In order to communicate a message to a hearer, speakers have to select a particular utterance from a set of utterances that can be used to convey this message in the utterance situation. Previously, this has been shown mostly for the omission of function words. Furthermore, we show that omissions of content words are also subject to information-theoretic well-formedness considerations. Second, we extend previous evidence for information-theoretic processing constraints on language in two ways: We find predictability effects on omissions driven by extralinguistic context, whereas previous research mostly focused on effects of local linguistic context. Our study makes two main contributions: First we develop an empirically motivated and supported account of fragment usage. We test these predictions with a production study that supports both of these predictions. Second, inserting words before very unpredictable words distributes otherwise excessively high processing effort more uniformly. Since processing effort is related to the predictability of words ( Hale, 2001) our account predicts two effects of word probability on omissions: First, omitting predictable words (which are more easily processed), avoids underutilizing processing resources. We propose an information-theoretic account to model this choice: A speaker chooses the encoding that distributes information most uniformly across the utterance in order to make the most efficient use of the hearer's processing resources (Uniform Information Density, Levy and Jaeger, 2007). So far there is no comprehensive and empirically supported account of why and under which circumstances speakers sometimes prefer a fragment over the corresponding full sentence. Instead of a full sentence like Bring me to the university (uttered by the passenger to a taxi driver) speakers often use fragments like To the university to get their message across. 3Department of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. ![]() 2Department of Modern German Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. ![]() ![]()
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