@proceeding{Lemke_2025,
title = {Investigating fragment usage with a gamified utterance selection task},
author = {Tyll Robin Lemke},
url = {https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/ELM/article/view/5836},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.3765/elm.3.5836},
year = {2025},
date = {2025},
booktitle = {Experiments in Linguistic Meaning},
pages = {447-459},
abstract = {<div class="main_entry"><section class="item abstract">Nonsentential utterances, or fragments, like <em>A coffee, please!</em> can often be used to communicate a propositional meaning otherwise encoded by a complete sentence <em>I'd like to order a coffee, please!</em>). Previous research focused mostly on the syntax and licensing of fragments, but the questions of why speakers use fragments and how listeners interpret them are still underexplored. I propose a simple game-theoretic account of fragment usage, which predicts that (i) listeners assign fragments the most likely interpretation in context and (ii) that speakers are aware of this and trade-off production cost and the risk of being misunderstood when choosing their utterance. Using a corpus of production data, empirically founded and precise model predictions are generated. These predictions are evaluated with two experiments using a novel gamified utterance selection paradigm. The experiments suggest that, as predicted, speakers take into account both potential gain in efficiency and the risk of being misunderstood when choosing their utterance.

</section></div>},
pubstate = {published},
type = {proceeding}
}