Rethinking Overspecification in Terms of Incremental Processing

Speakers often overspecify their referring descriptions by including more information than what is required to uniquely distinguish a referent. Although overspecification has received a substantial amount of attention, the factors that play a role in determining this behaviour are not yet well understood. Given evidence of cross-linguistic difference between English and Spanish regarding overspecification with colour adjectives, we argue that a factor that contributes to the inclusion of arguably redundant properties in a description is their incremental informativity in comprehension. We sketch a generation model that can account for this phenomenon by allowing for incremental interaction between content selection and linguistic realisation and for interdependencies between generation and processing.