In order to talk about an event they see in the world, speakers have to build a conceptual representation of that event and generate a message that selects the pragmatically appropriate (e.g., informative) parts of that event that they want to talk about. To further understand the relationship between a speaker's conceptual representations and the pragmatic factors that influence message generation, this work investigates the extent to which different aspects of an event could be affected by pragmatic constraints. We focus specifically on source-goal motion events (e.g., a butterfly flying from a lamppost to a chair) because the conceptual structure of these events is well-understood, but the role that those representations play in message generation is yet unclear. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the pragmatic status of the source (e.g., the lamppost) – in particular, whether starting points of motion were or were not already known to an addressee. We found that sources were mentioned significantly more in the latter case, where they provided new, previously unknown information to the addressee. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether the same pragmatic factors could affect goals, or endpoints of motion events (e.g., the chair), in the same way; results showed that they could not. We conclude that conceptually peripheral elements of an event (i.e., sources) are more susceptible to communicative factors than those elements which are conceptually privileged (i.e., goals). We consider the implications of our findings for the relationship between event cognition and pragmatics and discuss how theories of event cognition can be integrated into current models of language production. We also discuss the implications of our work for open issues in the domain of event cognition.

为了谈论他们在世界上看到的事件，演讲者必须构建该事件的概念表示并生成一条消息，以选择他们想谈论的该事件的实用的（例如，提供信息的）部分。为了进一步理解演讲者的概念性表达与影响消息生成的语用因素之间的关系，本研究调查了事件的各个方面受到语用约束的影响程度。我们特别关注源目标运动事件（例如，从路灯柱飞到椅子上的蝴蝶），因为这些事件的概念结构已经被很好地理解，但是这些表示在消息生成中的作用尚不清楚。在实验1中，我们操纵了来源的实用状态（例如，路灯柱）–特别是收件人是否知道运动的起点。我们发现，在后一种情况下，消息来源被提及的次数更多，因为它们向收件人提供了以前未知的新信息。在实验2中，我们调查了相同的务实因素是否会以相同的方式影响目标或运动事件的终点（例如，椅子）。结果表明他们做不到。我们得出的结论是，与概念上具有特权（即目标）的那些元素相比，事件的概念性外围元素（即源）更容易受到交流因素的影响。我们考虑研究结果对事件认知与语用学之间关系的影响，并讨论如何将事件认知理论整合到当前的语言产生模型中。