How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish

Abstract This study analyzes to what extent communicative accounts, in contrast to production ease ones, can predict the variable coding length of conditional constructions in Spanish. If coding length is determined by communicative efficiency, we anticipate more accessible antecedents to be more parsimoniously encoded and less accessible ones to be more explicitly encoded. Insofar as coding length is determined by production-internal processes, longer coding is expected when speakers experience production difficulties. A Bayesian mixed-effects multinomial regression of 977 conditional constructions indicates that coding length is chiefly regulated by the speaker’s communicative goals in that highly accessible antecedents are realized with shorter forms, and more inaccessible antecedents involve longer coding. We propose a speaker-hearer efficiency cline of conditional constructions that ranges from maximally explicit coding, which is less efficient for the speaker but easier to parse for the hearer, to maximally inferential coding, which is more efficient for the speaker but increases the inferential cognitive load of the hearer. Moreover, we find support for the view that pragmatically indirect conditionals are frequently redundantly coded. Because indirect speech act resolution is cognitively heavy for the listener, speakers seem to counterbalance the higher processing costs exerted by them through longer coding.