Pre-History
The collaborative model finds its roots in Grice's cooperative principle and four Gricean maxims, theories which prominently established the idea that conversation is a collaborative process between speaker and listener.
However, until the Clark/Wilkes-Gibbs study, the prevailing theory in explaining how participants in a conversation speak and understand was the literary model(or autonomous model or traditional model). This model likened the process of a speaker establishing reference to an author writing a book to distant readers. In the literary model, the speaker is the one who retains complete control and responsibility over the course of referent determination. The listener, in this theory, simply hears and understands the definite description as if they were reading it and, if successful, figures out the identity of the referent on their own.
It wasn't until the work of D.R. Olson in 1970 that a psycholinguistic researcher suggested the possibility that the process of establishing reference had a collaborative element and was not strictly autonomous. Olson, while still holding to the literary model, suggested that speakers select the words they do based on context and what they believe the listener will understand.
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