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part 2 - 7. Information Structure and Non-canonical Syntax, Materiały naukowe, The Hanbook of Pragmatics

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7. Information Structure and Non-canonical Syntax : The Handbook of Pragmatics : B...
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7. Information Structure and Non
-canonical
canonical
canonical Syntax
Syntax
GREGORY WARD
GREGORY WARD
AND
AND
BETTY BIRNER
BETTY BIRNER
AND
Subject
Theoretical Linguistics
Ç
Pragmatics
Key
-Topics
Topics
canon
,
information
,
structure
,
syntax
DOI:
10.1111/b.9780631225485.2005.00009.x
1 Introduction
Introduction
One of the primary factors contributing to the coherence of a discourse is the existence of
informational links between the current utterance and the prior context. These links facilitate
discourse processing by allowing the hearer to establish and track relationships such as coreference
between discourse entities. A variety of linguistic forms, in turn, mark these relationships. For
example, the use of the definite article marks the referent of a noun phrase as being individuable
within the discourse model (Birner and Ward 1994), and thereby cues the listener to the likelihood
that the entity in question has been previously evoked and individuated; thus, the listener will look for
an appropriate referent among his or her store of already evoked information rather than constructing
a new discourse entity.
Similarly, speakers use a wide range of non-canonical syntactic constructions to mark the information
status of the various elements within the proposition. These constructions not only mark the
information status of their constituents, but at the same time facilitate processing through the
positioning of various units of information. The speaker's choice of constructions, then, serves to
structure the informational flow of the discourse. This dual function of structuring and marking the
information in a discourse is illustrated in (1):
(1). Beds ringed the room, their iron feet sinking into thick shirdiks woven in colorful patterns
of birds and flowers. At the foot of each bed rested a stocky wooden chest, festooned with
designs of cranes and sheep, horses and leaves. [D. L. Wilson, I Rode a Horse of Milk White
Jade, 1998: 133]
Here, the NP each bed in the italicized clause has as its referent the set of beds already evoked in the
first sentence; the foot of each bed, in turn, can be inferred on the basis of the generally known fact
that a bed has a head and a foot. The inversion italicized here serves the dual function of, on the one
hand, structuring the information so as to link up the foot of each bed with the previously mentioned
beds for ease of processing and, on the other hand, marking the NP the foot of each bed as linked in
this way, via its sentence-initial placement, so that the hearer knows to search for a previously evoked
or inferrable entity rather than constructing a new entity for the beds.
The key factors that determine the structuring of information in English are the information's
discourse-status and hearer-status (Prince 1992); additional factors include formal weight and the
salience of particular Ñopen propositionsÒ (i.e., propositions containing an underspecified element) in
the discourse. (All of these factors will be discussed below.) Because non-canonical constructions are
used in consistent and characteristic ways to structure such information, formal features of a
particular construction make it possible to infer the status of the constituents of the construction; in
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this way the choice of construction for information-packaging purposes simultaneously marks the
information so packaged as to, for example, its discourse- and hearer-status. Thus, we can construct
a typology of non-canonical syntactic constructions and the information status of their constituents
(as will be shown in the table in (2) below).
Many languages tend to structure discourse on the basis of an Ñold/newÒ principle - that is, in any
given sentence, information that is assumed to be previously known tends to be placed before that
which is assumed to be new to the hearer.
1
English is such a language; indeed, this principle can be seen to be at work in (1) above, in that the
foot of each bed, inferrable from the previously evoked beds, is placed before the new and
unpredictable stocky wooden chest. Extensive research, however, has failed to identify a unitary
notion of ÑoldnessÒ or ÑgivennessÒ at work in all of the non-canonical constructions that are sensitive
to givenness. Rather, some constructions are sensitive to the status that the information has in the
discourse - whether it has been previously evoked or can plausibly be inferred from something that
has been previously evoked - whereas others are sensitive to the status that the information has for
the hearer - that is, whether the speaker believes it is already known to the hearer (not in the sense of
Ñknown to be true,Ò but rather present in the hearer's knowledge store). Moreover, certain
constructions are sensitive to the status of a single constituent, whereas others are sensitive to the
relative status of two constituents.
The type of information status to which a particular English construction is sensitive is partly
predictable from its form. As we will show below,
PREPOSING
constructions (that is, those that place
canonically postverbal constituents in preverbal position) mark the preposed information as familiar
within the discourse, while
POSTPOSING
constructions (those that place canonically preverbal
constituents in postverbal position) mark the postposed information as new, either to the discourse or
to the hearer. Finally, constructions that reverse the canonical ordering of two constituents (placing a
canonically preverbal constituent in postverbal position while placing a canonically postverbal
constituent in preverbal position) mark the preposed information as being at least as familiar within
the discourse as is the postposed information.
Thus, the situation we find in non-canonical syntactic constructions is as follows:
(2)
Information status
Preposed Old
Postposed New
Two arguments reversed Preposedat least as old as postposed
Single argument
Information status
This situation will be shown to hold for all constructions in English that involve the non-canonical
placement of one or more constituents whose canonical position is not filled by a referential element
(such as an anaphoric pronoun). It is traditional to think of such constructions as involving the
ÑmovementÒ of the preposed or postposed constituents from their canonical positions (hence the
absence of a referential constituent in that position), but we will take no position on how these
constructions are best analyzed syntactically. Our interest, rather, will be in their functional
properties, and specifically in their use by speakers for the purpose of structuring information in a
discourse.
2 Background and Definitions
Since the early Prague School work on syntax and discourse function (e.g. Firbas 1966), researchers
have accrued evidence for a correlation between sentence position and givenness in the discourse.
How to define the relevant notion of givenness, however, has been controversial. Prince (1981a)
frames the issue in terms of
ASSUMED
FAMILIARITY
, on the grounds that the speaker structures
information in discourse based on his or her assumptions concerning the familiarity of the
information to the hearer. Prince offers a preliminary taxonomy of types of givenness, ranging from
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brand-new information (either anchored to known information or not) through inferrable information
(that which has not been evoked but can be inferred from the prior context or from a constituent
contained within it) through ÑunusedÒ information (not evoked in the current discourse but assumed
to be previously known) to previously evoked information. Prince (1992) reframes this taxonomy in
terms of a matrix of two cross-cutting distinctions - between, on the one hand, discourse-old and
discourse-new information and, on the other hand, hearer-old and hearer-new information.
Discourse-old information is that which has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse, while
hearer-old information is that which, regardless of whether it has been evoked in the current
discourse, is assumed to be already known to the hearer. (See also Abbott, this volume, for a
discussion of similar parameters with respect to definiteness.)
The resulting matrix corresponds to Prince's earlier formulations as shown in (3):
(3)
É
É
Hearer
-old
old Hearer
-new
old
Hearer
new
Discourse-old Evoked
(non-occurring)
Discourse-newUnused
Brand-new
É
É
Brand-new anchored
Thus, in an utterance like The President gave a speech today, and in it he offered a new tax plan, the
NP the President represents information that is discourse-new but hearer-old, the NP a speech
represents information that is both discourse-new and (assumed to be) hearer-new, and the pronoun
it represents information that is both discourse-old and hearer-old. Information that is discourse-old
but hearer-new is predicted not to occur, on the grounds that a speaker typically believes that the
hearer is paying attention and thus that what has been evoked in the discourse is also known to the
hearer.
Prince (1992) leaves the status of inferrable information unresolved, but later studies have shown that
in those constructions sensitive to discourse-old status, inferrable information consistently patterns
with discourse-old information (Birner 1994, Birner and Ward 1998). As will be demonstrated below,
research has shown that the hearer- vs. discourse-status distinction is an important one for
distinguishing among functionally distinct syntactic constructions, and it will form the basis of our
functional typology of constructions.
In addition, many constructions require a particular open proposition to be salient in the discourse.
An open proposition (OP) is a proposition in which a constituent is left
OPEN
or unspecified; thus, a
question such as (4a) will render the OP in (4) salient.
(4)a. Where are your mittens?
(b). Your mittens are X:X˺[places]
That is, asking someone about the location of their mittens evokes the proposition that their mittens
are in some location, i.e. some member of the set of places. Declarative statements likewise give rise
to open propositions; for example, utterance of (5a) renders the OPs in (5b-d), among others, salient.
(5)a. I found your mittens.
(b). I found X:X˺[objects]
(c). X:X˺[people] found your mittens
(d). I did X:X˺[activities]
Uttering I found your mittens renders salient the notions that I found something, that someone found
your mittens, and that I did something, inter alia (cf. Wilson and Sperber 1979). The felicitous use of
certain constructions requires that a particular OP be salient in the discourse context, the classic
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example being clefts (Prince 1978, Delin 1995), as illustrated in (6)-(7):
(6)a. Two sets of immigration bills currently before this session of Congress are giving
observers both hope and worry. What is at stake are the immigration rights of gay people, and
though gay legislation generally moves slowly, voting is expected soon.
[Au Courant]
(b). Triggs is a lexicographer.
Over his desk hangs the 18th-century dictionary maker Samuel Johnson's ironical definition: ÑA
writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and
detailing the signification of words.Ã’
What Triggs actually does is find alert readers who recognize new words or new usages for
ordinary ones.
[New York Times News Service]
The wh-cleft in (6a), what is at stake are the immigration rights of gay people, is felicitous only in a
context in which it is salient that something is at stake (i.e., the OP X:X˺[issues] is at stake must be
salient). Likewise, the wh-cleft in 4b, what Triggs actually does is find alert readers who recognize
new words or new usages for ordinary ones, is felicitous only in a context in which it is salient that
Triggs does something (i.e., the OP Triggs does X:X˺[activities] must be salient). The contexts given in
(6) clearly do render these OPs salient; conversely, if such an OP is not salient, the wh-cleft is
infelicitous. Thus, compare (7a) and (7b), uttered in, say, a grocery store:
(7)a. Hey, look! That's my friend Jeremy Triggs over there. He's a lexicographer. What he does
is find alert readers who recognize new words or new usages for ordinary ones.
(b). Hey, look! That's my friend Jeremy Triggs over there. #What he does is find alert readers
who recognize new words or new usages for ordinary ones.
In (7a), the mention of Triggs's occupation gives rise to the issue of what he does, rendering the OP
salient. In (7b), however, merely sighting a friend in a grocery store does not render the OP salient,
and the wh-cleft is correspondingly infelicitous.
The instantiation of the variable in the OP corresponds to the
FOCUS
, or
NEW
INFORMATION
, of the
utterance. In (7a), the focus is find alert readers who recognize new words or new usages for ordinary
ones, corresponding to the instantiation of the OP. This packaging of information into an open
proposition and a focus corresponds closely to the
FOCUS
/
PRESUPPOSITION
distinction of Chomsky
(1971), Jackendoff (1972), and Rochemont (1978, 1986), inter alia (see also Vallduv (1992),
Lambrecht (1994), Gundel and Fretheim (this volume)).
Finally, many constructions are sensitive to the formal weight of their constituents. That is, just as
more informative (i.e. newer) information tends to appear late in the sentence, likewise longer or
more syntactically complex constituents tend to appear late in the sentence. The correlation between
the two, of course, is not coincidental. Information that has been previously evoked can frequently be
identified on the basis of a relatively short phrase, with the limiting case being a pronoun or null
argument for highly salient information; brand-new information, correspondingly, requires a
sufficiently long or complex linguistic realization to enable the hearer to construct an appropriate
discourse referent. Because formal weight is only tangential to the structuring of information, it will
not be among our central concerns in this chapter.
3 Preposing
Following Birner and Ward (1998) and Ward (1988), a
PREPOSING
is a sentence in which a lexically
governed, or subcategorized, phrasal constituent appears to the left of its canonical position, typically
sentence-initially. Preposing is not restricted to any particular phrasal category, as illustrated by the
examples of a preposed NP, PP, VP, and AP in (8) through (11), respectively:
(8). NP
To illustrate with a simple analogy, consider a person who knows arithmetic, who has mastered
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the concept of number. In principle, he is now capable of carrying out or determining the
accuracy of any computation. Some computations he may not be able to carry out in his head.
Paper and pencil are required to extend his memory. [N. Chomsky, Rules and Representations,
1980: 221]
(9). PP
But keep in mind that no matter which type of equipment you choose, a weight-training
regimen isn't likely to provide a cardiovascular workout as well. For that, you'll have to look
elsewhere.
[Philadelphia Inquirer, 8/28/83]
(10). VP
They certainly had a lot to talk about and talk they did.
[The New Republic, 4/23/84]
(11). AP
Interrogative do should then be classed as a popular idiom. Popular it may indeed have been,
but I doubt the different origin. [A. Ellegrd, The Auxiliary Do, the Establishment and
Regulation of Its Use in English, 1953: 168]
In each case, a single argument appears in preposed position and thus, following the generalization
we outlined earlier, that argument is constrained to be old information. More specifically, felicitous
preposing in English requires that the information conveyed by the preposed constituent constitute a
discourse-old anaphoric link to the preceding discourse (see Reinhart 1981, Horn 1986, Vallduv
1992).
This information can be related to the preceding discourse in a number of ways, including such
relations as type/subtype, entity/attribute, part/whole, identity, etc. These relations can all be defined
as partial orderings (Hirschberg 1991) and, as we have argued (Ward 1988, Birner and Ward 1998),
the range of relations that can support preposing are all of this type. Items (e.g. discourse entities)
that are ordered by means of a partial ordering constitute partially ordered sets, or
POSETS
. Some
typical partial orderings include, for example, type/subtype (pie and desserts), greater-than (five and
six), and simple set inclusion (apples and oranges). The notion of a poset subsumes both coreferential
links, where the linking relation between the preposed constituent link and the corresponding poset is
one of simple identity, and non-coreferential links, where the ordering relation is more complex.
Consider for example (12):
(12). Customer: Can I get a bagel?
Waitress: No, sorry. We're out of bagels. A bran muffin I can give you.
Here, the link (a bran muffin) and the previously evoked bagels stand in a poset relation as alternate
members of the inferred poset [breakfast baked goods]. However, note that the link could also have
been explicitly mentioned in the prior discourse, as in (13):
(13)
A: Can I get a bagel?
B: Sorry - all out.
A: How about a bran muffin?
B:
A bran muffin I can give you.
2
Here, although the link a bran muffin is coreferential with the entity explicitly evoked in A's second
query, the salient linking relation is not identity. Rather, the link is related via a type/subtype relation
to the evoked poset [breakfast baked goods], of which both bagels and bran muffins are members.
3
Thus, both (12) and (13) illustrate preposings whose posets contain multiple set members. However,
some types of preposing also permit links to posets containing only a single set member. Consider
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