Speakers balance their use of cues to grammatical functions in informative discourse contexts

Grammatical encoding has been suggested to be driven by communicative efficiency – a balance between production ease and success. Evidence for this view comes from studies indicating that speakers their use of morphosyntactic cues grammatical functions with respect animacy. However, these have not taken in the discourse context into account. In picture-description task, we investigate influence animacy on Swedish transitive sentences. These sentences are produced contexts additional information about functions. We find various (e.g. SVO word order case marking) more frequently used when object referent is animate. Speakers thus functions, even informative those findings provide direct evidence influenced efficiency.