![]() This idea has been formalized in information-theoretic ( Levy and Jaeger, 2007 Levy, 2008) and game-theoretic frameworks ( Franke, 2009 Frank and Goodman, 2012). The sparse evidence available with respect to the actual usage of fragments suggests that the choice between a fragment and a sentence is driven by the general tendency to maximize communicative efficiency: Speakers adapt the form of the utterance to properties of the situation and the hearer. Such information structure-based accounts however explain only why fragments can or cannot be used under particular conditions, but not why they are (not) used when they are licensed by grammar. Leaving aside conceptual differences between these accounts, overall they agree on the prediction that only material that is given in an information-structural sense ( Schwarzschild, 1999) can be omitted and that words that belong to the focus (see e.g., Rooth, 1992) must be realized. In the theoretical literature, the grammaticality of omissions has been related to information structure, in particular to the notions of focus and givenness ( Merchant, 2004 Reich, 2007 Weir, 2014 Ott and Struckmeier, 2016 Griffiths, 2019). Only a few studies have looked into the questions of why speakers use fragments at all, and under which circumstances they prefer them over the corresponding full sentence. Subsentential utterances, or fragments 1 ( Morgan, 1973), have been discussed extensively in the theoretical literature from a syntactic perspective, in particular with respect to the question of whether they are a genuinely nonsentential output of syntax ( Ginzburg and Sag, 2000 Barton and Progovac, 2005 Culicover and Jackendoff, 2005 Stainton, 2006), or derived by ellipsis from regular sentences ( Merchant, 2004 Reich, 2007 Weir, 2014). Despite their reduced form, given an appropriate context, such subsentential utterances are interpreted as roughly meaning-equivalent to their fully sentential counterparts. Besides utterances that contain different word forms or syntactic constructions, speakers can often resort to a subsentential utterance like (1-a) instead of a full sentence like (1-b). 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.1Collaborative Research Center 1102, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.Robin Lemke 1,2 *, Ingo Reich 1,2, Lisa Schäfer 1,2 and Heiner Drenhaus 1,3
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