This paper discusses the effect of overspecified reference as a communicative strategy in action-oriented discourse. In a perception and a production experiment, based on identical instructive environments, participants were asked to identify an object after reading a minimally specified or overspecified expression, or to produce a referential expression in a low-importance or a high-importance context. Overspecification shows to be a pervasive instructive production strategy, which mostly affects the addressee's identification task in a positive way.
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