guided by speakers' estimate of what entities are in the Common Ground and by listeners' estimate of the speaker's intended message.

8.1 Interpretation in context

Some expressions pick out unique referents in any context ("the first King of France"), whereas others depend on context to establish the referent. Given the Common Ground between two speakers, a particular name or definite noun phrase will identify a unique referent ("John", "that duck"), but such an expression will pick out a different referent in another situation. Furthermore, some expressions change their referent even within a single discourse context, as in "I" and "you" in the following example.

(1) A: John arrived early today. I appreciate promptness, don't you?
B: John arrived early? I can't believe it. You're kidding.

In (1), what matters for context is who is speaking (or being spoken to). In other examples, what matters is the context of the surrounding discourse (who has been mentioned). See how the referent of "she" and "her" changes in (2a-c).

(2) a. Mary_i kicked John_j. She_i apologised.
b. Sue_i tickled John_j. She_i wanted to make him_j laugh.
b. In her_i speech, Jane_i congratulated all the graduates_j.

In English, a variety of constraints guide pronoun interpretation, including number, gender, and person. In (2), the pronoun "she" and the possessive pronoun "her" indicate that the referent must be a singular 3rd person female. Of course there are also contexts where morphological features aren't enough to distinguish a unique referent the way they do in (2). In (3), the pronoun "he" is ambiguous because there are two available referents (John, Bob) who meet the number/gender/person requirements of the pronoun.

(3) John greeted Bob. He's always on time.

Given the ambiguity raised in (3), one might think that the choice to use a pronoun creates an unnecessary burden on the listener to sort out who the intended referent could be. In that light, a more listener-friendly speaker would avoid reduced expressions like pronouns and use more explicit forms instead. Consider the two variants of the passage below:

(4) a. Joe was the bully of the neighborhood.
b. He chased Tommy all the way home from school one day.
c. He watched Tommy hide behind a big tree and start to cry.
d. He yelled at Tommy so loudly that all the neighbors came outside.

(5) a. Joe was the bully of the neighborhood.
b. Joe chased Tommy all the way home from school one day.
c. Joe watched Tommy hide behind a big tree and start to cry.
d. Joe yelled at Tommy so loudly that all the neighbors came outside.

Of the two passages, (5) is the more explicit unambiguous version. In (4), the pronoun "He" is temporarily ambiguous (until the reference to 'Tommy' elsewhere in the sentence enforces coreference between "He" and "Joe").

• Review from syntax: What ensures that "He" and "Tommy" cannot corefer? [click to reveal]
  Recall Chomsky's Binding Theory (condition C) which stipulates that a name must be free in its governing category. That condition characterises the constraint against coreference between "He" and "Tommy" in (4b,c,d), where "He" c-commands "Tommy".

Of the two passages, which do you think is easier to read? The explicit version in (4) or the version in (5), which requires the interpretation of a series of ambiguous pronouns? Research by Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, (1993) reveals that there is in fact a Repeated Name Penalty, meaning that being explicit isn't necessarily better.

• Why would there be a Repeated Name Penalty? [click]
  Even though using a pronoun creates ambiguity, the results from Gordon et al. suggest that listeners come to expect that the most topical element will be pronominalised. Not doing so violates their expectations. Maybe they end up thinking "Joe? Joe who? Is there another Joe in this context? If you'd meant the Joe that's the topic of this discourse, you should have used a pronoun!"

The existence of the Repeated Name Penalty points to an expectation on the listeners' part based on observed production biases: Listeners have noticed that speakers tend to use pronouns to refer to topical entities and *not* using a pronoun for a topical referent is unexpected, even if the pronoun creates ambiguity. In this sense, a pronominal form has some utility (even informativity); the pronoun works to signal to the listener that the referent who was topical in the preceding context is continuing to be treated as the topic.

There is a balance between brevity and ambiguity. Consider the passage in (6) and the progression of (underlined) referring expressions that mention someone named Fred Goodwin:

(6)The former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Fred Goodwin, has had his knighthood 'cancelled and annulled' by the Queen, following advice from Whitehall officials. Sir Fred was knighted in 2004 by the then-Labour government for "services to banking", but was criticised after leading the bank to near-collapse in 2008. The Cabinet Office said the knighthood had been removed on the advice of the Forfeiture Committee because Mr Goodwin had brought the honours system "into disrepute".
... He ...

Common Ground permits reduced referring expressions (allowing speakers to be brief without risking miscommunication). Here the trade off between brevity and ambiguity shows how speakers may be optimising to convey maximum information with minimal effort.

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To go on to section 8.2 on "Structural factors in reference", click here.