The dissociation of deaccenting, Givenness, and syntactic role in spontaneous speech.
Ellen Gurman Bard, Matthew P. Aylett · 1999
This study examines co-referential repetitions in task-oriented dialogue for characteristics conducive to the lowered clarity of words naming Given entities. Pairs of word tokens repeatedly mentioning the same entity within a single task-oriented dialogue (n=294) and pairs introducing an entity in separate dialogues (n=48) were compared. In both samples intelligibility and length fell significantly with repeated mention. Deaccented second mentions, thought to be largely responsible for this effect, were rare (15 % within, 6 % between dialogues) and did not account for effects of repetition. Repetitions within sentences of the same structure are thought to encourage deaccenting, but were not common (6%, 35%), and structural similarity did not encourage deaccenting. Similarity in the conversational role of carrier utterances was associated with higher rates of similar structure among re-introductions, but not with increased frequency of deaccenting. Thus, factors which should promote marking of Givenness are either lacking or ineffective. 1.