Something old, something new: Addressee knowledge and the given-new contract

Although speakers in a dialogue are known to design utterances cooperatively with respect to meaning, less is known about audience design with respect to syntax. We report two picture verification experiments that investigated the production of Given-New ordering when speakers' and addressees' knowledge differed. In both experiments, speakers produced word orders that reflected their own but not their addressees' knowledge states. We suggest that speakers do not engage in audience design for aspects of their utterances which they do not consider to be necessary for adequate