Shifting ground: A definite puzzle in article production
Lara Hochstein, David Barner · 2016
Interlocutors are typically thought to create models of discourse that represent information that is shared between speaker and listener (i.e., common ground) and information that is available only to the speaker (i.e., privileged ground). In this study, we investigated the conditions under which speakers update these discourse models to accommodate new interlocutors. To do so, we investigated the production of a linguistic distinction which is conditioned on common ground information and is ubiquitous in everyday speech – namely, the distinction between definite articles (e.g., the) and indefinite articles (e.g., a). In Experiment 1, we asked subjects to describe a set of events they witnessed to either (1) an experimenter who was present during the events, or (2) a second person who was not present during the events and thus did not share common ground with the subject. We found that a surprisingly high number of subjects used the definite article to refer to objects in privileged ground when addressing the second interlocutor. In Experiments 2-6, we replicated this finding and explored the factors that cause speakers to update their discourse models to accommodate the knowledge states of new interlocutors. Our results suggest that although subjects generally consider use of the definite article to be infelicitous when referring to objects in privileged ground, they often fail to update their discourse models once a discourse has been created, to consider the perspective of new interlocutors.