As humans, we have the capacity to refer to the things in the world around us. In everyday spoken communication, we often use words to describe intended referents (such as objects, people, and events), and our bodies (e.g., eyes, head, and hands) to indicate the location to which our addressee should focus her attention in order to further identify what we are talking about (Bühler, 1934; Clark...

Lexical alignment refers to the adoption of one's interlocutor's lexical items. Accounts of the mechanisms underlying such lexical alignment differ (among other aspects) in the role assigned to addressee-centered behavior. In this study, we used a triadic communicative situation to test which factors may modulate the extent to which participants' lexical alignment reflects addressee-centered be...

The article is devoted to the investigation of grammar text with focus on definition, history formation, main stages development, its relationship linguistically and sociologically objective subjective grammar. two linguistic social categories addressee-linguoperson addressee are clearly separated clarified. Also, status in discussed detail. offers analysis linguistic-social specifics expressio...

Evidence suggests that speakers can take account of the addressee's needs when referring. However, what representations drive the speaker's audience design has been less clear. This study aims to go beyond previous studies by investigating the interplay between the visual and linguistic context during audience design. Speakers repeated subordinate descriptions (e.g., firefighter) given in the p...

One measure of the communicative function of gestures is to test how speakers’ gestures are influenced by whether an addressee can see them or not, that is, by manipulating visibility between participants. We question traditional dependent variables (i.e., rate measures), suggesting that they may have been insufficient for capturing essential differences in the gestures speakers use in each con...