Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

In this paper we examine the way disjunctive choices work in conversational context. We focus on disjunctive deontic rules, such as "you must either submit an essay or attend an exam". According to the Gricean "maxim of orderliness", a derivative of the "maxim of manner", people should interpret the first-mentioned…