Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
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CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS
General editors: s. R. ANDERSON, J. BRESNAN, B. COMRIE,
W. DRESSLER, C. EWEN, R. HUDDLESTON, R. LASS,
D. LIGHTFOOT, J. LYONS, P. H. MATTHEWS, R. POSNER,
S. ROMAINE, N. V. SMITH, N. VINCENT
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In this series
52 MICHAEL S. ROCHEMONT and PETER W. CULICOVER: English focus
constructions and the theory of grammar
53 PHILIP CARR: Linguistic realities: an autonomist metatheory for the generative
enterprise
54 EVE SWEETSER: From etymology to pragmatics: metaphorical and cultural aspects
of semantic structure
55 REGINA BLASS: Relevance relations in discourse: a study with special reference to
Sissala
56 ANDREW CHESTERMAN: On definiteness: a study with special reference to
English and Finnish
57 ALESSANDRA GIORGI and GIUSEPPE LONGOBARDI: The syntax of noun
phrases: configuration, parameters and empty categories
58 MONIK CHARETTE: Conditions on phonological government
59 M. H. KLAIMAN: Grammatical voice
60 SARAH M. B. FAGAN: The syntax and semantics of middle constructions: a study
with special reference to German
61 ANJUM P. SALEEMI: Universal Grammar and language learnability
62 STEPHEN R. ANDERSON: A-Morphous Morphology
63 LESLEY STIRLING: Switch reference and discourse representation.
64 HENK J. VERKUYL: A theory of aspectuality: the interaction between temporal and
atemporal structure
65 EVE V. CLARK: The lexicon in acquisition
66 ANTHONY R. WARNER: English auxiliaries: structure and history
67 P. H. MATTHEWS: Grammatical theory in the United States from Bloomfield to
Chomsky
68 LJILJANA PROGOVAC: Negative and positive polarity: a binding approach
69 R. M. W. DIXON: Ergativity
70 YAN HUANG: The syntax and pragmatics of anaphora
71 KNUD LAMBRECHT: Information structure and sentence form: topic, focus, and the
mental representations of discourse referents
72 LUIGI BURZIO: Principles of English stress
73 JOHN A. HAWKINS: A performance theory of order and constituency
74 ALICE C. HARRIS and LYLE CAMPBELL: Historical syntax in cross-linguistic
perspective
75 LILIANE HAEGEMAN: The syntax of negation
76 PAUL GORRELL: Syntax and parsing
77 GUGLIELMO CINQUE: Italian syntax and Universal Grammar
78 HENRY SMITH: Restrictiveness in case theory
79 D. ROBERT LADD: International phonology
80 ANDREA MORO: The raising of predicates: predicative noun phrases and the theory
of clause structure
81 ROGER LASS: Historical linguistics and language change
82 JOHN M. ANDERSON: A notional theory of syntactic categories
83 BERND HEINE: Possession: cognitive sources, forces and grammaticalization
Supplementary volumes
A. E. BACKHOUSE: The lexical field of taste: a semantic study of Japanese taste terms
NICKOLAUS RITT: Quantity adjustment: vowel lengthening and shortening in early Middle
English
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INFORMATION STRUCTURE
AND SENTENCE FORM
Topic, focus, and the mental representations of
discourse referents
KNUD LAMBRECHT
Department of French and Italian
University of Texas at Austin
| CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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CAMBRIDGE u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,
São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521587044
Lambrecht, Knud.
Information structure and sentence form: topic, focus, and the
mental representations of discourse referents / Knud Lambrecht.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 38056 1 (hardback). ISBN 0 521 58704 2 (paperback)
1. Grammar, Comparative and general — Sentences. 2. Grammar,
Comparative and general — Syntax. 3. Discourse analysis. 4. Pragmatics.
I. Title. P295.L36 1994
415-dc20 93-30380 CIP
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This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents:
Anni and Hans Lambrecht
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Contents
Preface xiii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 What is information structure? 1
1.2 The place of information structure in grammar 6
1.3 Information structure and sentence form: a sample
analysis 13
1.3.1 Three examples 13
1.3.2 A note on markedness in information structure 15
1.3.3 Analysis 19
1.3.4 Summary 24
1.4 Information structure and syntax 25
1.4.1 Autonomy versus motivation in grammar 26
1.4.2 The functional underspecification of syntactic
structures 29
1.4.3 Sentence types and the notion of grammatical
construction 32
2 Information 36
2.1 The universe of discourse 36
2.2 Information 43
2.3 Presupposition and assertion 51
2.4 The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional
structure 65
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Contents
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Contents xi
Notes 341
References 362
Index 376
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Preface
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xiv Preface
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Preface xv
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xvi Preface
Paul Postal, Armin Schwegler, and Sandy Thompson for their comments
on various parts of my dissertation, and to my friend Lenny Moss for
making me aware of connections between my work and research in other
scientific disciplines.
The present book has greatly benefited from discussions with Lee
Baker, Charles Fillmore, Suzanne Fleishman, Danielle Forget, Mirjam
Fried, Paul Kay, Manfred Krifka, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Dale Koike,
Francois Lagarde, Ellen Prince, Carlota Smith, and Tony Woodbury. I
am particularly grateful to Robert Van Valin for his interest in my work
and his encouragement in difficult times, and to Laura Michaelis for her
loving help and her faith in the value of this enterprise. Special thanks are
due also to Matthew Dryer for his penetrating criticism of certain
sections of the book, and to Randy LaPolla, who provided much help
with a careful reading of the manuscript. I am also grateful to a no-
longer-anonymous reviewer for Cambridge University Press (Nigel
Vincent) for his comments on parts of the manuscript. But above all I
want to thank Sue Schmerling for her detailed comments on various
versions of the manuscript, for her gentle yet inexorable criticism, and for
many hours of stimulating discussions in the cafes of Austin. And last,
but certainly not least, I would like to thank my friend Robby Aronowitz,
linguist turned MD, for his love and support over the years. Finally, I
thank the University of Texas at Austin for a Research Grant which
facilitated work on this book during one air-conditioned summer.
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1 Introduction
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2 Introduction
in the clause relates to what has been talked about before ... Perhaps the
great bulk of the derivational machinery in the syntax of natural
languages can be functionally explained by reference to the specialized
conversational jobs that many sentence structures seem to be designed
to perform. (1983:373)
It seems to me that any theoretical research that has even the slightest
chance of eventually explaining "the bulk of the syntactic processes called
'movement rules'" is worth pursuing, however discouraging the present
state of our knowledge may be. I hope this book will reduce some of the
"confusion and vagueness" which "plague the relevant literature" and
thereby help reduce the gap between "formal" and "functional"
approaches to the study of language.'
The difficulties encountered in the analysis of the information-
structure component of grammar are reflected in certain problems of
terminology. In the nineteenth century, some of the issues described here,
in particular the issue of word order and intonation, were discussed in the
context of the relationship between grammar and PSYCHOLOGY, as
manifested in the difference between "psychological" and "gramma-
tical" subjects and predicates (see e.g. Paul 1909, especially Chapters 6
and 16). Among the labels which have been used by twentieth-century
linguists are FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE, used by scholars of the
Prague School of linguistics, INFORMATION STRUCTURE or THEME (Halliday
1967), INFORMATION PACKAGING (Chafe 1976), DISCOURSE PRAGMATICS, and
and most recently INFORMATICS (Vallduvi 1990b). What unites linguistic
research done under one or another of these headings is the idea that
certain formal properties of sentences cannot be fully understood without
looking at the linguistic and extralinguistic contexts in which the
sentences having these properties are embedded. Since discourse involves
the USE of sentences in communicative settings, such research is clearly
associated with the general area of PRAGMATICS. The general domain of
inquiry into the relationship between grammar and discourse is therefore
often referred to as "discourse pragmatics." The reason I have adopted
Halliday's term "information structure" is because in the present book
special emphasis is placed on the STRUCTURAL implications of discourse-
pragmatic analysis. Occasionally I will also use Chafe's more vivid
"information packaging," whose partially non-latinate character makes
it less appropriate for international use.2
What then, is information structure or information packaging?
According to Prince (1981a), information packaging has to do with
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What is information structure? 3
The statuses to be discussed here have more to do with how the content
is transmitted than with the content itself. Specifically, they all have to
do with the speaker's assessment of how the addressee is able to process
what he is saying against the background of a particular context. Not
only do people's minds contain a large store of knowledge, they are also
at any one moment in certain temporary states with relation to that
knowledge ... Language functions effectively only if the speaker takes
account of such states in the mind of the person he is talking to. (Chafe
1976:27)
We may now word the basic problem as follows. From the point of view
of the speaker/writer, what kinds of assumptions about the hearer/
reader have a bearing on the form of the text being produced ... ? From
the point of view of the hearer/reader, what inferences will s/he draw on
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4 Introduction
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What is information structure? 5
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6 Introduction
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The place of information structure in grammar 7
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8 Introduction
termed relation that unites (i) linguistic form and (ii) the communicative
functions that these forms are capable of serving, with (iii) the contexts
or settings in which those linguistic forms can have those communicative
functions. Diagrammatically,
Syntax [form]
Semantics [form, function]
Pragmatics [form, function, setting] (Fillmore 1976:83)
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The place of information structure in grammar 9
In its more restricted and technical sense, ecology is the study of organic
diversity. It focuses on the interaction of organisms and their
environments in order to address what may be the most fundamental
question in evolutionary biology: "Why are there so many kinds of
living things?" (Gould 1977:119)
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10 Introduction
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The place of information structure in grammar 11
Syntax may be autonomous in its own domain, but by its nature it must
provide the resources for expressing the communicative needs of
speakers. Therefore its nature cannot be fully understood unless we
explain the principles which determine its function in discourse. In my
view, the most promising but perhaps also the most difficult approach to
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12 Introduction
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A sample analysis 13
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14 Introduction
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A sample analysis 15
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16 Introduction
focal material; see Section 5.3.3). Assuming the existence of a relationship
between sentence accent and focus, these two assumptions, taken
together, entail that in the unmarked case a clause-initial subject will
have a topic relation and a clause-final object a focus relation to the
proposition (the terms "topic relation" and "focus relation" will be
explicated in Chapters 4 and 5). The UNMARKED INFORMATION-STRUCTURE
SEQUENCE for lexical arguments is thus topic-focus. (I am ignoring here
the pragmatic status of non-argument constituents, in particular of the
verb; see Section 5.4.2 for justification of this procedure.) Given these
assumptions, the constituent order in the Italian sentence (1.2) and the
position of the focus accent in the English sentence (1.1) must be
characterized as marked.
These assumptions concerning the markedness status of the syntactic
and prosodic structure of our sentences are not uncontroversial and call
for some justification. In assuming that languages have a pragmatically
unmarked (or canonical) constituent order and an unmarked focus-
accent position, I am by no means suggesting that sentences having these
formal properties are "pragmatically neutral." The widespread idea of
the existence of pragmatically neutral syntax or prosody is misleading
because it rests on the unwarranted assumption that grammatical form
"normally" has no pragmatic correlates. (A terminologically more
elaborate version of this idea is that unmarked word order or accent
position is used in discourse situations which lack "particular pre-
suppositions"; such statements remain vacuous as long as they are
not accompanied by a definition of "normal presuppositions.") The
assumption that certain sentence forms are pragmatically neutral
naturally leads to the view, which I take to be misguided, that the task
of linguists interested in information structure is at best that of figuring
out which "special constructions" are in need of a pragmatic inter-
pretation. Just as there are no sentences without morphosyntactic and
phonological structure, there are no sentences without information
structure. Saying that some syntactic or prosodic structures "have a
special pragmatic function" while others do not is somewhat like saying
that some mechanical tools have a special function while others are
functionally neutral. According to this logic, a screwdriver for example
would be said to have a "special function" because the objects
manipulated with it (i.e. screws) must have a special shape, while a
hammer would be said to be functionally neutral because it may be used
to drive in various kinds of objects including nails, fence poles, and if
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A sample analysis 17
need be even screws. The difference is of course not that hammers have
no special function or are functionally neutral but simply that their
potential domain of application is larger, hence that they tend to be used
more often.
Concerning the pragmatic markedness status of grammatical struc-
tures, we can state the following general rule: given a pair of
allosentences, one member is pragmatically unmarked if it serves two
discourse functions while the other member serves only one of them.
While the marked member is positively specified for some pragmatic
feature, the unmarked member is neutral with respect to this feature. For
example, the canonical SVO sentence She likes GERMANS is unmarked for
the feature "argument focus" while its clefted counterpart // is GERMANS
that she likes is marked for this feature (see Section 5.6 for details). The
canonical version may be construed both with a broad (or "normal") and
with a narrow (or "contrastive") focus reading, i.e. the sentence may be
used to answer either the question "What kind of person is she?" or a
question such as "Does she like Americans or Germans?" The clefted
allosentence, on the other hand, only permits the narrow-focus reading.
In other words, while the former can be used in the reading of the latter,
the latter cannot be used in one of the readings of the former.12 This
approach to pragmatic markedness entails that the marked member of a
given pair of allosentences may in turn be the unmarked member of
another pair. For example, the Italian inversion construction in (1.2),
whose syntax is marked in comparison to its canonical counterpart (see
(1.2') below), is unmarked with respect to the feature "argument focus."
Herein it contrasts with the clefted allosentence E la mia MACCHINA que si
e rotta "It is my CAR that broke down": the VS sentence has both a
broad- and a narrow-focus reading (like its subject-accented English
counterpart in (1.1)), but the cleft sentence can only be construed as
having narrow focus.
In calling SV(O) constituent order and clause-final focus-accent
position "pragmatically unmarked" in our three languages I am
referring to the fact that this pattern has greater DISTRIBUTIONAL FREE-
DOM than alternative patterns and, as a corollary, that it has greater
overall frequency of occurrence. I am NOT implying that alternative, i.e.
marked, patterns are somehow "stylistically remarkable" or "abnormal."
For example with a certain class of intransitive predicates (the so-called
"unaccusatives" as well as impersonal ^/-predicates) VS order in Italian is
in fact often perceived by native speakers to be more natural than SV
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18 Introduction
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A sample analysis 19
1.3.3 Analysis
Let us return to our three examples. How is the semantic and pragmatic
structure of these sentences related to the level of morphosyntax and
prosody and, more specifically, what is the role of information structure
in the shaping of these utterances?
In the English sentence My CAR broke down, the semantic role of THEME
is associated with the syntactic relation of SUBJECT in the subject phrase
my car. Within this phrase, the determiner my plays the semantic role of
the possessor, and the noun car that of the possessed entity. The subject
NP is the initial constituent in an intransitive sentence, resulting in a
sequence of the form NP-V. As for the information structure of (1.1), we
notice that the linguistic expression designating the topic of the utterance
(the speaker) is the initial pronominal element my. The pragmatic relation
of TOPIC is thus mapped with the non-phrasal syntactic category of
determiner, which is not an argument of the main predicate, and whose
position is fixed within its phrasal domain. The sentence accent falls on
the subject noun car, marking the designatum of this noun as having the
pragmatic relation of FOCUS rather than topic to the proposition and -
given the particular focus structure of this sentence - indirectly marking
all subsequent constituents as part of the focus domain (see Section 5.6.2).
Thus in (1.1) both the semantic role of theme and the pragmatic role of
focus are associated with the grammatical role of subject in a constituent
of type NP, and this subject NP occupies its unmarked preverbal
position. Moreover this NP is also the only nominal constituent in the
sentence. However the position of the focus accent on the noun car is
marked. Instead of being coded syntactically, the information structure
of the utterance is coded prosodically. It follows that the SYNTACTIC
pattern in (1.1) is NOT directly motivated by the pragmatics of the
utterance. Rather the sequence NP-V is an independently motivated
syntactic structure in the language. Indeed, the same syntactic sequence,
but with a different intonation contour, could be used under different
pragmatic conditions, as when I ask "What happened to your CAR?" and
you answer, with perhaps somewhat unnatural explicitness:
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20 Introduction
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A sample analysis 21
Sentence (1.2') has the canonical (unmarked) form, with the topical subject
NP in initial position and the focus accent on the predicate.15
There is another interesting difference between the Italian and the
English example with respect to the formal manifestation of the
information structure of the proposition, having to do with the syntactic
status of the pronoun mi. Like the English possessive my, mi has the
pragmatic role of topic. But in Italian this topic is a personal pronoun
bound to the verb rather than a determiner bound to a noun. By
replacing the ordinary NP-internal possessive relation (as in la mia
macchina "my car" in (1.2')) by a relation between a personal pronoun
and a non-possessive NP, Italian is able to maintain the topic constituent
in its unmarked initial position rather than have it follow the verb. Notice
that this expression of the "topic-first principle" occurs again at the
expense of the unmarked, canonical syntax.
To summarize, even though the Italian example (1.2) resembles the
English (1.1) in that the theme, the subject, and the focus are all
combined in the same NP constituent, the manifestation of the
information structure of the proposition in the form of the sentence is
radically different in the two languages. In Italian it is not the unmarked
syntactic SV sequence but the unmarked prosodic sequence that is
maintained, with a topic constituent as the initial and the constituent
carrying the focus accent as the final element in the clause. The Italian
sentence contains TWO argument constituents, while its English counter-
part contains only one.16 Using Bally's schematic representation, we may
symbolize the prosodic sequence in the Italian sentence as A-Z.
In the discussion of the Italian sentence I have assumed, with
traditional grammar, that the postverbal constituent la macchina is the
subject of the sentence, albeit an "inverted" one. This has become a
controversial assumption in generative syntax. One can argue that la
macchina is in fact not a full-fledged subject because it shares certain
formal properties with direct objects (in particular its position), an idea
which has been much discussed in recent years in connection with the so-
called "unaccusative hypothesis" (Perlmutter 1978, Burzio 1981, etc).
According to this hypothesis, the postverbal subject in (1.2), as in other
VS constructions containing certain intransitive predicates, would in fact
not be a subject but an object at a deeper level of analysis. I consider it a
major advantage of the approach to grammatical analysis advocated in
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22 Introduction
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A sample analysis 23
sentence such as Est en panne ma VOITURE, which would have the focus in
the right place, would be syntactically ill-formed).19
In the bi-clausal structure thus created, the function of the first clause
J'ai ma voiture, which appears to express a semantically independent
proposition, is in fact not to make the (tautological) assertion that the
speaker "has her car." Rather the sole function of the avo/r-clause is to
pragmatically POSE the referent of the NP in the discourse in such a way
that its lexical manifestation does not coincide with the grammatical role
of subject. The subject position of this clause is occupied by the first
person subject pronoun je which, like the Italian dative mi, has the
pragmatic role of topic. The semantic role of this topic argument may be
described as locative (see Lambrecht 1988b). The semantic relation of the
referent of the lexical NP ma voiture to the predicate est en panne is
expressed in the <7«/-clause, whose pronominal subject qui is anaphoric to
the object NP in the preceding clause. This ^rw/'-clause, even though it has
the internal structure of a relative clause, differs in crucial ways both
from the restrictive and the appositive relative clause type. Not only
could the antecedent NP in the avo/r-clause be a proper name, thereby
excluding the modifying function associated with the restrictive relative,
but the information expressed in the ^Mi-clause in (1.3) is neither
(pragmatically) presupposed, as in the restrictive relative, nor parenthe-
tical, as in the appositive relative. In fact it is the predicate of the qui-
clause, not of the avo/r-clause, which expresses the main assertion
expressed by the sentence (see Lambrecht 1988a for further discussion).
Thus in the French sentence both grammatical relations and syntactic
constituent structure are accommodated to fit an independently
motivated information structure, at the price of complex formal
adjustments. While in English the proposition is expressed with one
predicator and one argument, and in Italian with one predicator and two
arguments, in French it is expressed with two predicators and three
arguments (two of which obligatorily designate the same entity). Since
the French sentence is synonymous with the monoclausal English and
Italian sentences, and since the French canonical monoclausal version in
(1.3') is syntactically and semantically well-formed, this proliferation of
arguments can only be explained by the requirements of information
structure. We can symbolize the sequence in the French sentence as A - Z -
A-Z, i.e. as a grammatical compromise between the English sequence Z -
A and the Italian sequence A-Z. The accented NP ma voiture is final in its
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24 Introduction
1.3.4 Summary
The purpose of the preceding analysis was to defend the view that the
grammatical patterns illustrated in our three examples can be understood
in all their complexity only by interpreting them as the result of multiple
language-specific dependencies between the various components of
grammar: semantics, information structure, morphosyntax, and pro-
sody. As the examples show, the interaction between the components
may lead to quite different formal results, even in languages as closely
related as English, French and Italian. In the case of the English example
(1.1), information structure "loses out" on the syntactic level. However
this loss is compensated for by the fact that in English the sentence accent
can in principle "move" from right to left, allowing for prosodic focus
marking in any position in the sentence. Because of the importance of
sentence accentuation in English, syntactic expression of information
structure is often unnecessary in this language, or, phrased differently,
sentence accentuation makes up for the rigid word order constraints of
English grammar. Sentence prosody is thus pragmatically highly
motivated in English. Typologically, English presents itself as an
example of extreme "subject prominence" (Li & Thompson 1976), i.e.
as a language in which a great variety of semantic and pragmatic
functions may be associated with the invariant syntactic function of
subject and in which word order is to a large extent grammatically and
not pragmatically controlled.20
The competition of grammatical factors has different consequences in
the Italian example (1.2). Here, it is syntax that "yields" in the
competition between formal structure and information structure: the
canonical constituent order is altered to accommodate the requirements
of discourse. Just as English is reluctant to tolerate a violation of its
canonical SV order, Italian is reluctant to tolerate a violation of the
information-structure constraint that places a focus argument in post-
verbal position.21 In Italian, word order is thus to a greater extent
controlled by information structure than in English, even though the
syntax of Italian is far more rigid in this respect than the syntax of so-
called free word order languages, like Russian or Latin. Given our
assumption that the SV(O) pattern in (1.2') illustrates the unmarked
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Information structure and syntax 25
constituent order in this language, we may say that the formal structure
of (1.2) is MOTIVATED by the pragmatic function of the utterance.
As for the French structure in (1.3), syntax and information structure
both win and lose in the competition. The constituent order in the French
sentence being strongly grammatically controlled, the language does not
freely permit subject-verb inversion or other types of word-order
variation found in languages with pragmatically controlled word order.
Nevertheless the global structure of sentence (1.3) DIRECTLY reflects its
pragmatic function. Even more so than in Italian, the syntactic structure
of the French sentence may be said to be pragmatically MOTIVATED, since
this cleft construction involving the verb avoir has as its unique function
to express a single proposition in bi-clausal form under the specific
pragmatic circumstances discussed above. As shown in Lambrecht 1986b
(Section 7.2.2), certain formal and semantic properties of the construc-
tion (such as the use of the verb avoir in cooccurrence with a possessive
object NP) can be made sense of only if reference is made to its pragmatic
function. By using grammatical constructions of the clefting type, spoken
French achieves several things at once. It substitutes structures of a
certain pragmatically preferred type for the pragmatically unacceptable
SV(O) sequence; it preserves its syntactically controlled basic word order
without violating the information-structure constraint which maps topic
with subject and focus with object; and it avoids violation of its strict
oxytonic accent pattern. The "mixed strategy" of cleft formation allows
the language to have its cake and eat it too. It represents one of the
specific solutions in French to the competition between syntax and
pragmatics.
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26 Introduction
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28 Introduction
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30 Introduction
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32 Introduction
Marked topics and marked foci naturally compete for this cognitively
privileged position.27
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Information structure and syntax 33
Type Schema." In the case of English, it is the presence and the position
of the auxiliary which determine a significant set of formal sentence
types, in conjunction with a set of intonation features which directly
interact with the syntax. Although Akmajian acknowledges the
theoretical possibility of a one-to-one form-function fit (for example in
such constructions as Down with XI or Off with X's Y!, which he calls
"highly marked"), his main claim is "that something along the lines of
the Formal Sentence-Type Schema, based on a small and restricted set of
formal parameters, provides the input from formal grammar to the
pragmatics" and that across languages "the task will be to specify a set of
correspondence principles that relate certain formal sentence-types and
certain pragmatic functions" (p. 21).
Akmajian's theoretical stance may be characterized as follows. Given
the fact that there are clear cases of one-to-many form-function
correspondences, i.e. given the fact that in many cases a single syntactic
structure serves more than one pragmatic function, let us assume a
syntactic component which is as simple and general as possible and let
this component generate a small set of highly general sentence types. Let
us furthermore allow this component to interact with certain aspects of
phonology, and let a sophisticated pragmatic component, in the form of a
universal theory of speech acts, provide principles of pragmatic
interpretation which will rule out undesirable surface configurations.
Any formal phenomena which are not accounted for in this way will have
to be specified as a set (small, we hope) of exceptions to the general
system, e.g. in the form of special syntactic rules.
Although there is an undeniable theoretical appeal in this idea of a
mapping function between highly general syntactic types and equally
general pragmatic principles, I believe that this approach does not
provide a realistic picture of the relationship between form and function
in natural language.29 Even though it is true that a great many syntactic
patterns cannot be uniquely paired with specific uses, I believe that the
number of "highly marked" and idiosyncratic form-meaning-use
correspondences in natural languages is much greater than assumed
in most current approaches. With Fillmore and other proponents of
Construction Grammar, I take it to be impossible to draw a dividing
line on principled grounds between idiosyncratic (or "idiomatic") and
general or ("regular") types of constructions. One of the most important
tenets of Construction Grammar is the belief that the distinction
between "idiomaticity" and "regularity" (syntactic generativity, semantic
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2 Information
In this and the next three chapters I will analyze the concepts which I
consider fundamental to the study of information structure. These
concepts are: (i) PROPOSITIONAL INFORMATION and its two components
PRESUPPOSITION and ASSERTION (Chapter 2); (ii) the IDENTIFIABILITY and
ACTIVATION states of the representations of discourse referents in the
minds of the speech participants (Chapter 3); (iii) the pragmatic relations
TOPIC (Chapter 4) and FOCUS (Chapter 5). Many of the observations in
these chapters have been made by other linguists before me, and I will
acknowledge my predecessors whenever possible. Other portions, I
believe, contain new insights, such as the analysis of the pragmatic
relations "topic" and "focus" and of the relationship between the two. In
particular, what I believe is new in my treatment, and what prompts me
to call it loosely a "theory," is the idea that an account of information
structure must include all three of the sets of concepts listed above and
must explain how they relate to each other.'
(a) the TEXT-EXTERNAL WORLD, which comprises (i) SPEECH PARTICIPANTS, i.e. a
speaker and one or several addressees, and (ii) a SPEECH SETTING, i.e. the
place, time and circumstances in which a speech event takes place;
36
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The universe of discourse 37
(b) the TEXT-INTERNAL WORLD, which comprises LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS
(words, phrases, sentences) and their MEANINGS,
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The universe of discourse 39
pronoun is used, the question of the stress it will receive, where it will
appear in the sentence, or (depending on the language) which pronoun
type it will belong to is also determined by text-internal criteria. Most of
the information-structure concepts used in this study, such as "topic,"
"focus," "aboutness," "information," etc., are categories of the text-
internal world. They have to do with the discourse representations of
entities and states of affairs in the minds of the speech participants, not
with the properties of entities in the real world.
Particularly revealing from the point of view of the formal
manifestation of the categories under analysis are linguistic situations
where the two discourse worlds come together or overlap. This happens
for example when an element in the text-external world (e.g. the speaker
and/or the addressee) is at the same time a topic in the ongoing
conversation. In such cases, one and the same entity can be expressed in
different grammatical forms depending on whether it is referred to by
virtue of its presence in the speech setting or by virtue of its role as a topic
in the text-internal world. Let us consider one example of this kind of
correspondence between the two discourse worlds and of the grammatical
changes which the transfer from one to the other can bring about.
English, like other languages, has a special "presentational" construc-
tion, involving a small number of intransitive verbs like be and come, the
subjects of these verbs, and the deictic adverbs here or there. The point of
using this construction is to call the attention of an addressee to the
hitherto unnoticed presence of some person or thing in the speech setting.
This construction is called "presentational" because its communicative
function is not to predicate a property of a given entity but to introduce a
new entity into a discourse. (The notion "presentational construction" is
not restricted to deixis, as in the case I have in mind; such constructions
may also function to introduce a new entity into the text-internal world,
in which case they are usually-and misleadingly - called "existential"; see
Section 4.4.4.1.5) Let us assume a speaker wants to draw her addressee's
attention to the fact that a hitherto absent entity, say someone's cat, is
now arriving at the speech setting. She can do this by uttering the
sentence
(2.1) Here conies the CAT.
In this sentence, the subject noun cat is placed after the verb and its
prosodic prominence characterizes it as having a FOCUS RELATION to the
proposition. Now if at the time of the utterance the entity newly
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40 Information
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The universe of discourse 41
who was sitting in the house of a cat owner and who was hoping the
animal wouldn't show up:6
(2.2') And here the cat COMES!
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42 Information
pronouns, they are unaccented, and they appear BEFORE the verb. They
are thus formally similar to the anaphoric he in example (2.2). The
pronouns are not given prosodic prominence and cannot appear in the
postverbal focus position which the NP the cat occupied in (2.1). The
sequences Here's ME or Here's YOU would be unacceptable under the
circumstances (but see below), and the sequences Here am i or Here are
YOU are ungrammatical.
In spite of the intonational and positional similarity between the deictic
I/you in (2.3), (2.4) and the anaphoric he in (2.2) there is an important
difference between the two kinds of pronouns. With / and you the
contrast between the two discourse worlds is to some extent neutralized,
because of the dual status of speakers and addressees as interlocutors and
as possible topics of discussion. Speakers can talk about themselves as
well as about other referents, and an addressee can simultaneously be
talked TO and talked ABOUT by a speaker. Nevertheless, the contrast in
question is sometimes grammatically expressed with first and second
person pronouns. This happens whenever the presence of the speaker or
the hearer, in spite of their role as interlocutors in the text-external world,
is unexpected in a world which is not that of the ongoing discourse. For
example, when a speaker discovers herself or the addressee in a group
photograph she might utter sentence (2.5) or (2.6):
In these sentences the pronoun now carries the focus accent and is placed
in postverbal position, as in the case of the cat in example (2.1). The
similarity is due to the fact that in both cases a referent is newly
established in a discourse world, a situation which entails prosodic
prominence of the NP (see Section 5.7). Notice that, unlike the topic
pronouns in (2.2) through (2.4), the focus pronoun me has oblique case-
marking and the verb does not agree with it. (YOU in (2.6) is also oblique,
but formally ambiguous between nominative and oblique case.) This
illustrates the often noticed (though by no means absolute) correlation
between subject, topic, and agreement on the one hand, and non-subject,
focus, and lack of agreement on the other (see Givon 1976, Lambrecht
1984a, Bresnan & Mchombo 1987).7
The various examples involving the deictic Aere-construction show that
pragmatic differences having to do with the contrast between the text-
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Information 43
2.2 Information
In my brief sketch of the universe of discourse I characterized the text-
internal world as the abstract world of linguistic representations in which
INFORMATION is created in the minds of the interlocutors. As a first step
towards understanding the notion of information in natural language let
us carefully distinguish the information conveyed by the utterance of a
sentence from the MEANING expressed by the sentence. While the meaning
of the sentence is a function of the linguistic expressions which it contains
and thus remains constant, the information value of an utterance of the
sentence depends on the mental states of the interlocutors. Whether a
given piece of propositional meaning constitutes information or not
depends entirely on the communicative situation in which it is uttered.
One useful way of characterizing information is to say that by
informing the hearer of some situation or state of affairs, the speaker
influences the hearer's MENTAL REPRESENTATION of the world. This
representation is formed by the sum of "propositions" which the hearer
knows or believes or considers uncontroversial at the time of speech. (My
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Information 45
in the sense that their application to states of affairs in given worlds may
be correct or incorrect, the mental representations of events, situations,
or states which we think of in terms of propositions and which are
communicated in sentences can hardly be characterized as having truth
values. Such representations simply exist, or do not exist, in the heads of
speakers and hearers. One can know, or be ignorant of, a certain event
denoted by a proposition, i.e. one may, or may not, have some mental
"picture" of the event; and one may be thinking of the event, or be
oblivious of it, at a certain time, i.e. one may, or may not, have that
picture at the forefront of one's consciousness. But to characterize the
event, or the picture of it, as true or false seems incongruous.
If someone informs me that "The cat in the hat is back," my
representation of the world is increased by one proposition, indepen-
dently of whether what I'm being told is true. If later I find out that the
proposition "The cat in the hat is back" was not true in the situation in
which it was used, the representation of the cat being back may
nevertheless linger in my mind. And this representation does not become
false just because it does not correspond to the world as it is. It just
becomes outdated. To take another example, if someone says to me "I
just found out that Sue is married," and I happen to know that in fact she
is not married, it is certainly possible to say that the speaker has a false
belief about Sue's marital state, hence that the proposition "Sue is
married" is false under the circumstances. But this way of phrasing things
does not seem to contribute much to our understanding of the utterance
as a piece of information. If I correct the speaker by saying "But it's not
true that she is married," I am still evoking the same mental
representation "Sue is married," and I assume my addressee still has
this representation in his mind, even though the proposition is not true.
From the point of view of the information structure of the sentence, it is
the existence and cognitive state of this representation in the mind of the
interlocutors that counts, not the question of the truth of the proposition
in terms of which it is conceptualized. What we are concerned with is the
fit between states of minds and sentence structures, not between states of
affairs and propositions.
Let us turn to the notions "old" and "new" in Dahl's quote. It is a
fundamental property of information in natural language that whatever
is assumed by a speaker to be NEW to a hearer is information which is
ADDED to an already existing stock of knowledge in the hearer's mind.
The hearer's mind is not a blank sheet of paper on which new
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Presupposition and assertion 55
(i) the addressee can identify the female individual designated by the
definite noun phrase;
(ii) someone moved in downstairs from the speaker;
(iii) one would have expected the speaker to have met that individual at
some earlier point in time.
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56 Information
the relative clause who moved in downstairs; and the third is evoked by a
lexical item, the adverb finally.14 To these three presuppositions
concerning the knowledge state of the addressee we must add the
consciousness presuppositions evoked by the personal pronoun / and the
relative pronoun who:
(iv) the addressee is aware of the referents of the pronouns / and who at the
time these pronouns are uttered.
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58 Information
in some sense added to, or superimposed on, the former. The assertion is
therefore not to be seen as the utterance "minus the presupposition" but
rather as a combination of two sets of propositions. In view of the claims
to be made later about the grammatical signaling of the presupposition-
assertion relation it is important to understand that the superimposition
of the asserted proposition on the set of presupposed propositions often
occurs in such a way that the two cannot be lexically factored out and
identified with specific sentence constituents (see also my remarks to this
effect in the section on information above). For example in (2.11) the
presupposition "someone moved in downstairs" does not exactly
coincide with the meaning of the relative clause who moved in downstairs
since the relative pronoun who and the indefinite someone have different
referential properties, nor does it coincide with the meaning of the
complex noun phrase the woman who moved in downstairs since that noun
phrase evokes several different presuppositions. Rather the grammatical
domain for both presupposition and assertion is the sentence or clause as
a whole. This fact will be of special importance in the discussion of focus
in Chapter 5, where "focus" will be defined as that portion of an
utterance whereby the presupposition and the assertion differ from each
other. Since that portion can often not be identified with a particular
sentence constituent, the relationship between focus MEANING and focus
MARKING will be shown to be rather indirect.
From the characterization of "assertion" as the proposition which the
hearer is expected to know as a result of hearing a sentence, it follows (as
a truism) that the asserted proposition must differ from the set of
propositions which are presupposed. One cannot INFORM an addressee of
something she already knows (although one can obviously TELL an
addressee something she knows already). However, while an assertion
cannot COINCIDE with a presupposition, it may consist in RELATING two or
more presuppositions to each other. This possibility was hinted at in the
discussion of the presuppositional structure of (2.8). As another example
consider the following conversational exchange:
Even though both the proposition "I did it" and the proposition
"you're my friend" may be considered pragmatically presupposed,
speaker B's answer clearly is informative. The assertion it expresses
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Presupposition and assertion 63
within the pragmatic framework adopted here. From the definition of the
pragmatic presupposition of a sentence as a (lexicogrammatically evoked)
set of propositions which the speaker and the hearer are assumed to have
in common at the time of utterance it follows naturally that the truth of
any pragmatically presupposed proposition is simply taken for granted
by the interlocutors and therefore cannot be affected by an assertion
(unless the point of the assertion is to make the addressee aware that
some presupposition was faulty). As we saw with the application of the
lie-test (example (2.11) and discussion), any aspect of a sentence which
affects the truth value of the proposition expressed by it must be an
element of the assertion, not of the presupposition. For example, let us
assume a state of affairs in which Jespersen's sentence PETER said it would
be false as a reply to the question Who said that? The falsity of this reply
would NOT affect the pragmatic presupposition required by the false
answer, namely that a particular person said a particular thing. What
would be affected is rather the assertion that the person who said it is the
individual named Peter. As a result, the proposition as a whole would
cease to be true and, if believed by the addressee, would constitute false
information.
What is interesting from the point of view of information structure-
and what further distinguishes a pragmatic from a semantic analysis of
the presuppositional structure of this sentence - is the pragmatic status of
the NEGATION of the answer, i.e. PETER didn't say it. From the point of view
of two-valued logic, if the proposition expressed by the affirmative version
of the sentence is false, its negation must be true, and that is all there is to
say. However it is obvious, from a communicative point of view, that this
negative sentence, though true, would normally be inappropriate as an
answer to the question "Who said that?" By its prosodic structure (in
particular the lack of pitch prominence on some element in the verb
phrase, see Section 5.6) the sentence PETER didn't say it evokes the
pragmatic presupposition underlying another question, i.e. the question
"Who didn't say that?", i.e. it pragmatically presupposes that one or
several individuals did NOT say a particular thing (and it asserts that Peter
is among these individuals). This, however, is not the presupposition
evoked in the original question "Who said that?", hence the striking
inappropriateness of the answer. This important fact of communication is
unaccounted for in the logico-semantic view of presupposition.
It has been observed that in natural language negative sentences are
ordinarily uttered only if the speaker assumes that the addressee believes,
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64 Information
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The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure 65
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The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure 67
In what follows I will present a few examples illustrating this rule, using
constructions whose presuppositional structure is relatively well under-
stood. 21
Let us first consider the case of the presuppositional structure of
adverbial clauses involving such adverbial conjunctions as when, after,
before, because, since, although, etc. Here is a simple example:
(2.16) A: What did you do before you sat down to eat?
B: (Before I sat down to eat) I washed my hands.
In speaker B's reply, the proposition that B sat down to eat, which
appears in the form of a dependent clause, is pragmatically presupposed
(to the point that it could be omitted altogether without influencing the
interpretation of the sentence). The presuppositional status of the
proposition expressed in the main clause, on the other hand, is left
unspecified. Speaker A may well have known as a fact that B washed his
hands at some point in time, but such knowledge is irrelevant in this
context. Speaker A clearly did not know that B washed his hands at the
time before he sat down to eat, unless he was testing B's sincerity or
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68 Information
Since (2.18) is assumed to be the first sentence of the story, the reader
cannot be expected to know that the protagonist moved to Switzerland at
one point in his life. Nevertheless, the use of the before-clause is
appropriate and causes no difficulty of interpretation (at least not within
the given literary genre). The important fact here is that this does NOT
invalidate my claim concerning the presuppositional structure of before-
clauses. If the short story were to continue with the sentence In fact, that's
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The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure 69
not quite true, the reader would understand that it is the proposition
expressed in the main clause, not in the before-clause, whose truth is
being challenged. The explanation for the appropriateness of (2.18) is
provided by Lewis' rule of accommodation for presupposition. By the
act of using the clause which required the presupposition, the writer
CREATED the presupposition in the reader's mind and made it available as
a background for the assertion in the following main clause.
The phenomenon illustrated in (2.18) is not restricted to literary
discourse. Consider the two English adverbial conjunctions because and
since. Both indicate a causal relation between two propositions, but they
differ from each other in their presuppositional structure. As a rough
characterization of this difference let us say that the presuppositional
structure of since is such that the proposition expressed in the clause
which it introduces can be taken for granted in the reasoning process that
links this proposition to the proposition expressed in the main clause.24
Because, on the other hand, does not require such a presupposition.
While since is marked for the presuppositional feature in question,
because is unmarked in this respect. The basic difference is clearly
illustrated in question-answer pairs such as the following (the # symbol
indicates unacceptability on the discourse level):
It is clear from the word why in the question that speaker A does not
know (or purports not to know) the reason for speaker B's action. The
difference in acceptability between the two answers shows that the
proposition "because P" can be used to make an assertion while the
proposition "since P" cannot. Now consider the following dialogue:
The use of the conjunction since would normally signal that speaker B
assumes that speaker A already knows that B's wife has only two weeks'
vacation. However, in spite of this presuppositional requirement, the
answer in (2.20) is felicitous even if B assumes that A does in fact not
have that knowledge. (In fact, it would be felicitous even if A did not
know that B is married, in which case the "existential" presupposition
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70 Information
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The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure 71
(2.21) It was George Orwell who said that the best books are those which tell
you what you already know.
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72 Information
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The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure 73
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3 The mental representations of
discourse referents
(3.1) This package is sold by weight, not by volume ... If it does not appear
full when opened, it is because contents have settled during shipping and
handling.
74
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Discourse referents 75
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76 The mental representations of discourse referents
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Identifiability 77
3.2 Identifiability
When a speaker wishes to make an assertion involving some entity which
she assumes is not yet represented in the addressee's mind and which
cannot be referred to deictically, it is necessary for her to create a
representation of that entity via a linguistic description, which can then
be anaphorically referred to in subsequent discourse. The creation of such
a new discourse representation for the addressee can be compared to the
establishment of a new referential "file" in the discourse register, to
which further elements of information may be added in the course of the
conversation and which can be reopened in future discourses.3
To account for the difference between entities for which the speaker
assumes a file has already been opened in the discourse register and those
for which such a file does not yet exist, I will postulate the cognitive
category of IDENTIFIABILITY, using a term once suggested by Chafe (1976).
Chafe observes that to designate referents for which a representation
exists in the addressee's mind the term "identifiable" is preferable to the
sometimes suggested terms "known" or "familiar." As we shall see, what
counts for the linguistic expression of the cognitive distinction in question
is not that the addressee know or be familiar with the referent in question
(a newly opened file may contain no more than a name) but that he be
able to pick it out from among all those which can be designated with a
particular linguistic expression and identify it as the one which the
speaker has in mind.
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Identifiability 79
children. (Compare also the remarks on the function of the definite article
in the discussion of pragmatic presupposition in Section 2.2.) Moreover,
it seems reasonable to assume that the representations of given entities in
people's minds are associated with sets of "propositions" corresponding
to various attributes of these entities. Nevertheless the referent of that
noun phrase is mentally represented as an entity, not as a set of
propositions. For the purposes of the present study, I will therefore not
count existential presuppositions as pragmatic presuppositions in the
sense of (2.12) and I will treat the notion of identifiability as a category in
its own right. The concepts of identifiability and of existential
presupposition do not necessarily exclude each other; they merely
represent different theoretical perspectives on the same or a similar
phenomenon. I will return to this issue in the discussion of the
relationship between topic and presupposition in Section 4.3.
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80 The mental representations of discourse referents
fact that the use of the definite and the indefinite article varies widely
from language to language, in idiosyncratic and sometimes quite subtle
ways, while the mental ability to identify referents is presumably the same
for speakers of all languages. Moreover, languages which have
definiteness markers often differ with respect to the grammatical option
of not using them. Certain languages offer a three-way distinction
between a definite, an indefinite, and a zero article. Such a three-way
contrast is found e.g. in English and in German, but not in French, where
referential common nouns must ordinarily be accompanied by a
determiner. Moreover the types of nouns with which the three options
can be used are not the same across languages. For example, while
English allows for a three-way distinction between the man, a man, and
man (as in Man is a dangerous animal), German has only der Mensch and
ein Mensch, prohibiting *Mensch. But German does permit such three-
way contrasts as die Grammatik, eine Grammatik, and Grammatik (as e.g.
in Grammatik ist nicht seine Stdrke, "Grammar isn't his forte"). French,
however, permits only I'homme and un homme, la grammaire and une
grammaire, normally prohibiting both *homme and *grammaire, except
when the noun is used predicatively, i.e. non-referentially.4
An important semantic distinction having to do with identifiability
which has no direct correlate in the grammatical definite/indefinite
contrast is that between SPECIFIC and NON-SPECIFIC referents of indefinite
noun phrases. It is often said that in an English sentence like
(3.3) I am looking for a book.
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Identifiability 81
(3.5) a. Je cherche un livre qui est rouge. "I'm looking for a book that's red."
b. Je cherche un livre qui soil rouge. "I'm looking for a book that's red."
In (3.5a) the indicative mood of the verb of the relative clause indicates
that the referent of the NP is specific, i.e. that the speaker is looking for a
particular red book which exists but which she assumes the addressee
cannot yet identify, while the subjunctive mood in (3.5b) indicates that
the referent is non-specific, i.e. that the speaker would like to find a book
whose color is red, but of which there may not exist an instance in the
given universe of discourse. The correlation between indicative mood and
specificity on the one hand and subjunctive mood and non-specificity on
the other is a result of the different semantic functions of the two moods.
While the indicative treats the relative clause proposition as a matter of
fact, the subjunctive marks it as being subject to incertitude or doubt. The
use of the subjunctive in the relative clause is motivated by the fact that it
is not possible to assign with certitude a property (e.g. redness) to
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82 The mental representations of discourse referents
(3.6) a. Ich suche ein Buch, das rot ist. "I'm looking for a book that's red."
b. Ich suche ein Buch, das ist rot. "I'm looking for a book that's red."
The standard version in (3.6a), which has the verb in final (subordinate
clause) position in the relative clause, has both the specific and the non-
specific reading. The colloquial version in (b), however, which has the
verb in second (main clause) position, has only the specific reading. The
fact that main clause word order only yields the specific reading is a
consequence of the correlation between main-clause status and ASSERTION
(cf. Section 2.4). In (3.6b) it is asserted that the object designated by the
pronoun das is red. For such an assertion to make sense, the existence of
the object must be taken for granted. Hence the necessarily specific
reading of the noun phrase. 6
A grammatically indefinite noun phrase may have yet another
semantic value, as in the sentence
where the indefinite noun phrases a book and a doctor ('s) are said to be
GENERIC, meaning that their referents are either the classes of all books or
doctors or perhaps some representative set of members of these classes,
but not specific or non-specific individuals. Since such noun phrases
merely require that the addressee be able to identify the semantic class
designated by the lexical head, generic indefinite NPs may be said to have
identifiable referents, further weakening the correlation between the
formal category of definiteness and the information-structure category of
identifiability. That the referents of generic indefinite noun phrases must
be considered identifiable is confirmed by the fact that they may be
anaphorically referred to either with another indefinite NP or with a
definite pronoun, without a clear difference in interpretation. For
example after uttering (3.7) I can go on to say A book is also something
easy to carry around as well as It is also something easy to carry around.
This possibility distinguishes generic indefinites from indefinites with
specific or non-specific referents which, as we saw, permit only one or the
other kind of anaphoric expression, but not both.
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Identifiability 83
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84 The mental representations of discourse referents
bir (combined with the accusative case suffix on the noun, see Comrie
1981:128 and example (3.11) below), and Hebrew exad (Givon 1983:26).
In fact, this function of the numeral one is attested in English, as e.g. in /
saw this one woman or / was introduced to one John Smith.
The theoretical distinction between grammatical definiteness and
cognitive identifiability has the advantage of enabling us to distinguish
between a discrete (grammatical) and a non-discrete (cognitive) category.
While the definite/indefinite contrast is in principle a matter of yes or no,
identifiability is in principle a matter of degree. Referents can be assumed
to be more or less identifiable, depending on a multitude of psychological
factors, but articles cannot be more or less definite (but see below). The
differences in the grammatical marking of definiteness among those
languages whose grammar codes this category should perhaps be seen as
reflections of different language-specific cut-off points on the continuum
of identifiability. The fact that grammatical definiteness is a (relatively)
"arbitrary" category with (relatively) unpredictable cut-off points across
languages may account for certain difficulties in second language
acquisition. The difficulties which Russian speakers encounter in the
acquisition of definiteness in e.g. English or German are notorious, but
serious difficulties also often arise for speakers who pass from one to
another of two relatively similar systems of definiteness marking, such as
those in German and English.
Even though grammatical markers of definiteness are normally
indicators of two-way distinctions and cannot mark degrees, there are
interesting formal hedges between definiteness and indefiniteness
marking, which seem to stem from a psychological need for the
grammatical expression of intermediate degrees of identifiablity. As one
instance of such hedging we can mention the above-mentioned three-way
distinction between a definite, an indefinite, and a zero article in English
and German. Another instance is the French expression l'un(e) "one (of
them)" (NOT "the one"), in which the definite article le, la serves as a
determiner in a noun phrase whose head is the indefinite article (and
numeral) un(e), as illustrated in (3.10):
(3.10) La chambre avait trois fenetres; 1'une d'elles etait ouverte.
'The room had three windows; one of them (lit. "the one of them") was
open.'
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Identifiability 85
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86 The mental representations of discourse referents
differences between the indefinite noun phrases in the two sentences / got
on a bus yesterday and the driver was drunk and A guy I work with says he
knows your sister, Prince writes:10
Brand-new entities themselves seem to be of two types: ANCHORED and
UNANCHORED. A discourse entity is Anchored if the NP representing it is
LINKED, by means of another NP, or "Anchor," properly contained in it,
to some other discourse entity. Thus a bus is Unanchored, or simply
Brand-new, whereas a guy I work with, containing the NP /, is Brand-
new Anchored, as the discourse entity the hearer creates for this
particular guy will be immediately linked to his/her discourse entity for
the speaker. (Prince 1981a:236)
I will return to the notion of anchoring in Section 4.4.2, where I will show
that the various types of anchoring, which reflect degrees of identifiability
of a referent in a discourse, may have effects on the acceptability of
sentence topics.
Finally, the conceptual and terminological distinction between a
grammatical category of definiteness and a cognitive category of
identifiability enables us to avoid a certain confusion which sometimes
arises in discussions of the manifestations of definiteness across
languages. It is not uncommon to find the term "definite N P " applied
to some noun phrase in a language other than English only because the
English gloss of the sentence in which this noun phrase occurs contains a
definite NP. It has been suggested, for example, that the distinction
between definite and indefinite NPs can be expressed in Czech (which is
similar to Russian in this respect) via the difference between preverbal
and postverbal position of the NP (Kramsky 1968). Consider the
following examples:
(3.12) a. Kniha je na stole "The book is on the table"
b. Na stole je kniha "On the table (there) is a book"
In (3.12a), the preverbal NP kniha "book" is appropriately glossed as
"the book," while in (3.12b) the postverbal kniha is appropriately glossed
as "a book." However, this difference in the English glosses should not be
taken as evidence for the existence of a grammatical definiteness/
indefiniteness contrast in Czech, expressed via preverbal vs. postverbal
position of the NP. To see this, consider these additional Czech examples
cited by Benes (1968) (the focus marking in the English glosses is mine):
(3.13) a. Venku je Pavel "Outside is PAVEL/PAVEL'S outside"
b. Pavel je venku "Pavel is OUTSIDE"
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Identifiability 87
In (3.13), the name Pavel, which by virtue of being a proper noun phrase
is necessarily "definite" (i.e. whose referent is necessarily assumed to be
identifiable), appears both postverbally and preverbally. It follows that
the different English glosses ofkniha in example (3.12) do not constitute
sufficient evidence for recognition of a category of definiteness in Czech.
The difference between preverbal and postverbal position in Czech must
correspond to some other grammatical distinction, which, in the
particular case of (3.12), happens to coincide with a difference in
definiteness in English. I believe that the relevant contrast in (3.12) and
(3.13) is the contrast between topic and non-topic, which, as we will see in
Chapter 4, correlates with, but cannot be equated with, the definite/
indefinite contrast."
Even though I will continue to use the familiar term "definiteness"
when referring to the language-specific expression of identifiability
known under this label, I prefer not to think of definiteness as a universal
linguistic category. What is presumably universal is the COGNITIVE
category of IDENTIFIABILITY, which is imperfectly and non-universally
matched by the grammatical category of definiteness.
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Identifiability 89
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90 The mental representations of discourse referents
(See also Fillmore 1976 and 1985a.) The frame within which a referent
becomes identifiable can be so broad as to coincide with the speaker/
hearer's natural or social universe, accounting for the identifiability of the
referents of NPs like the sun or the President of the United States. It can
be narrower, as the personal frame within which the referent of the
cleaning lady or the car becomes identifiable. Or it can be the physical
environment in which a speech act takes place, making it possible to
identify the referents of such noun phrases as the woman over there or
those ugly pictures. Finally, the text-internal discourse world itself can be
such a cognitive frame. For example the referent of the NP the meeting
tonight in (3.19) is identifiable to the hearer by virtue of the frame of
reference established by the ongoing discourse alone, independently of
whether such a meeting actually exists or will exist in the real world. 13
The concept of frame-linked referent identification enables us to
account in a straightforward fashion for certain occurrences of definite
noun phrases which otherwise might seem mysterious. One instance is the
use of definite noun phrases in contexts like the following:
Unlike the expressions the cleaning lady or the car, which are assumed to
designate just one specific individual for the speaker and the hearer, the
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Identifiability 91
i.e., I can use definite noun phrases for my explanation even though the
designated objects were not previously identifiable by the hearer. This is
possible because the various car parts are all indirectly identifiable as
elements of an already identified frame or schema, which is the car itself.
However, if the same ignorant addressee wonders about some
unidentified object on a shelf in my garage, I cannot say to him This is
the carburetor but only This is a carburetor, because the object is not
interpreted as an element of an already established frame.
An intriguing case of definiteness motivated by relations between
elements of a semantic frame is the phenomenon whereby the possessee in
a possessive noun phrase gets marked as definite even if both the
possessor and the possessee are unidentifiable in the discourse. For
example I may say
(3.17) I met the daughter of a king.
(instead of a daughter of a king) even if I assume that my addressee can
identify neither the king's daughter nor the king himself. This suggests
that for the purposes of grammar an entity may be categorized as
identifiable merely by virtue of being perceived as standing in a frame
relation to some other entity, whether this other entity is itself identifiable
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Activation 93
3.3 Activation
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Activation 95
it is not clear which of the two activated referents, John or Bill, the
pronoun he is intended to designate. Barring pragmatic disambiguation
(e.g. John might be known as a sickly person so that he would most likely
be interpreted as referring to him), it would therefore be preferable, in the
given context, to refer to the one who is sick with a lexical noun (John or
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96 The mental representations of discourse referents
Bill). There are various other semantic and stylistic reasons for not
coding already activated referents as pronouns, which I cannot discuss
here. Languages also seem to differ widely with respect to the possibility
of, or tolerance for, non-pronominal coding of active referents.19
Nevertheless, in spite of various kinds of exceptions, the overall
correlation between assumed activeness and pronominal coding is
extremely strong on the discourse level and has important consequences
for the structure of sentences. It can be shown to play a major role in the
structure of the clause in spoken French (see Lambrecht 1986b). The
formal category "pronoun" is no doubt the best evidence for the
grammatical reality of the information-structure category of "activeness."
To summarize, assumed active status of a referent is formally expressed
via lack of pitch prominence and typically (but not necessarily) via
pronominal coding of the corresponding linguistic expression. In the
terminology established at the end of Section 2.3, lack of prominence and
pronominal coding are to be seen as features of the PRESUPPOSITIONAL
STRUCTURE of a given expression. The term "pronominal coding" will be
understood in a very general sense, applying to free and bound pronouns,
inflectional affixes, and null instantiations of arguments. Any non-lexical
expression of a referent counts as pronominal.
As for the formal expression of the INACTIVE status of a referent, it is
the opposite of that of active referents. Inactive marking entails
ACCENTUATION of the referential expression and FULL LEXICAL coding.
An inactive referent cannot be expressed pronominally (again, with the
possible exception of deictic pronouns). The grammatical correlate of
inactiveness is thus the coding of a referent in the form of an ACCENTED
LEXICAL PHRASE. Even though the relation between accented and
unaccented and between pronominal and lexical coding is one of simple
opposition, we will see below that this relation is functionally
asymmetric, one of the members being marked and the other one
unmarked with respect to the category of activation.
The relationship postulated by Chafe between activeness of a referent
and "attenuated pronunciation" of the expression designating it, on the
one hand, and between inactiveness of a referent and "strong
pronunciation," on the other, may be called ICONIC, in the sense that
there exists a direct correlation between different mental states and
differences in phonetic intensity or word length (pronouns tend to be
shorter than lexical NPs). Creating and interpreting a new discourse
representation of a referent requires a greater mental effort on the part of
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Activation 97
the speaker and the hearer than keeping an already established referent in
a state of activeness. As a result, it involves higher acoustic intensity and
typically more phonological material. The iconic nature of intonation has
been emphasized in much work by Bolinger, in particular in his 1985
essay on "The inherent iconism of intonation," where we find the
following statement: "Suppose we take the obvious emotive correlation
as basic: high pitch symptomizes a condition of high tension in the
organization, low pitch the opposite" (1985:99).
Important though this iconic principle may be, there are severe
limitations on its applicability. While it is true that the referent of a
pronominal expression or of a nominal expression spoken with
attenuated pronunciation is always taken to be active (again, barring
certain cases of pragmatic accommodation), it is NOT the case that an
expression coding a referent which is assumed to be active is necessarily
also spoken with attenuated pronunciation. In other words, weak
prosodic manifestation is only a sufficient, not a necessary condition
for assumed activeness of a discourse referent. Under certain circum-
stances, constituents with clearly active referents, including anaphoric
pronouns, may receive prominence. Compare the two examples in (3.20):
The referent of the pronoun she is equally active in both sentences, but
the pronoun is prosodically more prominent in the second example. The
difference between accented and unaccented pronouns has often been
accounted for in terms of the notion of "contrastiveness," which I will
discuss in detail in Section 5.5. Suffice it to say here that in (3.20b)
prosodic prominence has a distinguishing, or disambiguating, function
which is different from the simple marking of an activation state.
Active referents may also be coded as lexical noun phrases with pitch
prominence, as shown in (3.21), an example originally discussed by Kuno
(1972):
(3.21) (= Kuno's(l-5))
Q: Among John, Mary, and Tom, who is the oldest?
A: TOM is the oldest.
The referent of the focus noun Tom in the answer is clearly active, but
this noun is also clearly the prosodic peak of its sentence.20 According to
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98 The mental representations of discourse referents
Kuno, the accent on Tom in the answer is due to the fact that the referent
of this noun is "unpredictable" as an argument in the proposition, an
explanation which I will adopt and develop in a later chapter (Section
5.7). Let me say, for the time being, that an active referent is coded with
prosodic prominence for reasons having to do with the marking of a
RELATION between it and the proposition in which it occurs, rather than as
a result of its activation state in the disourse. I will return to the
distinction between activation marking and focus marking at the end of
this chapter and, in more detail, in Chapter 5.
The preceding observations allow us to draw an important conclusion
concerning the interpretation of prosodic prominence in general. While
the ABSENCE of prosodic prominence on a constituent necessarily indicates
active status of the coded referent or denotatum, the PRESENCE of
prominence has no analogous distinguishing function. The function of
the one is not simply the opposite of the function of the other. There is a
fundamental functional asymmetry between accented and unaccented
constituents. This is the asymmetry of MARKEDNESS. An unaccented
constituent is MARKED for the feature "discourse-active denotatum,"
while an accented constituent is UNMARKED with respect to this feature.
The characterization of unaccented constituents as marked may seem
counterintuitive, since it is normally the presence rather than the absence
of a feature that designates one member of a pair as the marked one.
Moreover, if Bolinger's claim concerning the emotive correlation between
high pitch and high tension is correct, interpreting high pitch as
unmarked would entail that high rather than low tension is considered
the unmarked state of affairs in speech, a conclusion one may be
reluctant to accept. However, there is nothing unnatural about such a
conclusion. The negative feature "absence of sound" can be phrased
positively as "presence of silence." And in the use of language, silence is
indeed the marked state of affairs. Thus the generalization concerning the
unmarked status of prospdically prominent constituents is to be
maintained. It will be shown to be of great importance in the
interpretation of focus prosody in Chapter 5.21
An analogous generalization may be made in the case of the
morphological contrast between PRONOMINAL and LEXICAL coding of a
referent. A pronoun is marked as having an active referent; a lexical noun
phrase is unmarked for the activation state of its referent. To sum up,
while ACTIVE referents can be unambiguously marked as such, via absence
of prosodic prominence, or pronominal coding, or both, there is no
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Activation 99
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100 The mental representations of discourse referents
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Activation 101
(3.22) a. (= Dahl's 8) Peter went to see Bill, but he was not at home,
b. (= Dahl's 9) Peter went to see Bill, but he had to return.
It is clear that in the (a) sentence the pronoun he will normally be
construed as referring to "Bill," whereas in (b) it will be construed as
referring to "Peter." This is so because the hearer is able to keep the
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102 The mental representations of discourse referents
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Activation 103
contract" between the interlocutors was not yet negotiated with respect
to this referent. By violating this contract, John impaired the normal
communication process. In Section 5.7 I will propose a revised account of
the appropriateness conditions on the use of unaccented referential
constituents, based on the added notion of "expected topic," which will
predict the oddness of (3.23) (see example (5.80) and discussion).
Notice that (3.23), though strange, is not uninterpretable. Mary could
have correctly interpreted her husband's utterance by means of pragmatic
accommodation.24 This indicates that it is not only, and perhaps not even
mainly, the use of the unaccented pronoun that causes the utterance to be
anomalous. If John had used a proper name instead, i.e. if he had said
Where is Bill? or even Where is BILL?, his utterance would still have been
inappropriate under the circumstances. Rather than constituting evidence
against the activation approach to the use of pronouns, this example only
illustrates the intricacies of pragmatic presupposition and the importance
of shared knowledge in the processing of information in discourse.
The last example which I would like to discuss concerns an apparent
exception to the above-postulated necessary correlation between use of
an unaccented pronoun and assumed activeness of the pronominal
referent. Allerton (1978) cites the case of a man who sees another man in
a tennis outfit coming back from a tennis court and who says to that
man:
(3.24) Did you BEAT him?
Even though the referent coded by him has the typical grammatical
characteristics of an active referent (lack of accent and pronominal
coding), it is unlikely that this referent is in fact "currently lit up" in the
hearer's (the tennis player's) consciousness at the moment of utterance.
Rather the referent is either totally inactive or it is in a state of inferential
accessibility. (The decision whether to call the referent inactive or
accessible is difficult in this case, a problem to which I will return.) What
intuitively seems to justify the coding of the referent in this form is the
fact that it is EASY TO (RE)ACTIVATE. AS I see it, the interpretation of this
utterance involves two cognitive steps. The first is the pragmatic
accommodation to the presuppositional structure of the pronoun him.
Even though the speaker does not assume that the addressee is thinking
of his tennis partner, he ACTS AS IF he were making that assumption,
forcing his addressee to go along with that fiction in a cooperative
manner (or else to reject the dialogue). The second step is the reaction of
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104 The mental representations of discourse referents
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Summary and illustration 105
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106 The mental representations of discourse referents
Furthermore, English noun phrases with the determiner this, which are
formally definite, may have unidentifiable referents (example (3.9) and
discussion). On the other hand, generic referents, which are always
identifiable, may be expressed via indefinite noun phrases (see (3.7) and
discussion). The lack of a one-to-one correspondence between
(un)identifiability and (in)definiteness entails that there can also be no
absolute correlation between indefiniteness and the presence of PROSODIC
PROMINENCE. For example, generic indefinite NPs may be unaccented
when used anaphorically.
Once a referent is assumed to be IDENTIFIABLE, it is necessarily in one of
the three activation states "active," "inactive," "accessible." These
activation states have a variety of formal correlates. An ACTIVE referent is
typically, but not necessarily, coded with an unaccented expression. All
unaccented referential expressions have active referents, but not all active
referents appear as unaccented expressions. Unaccented expressions are
marked for the feature "active referent" but accented expressions are
unmarked for this feature. Similarly, all pronominal expressions (free or
bound pronouns, inflectional markers, null elements) have active
referents, but not all active referents are expressed pronominally: they
may appear as lexical noun phrases, and these lexical phrases may be
definite or indefinite. Pronouns are marked as having active referents,
while lexical phrases are unmarked for the active/inactive distinction. To
designate an active referent, the label "active" is sufficient. An often-
encountered alternative label for "active" is "given," a term which I will
generally avoid because of its ambiguity.
There is an apparent exception to the one-to-one relationship between
lack of accentuation and/or pronominal coding on the one hand, and
activeness of the coded referent on the other. In the discussion of the
specific/non-specific distinction in Section 3.2.2 I mentioned that the
anaphor to an indefinite noun phrase with a non-specific referent must be
an indefinite pronoun or lexical NP. For example we saw that sentence
(3.3) I'm looking for a BOOK could be followed by / FOUND one ox I FOUND a
book. The referents of the anaphors one and a book in these sentences are
unidentifiable, in the sense that the addressee is not assumed to be able to
identify the particular book the speaker has in mind. Yet the referent is
treated as active-hence necessarily as identifiable-as indicated by the
lack of accentuation on the anaphor and, in the case of one, by the use of
a pronominal form.
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Summary and illustration 107
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108 The mental representations of discourse referents
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Summary and illustration 109
Definite NP (+)
Indefinite NP
<
unidentifiable <T
\ anchored (2)
inactive (3) textualiy (4)
identifiable—•ACTIVATION^- accessible -^-situationally (5)
active (7) inferential^ (6)
Using the numbers after each terminal label in the diagram, the
terminological conventions, including alternative terms, are summarized
in (3.26):
(3.26) (1) unidentifiable/brand-new
(2) unidentifiable anchored/brand-new anchored
(3) inactive/unused
(4) textualiy accessible
(5) situationally accessible
(6) inferentially accessible
(7) active/given
The categories represented in the diagram are exemplified in the
following short (attested) text.26 The relevant referential expressions are
underlined. Small capitals indicate main points of pitch prominence.
Finer pitch accent variations are ignored. I am also ignoring differences
in INTONATION CONTOUR, such as that between MARK (rising, interrogative)
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110 The mental representations of discourse referents
(3.27) I heard something TERRIBLE last night. (0) remember MARK , the guy we
went HIKING with {0), who's GAY? His LOVER just died of AIDS.
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Summary and illustration 111
while about the person who has died of AIDS, might shift bade to the
person called Mark with the sentence
(3.27') Mark is terribly UPSET.
In this modified context, the referent of the noun Mark, which is by now
textually accessible, is unlikely to appear in the form of a pronoun
because the intervening discourse has deactivated this referent, without,
however, erasing it from the current discourse register, i.e. without
returning it to the status of unused. The noun Mark may or may not be
accented, depending on the mental effort the speaker assumes is necessary
to reactivate the referent as well as on other factors to be discussed in
Chapter 5.
The reader will have noticed that in the characterization of the
discourse statuses exemplified in (3.27) and (3.27') I have said nothing
about possible differences among the constituents that are not under-
lined. One might wonder in particular about the status of a verb like
heard or hiking, an adjective like gay, or a preposition like with. The
reason for this omission has to do with the information-structure
distinction I drew in Section 3.1 between DISCOURSE-REFERENTIAL and NON-
DISCOURSE-REFERENTIAL categories. While it seems relatively straightfor-
ward to assume that an interlocutor may have the referent of a noun
phrase like Mark or AIDS present in his consciousness or that he can
mentally access such a referent, and while I think it makes sense to say
that an interlocutor can identify the referent of such a phrase once it has
been introduced into the discourse, it is not clear what gets "activated" in
the hearer's mind when he hears a verb, an adjective, a preposition, or
certain adverbs and what it is that can be assumed to be in his
consciousness after he has heard it. It certainly makes no sense to apply
the category of identifiability to such words. There are no definite or
indefinite verbs or adjectives, etc. (unless, of course, they are
nominalized, i.e. made into discourse-referential expressions).
According to Chafe (1976, 1987), it is the "concept" of the verb,
adjective, adverb, or preposition that is "lit up" in the mind of the hearer,
just as it is the "concept" of "Mark" or "AIDS" that is being activated in
the mind of the speech participants during the speech act. This way of
speaking is useful in the case of certain syntactic processes in which
lexical items which are clearly understood from the context may be
omitted from verbalization. One such case is the "gapping" phenomenon
in a sentence like John went to the movies and Mary to the restaurant,
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112 The mental representations of discourse referents
where the verb form went is omitted under identity with an immediately
preceding occurrence of the same form; another is the elliptical omission
of larger sentence portions in answers to questions, as when I answer the
question Where did she go? with the prepositional phrase To the movies.
In such cases, it seems reasonable to assume that it is the identity of two
denotata which accounts for the possibility of omitting the second
occurrence.28
I see an important difference, however, between the information-
structure status of predicators like heard or gay or with on the one hand,
and that of referential argument categories like Mark or AIDS or his or
you on the other. Only the latter designate entities-whether real,
possible, or imaginary-and involve the creation and interpretation of
discourse representations via lexical phrases or pronouns. This difference
in status between discourse-referential and non-discourse-referential
categories has important implications for the interpretation of the role
of prosody in information structure. While in the case of referential
categories prosodic differences may clearly indicate differences in
activation states, prosodic differences involving non-referential cat-
egories cannot, or cannot as clearly, be attributed to differences in
"concept activation." For example it would make little sense to argue
that the prosodic difference between the (relatively) unaccented verb
forms heard and went and the (relatively) accented form HIKING in (3.27) is
due to a difference in the activation state of the designated concepts since
none of these verbs were mentioned previously in the discourse. This is
not to say that the cognitive states of the designata of predicators never
matter for their grammatical coding in the sentence (as seen in the cases
of gapping and ellipsis above), but only that they do not play the same
prominent role as referential expressions in the coding system in which
meaningful contrasts arise with variations of word order, prosody, lexical
vs. pronominal coding, etc. I will return to the issue of the relationship
between prosodic prominence and the pragmatic statuses of predicators
in Section 5.4.2.
It is necessary, then, to postulate two functionally (though not
necessarily phonetically) distinct types of prosodic contrast, one
expressing differences in the activation states of referents, the other
differences of another kind. I will argue that the existence of these two
functionally different types of accent correlates with the existence of two
different types of information-structure categories: those indicating
temporary cognitive STATES of discourse referents (the categories of
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Idenliflability, activation, and the topic-focus parameter 113
Let us take another look at the status of the noun phrase his lover in
(3.27), which I provisionally characterized as "inferentially accessible."
Consider the following (constructed) variant of that text:
(3.28) I just heard something TERRIBLE. Remember MARK, the guy we went
HIKING with, who's GAY? I ran into his LOVER yesterday, and he told me
he had AIDS.
The activation status of the referent of his lover is necessarily the same in
(3.27) as in (3.28): in both examples the referent was not previously
mentioned but is to be inferred from another referent in the context. But
there is a subtle difference in the pragmatic construal of his lover in the
two versions. It seems as if in (3.28) the referent is given greater pragmatic
salience than in (3.27). And this greater salience correlates with the fact
that in (3.28) the NP is likely to be perceived as being prosodically more
prominent. 29 The inferentially accessible status of the referent is
grammatically EXPLOITED in (3.27), where the NP is a subject, but not
in (3.28), where it occurs in a postverbal prepositional phrase. Through
its SYNTACTIC organization, (3.27) suggests that the referent is already
accessible in the discourse. But the SYNTACTIC organization of (3.28)
suggests that the referent is being evoked in the hearer's consciousness as
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114 The mental representations of discourse referents
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Identifiability, activation, and the topic-focus parameter 115
In the two answers to A's question in (3.29), the pronouns her and she are
anaphorically linked to the antecedent Pat. Their referent is clearly active
and they show the expected lack of accent. These pronouns stand in a
TOPIC relation to their propositions. The constituent receiving the main,
focal accent in these answers is the adverb twice. But consider now
example (3.30).
(3.30) A: Who did they call?
B: a. Pat said SHE was called,
b. Pat said they called HER.
The pronouns SHE and HER in the answers in (3.30) are as anaphoric and
their referents are as active as in (3.29), but this time they are accented,
contrasting with the low tone on the other constituents in the sentence.
They do not stand in a topic but in a FOCUS relation to their propositions.
The distinction drawn here on the basis of the prosody of English
pronouns is particularly clear in languages in which the difference
between pronouns with topic function and pronouns with focus function
has not only intonational but also morphosyntactic correlates. This is the
case e.g. in Italian and French. Rather dramatic syntactic differences
between a discourse-active referent with topic function and one with
focus function are illustrated in these Italian and French sentences:
(3.31) a. IO PAGO. - MOI je PAYE. "i'11 PAY"
b. Pago lo.-C'est MOI qui paye. "I'H pay"
In example (3.31a), the preverbal pronouns io and moi are topic
expressions. Their intonation contour is rising, indicating that an
assertion is following. Example (3.31a) is appropriate in a context in
which the proposition "I pay" is construed as conveying information
about the speaker, in particular when contrasted with another
proposition expressing information about someone else (as e.g. in /'//
PAY, the OTHERS may do as they PLEASE). In example (3.31b), on the other
hand, the pronouns are focus expressions, and appear either in sentence-
final position (Italian io) or in clause-final "clefted" position (French
moi). Their intonation contour is falling, indicating the end of the
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4 Pragmatic relations: topic
Let me begin with a few remarks about what I will NOT take "topic" to be
in this chapter. First, in keeping with the decision to restrict my research
to pragmatic phenomena with grammatical, in particular syntactic,
correlates in sentence structure (cf. Section 1.1), I will restrict my
attention to SENTENCE TOPICS or CLAUSE TOPICS. I will have little to say
about the notion of DISCOURSE TOPIC, which has more to do with discourse
understanding and text cohesion than with the grammatical form of
sentences (cf. Halliday & Hasan 1976, Ochs Keenan & Schieffelin 1976b,
van Dijk 1977, Reinhart 1982, Barnes 1985, Van Oosten 1985), although
I will sometimes informally use that term to designate a topic expression
whose referent is pragmatically salient beyond the limit of a single
sentence.
Second, I would like to emphasize from the outset that the concept of
topic developed here does not coincide with that of topic (or "theme") as
the "element which comes first in a sentence." In the framework adopted
here, sentence-initial elements may either be topics or foci, hence cannot
be identified with either of these categories. The notion of topic/theme as
the first element in the sentence is extensively discussed in Prague School
research (cf. e.g. the summary in Firbas 1966a) and has been adopted e.g.
by Halliday (1967) and Fries (1983). The relationship between sentence-
initial position and topic function will be discussed in Section 4.7. Finally,
my notion of topic differs from that of Givon and other linguists (cf. e.g.
Givon 1983), who often use the term "topic" to refer to any "participant"
in a discourse and who do not draw a principled distinction between
topical and non-topical participants, a distinction which is essential in my
own approach.
117
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Definition of topic 119
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120 Pragmatic relations: topic
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Definition of topic 121
vague does not alter the fact that they are crucial in understanding a great
number of formal grammatical phenomena.
To see that even in a sentence like (4.1) the topic-comment structure is
to some extent formally (though not syntactically) expressed let us
contrast it with some possible allosentences by embedding the statement
expressed in it in different discourse contexts:2
(4.2) a. (What did the children do next?) The children went to SCHOOL.
b. (Who went to school?) The CHILDREN went to school.
c. (What happened?) The CHILDREN went to SCHOOL!
d. (John was very busy that morning.) After the children went to
SCHOOL, he had to clean the house and go shopping for the party.
Only in the reply in (4.2a) can we say that the referent of the subject NP
the children is properly "what the sentence is about," hence that this NP
represents the topic of the sentence. In this context, the statement
expressed in (4.1) is intended to increase the addressee's knowledge about
the children as a previously established set of entities. The statement
pragmatically presupposes that the children in question are a "matter of
standing current interest and concern" (Strawson) and asserts about
these children that they went to school. With traditional logic, we might
say that the predicate "went to school" expresses a property attributed to
the subject "the children." However, the information-structure analysis
differs from the traditional one in one important respect: both the
"subject" relation and the "predicate" relation are seen not as logical
properties of the proposition expressed in the sentence but as pragmatic
properties of the sentence used in discourse. This distinction is crucial
since, as we will see, the same syntactic structure, expressing the same
logical proposition, can have a different information structure in which
the "subject-predicate" distribution is not the same as in (4.2a). Hence
the need for the terms "topic" and "comment." To characterize a
sentence such as (4.2a) in information-structure terms, the label "topic-
comment sentence" is therefore preferable to the term "subject-predicate
sentence."3
Formally, topic-comment sentences are minimally characterized by the
presence of a focus accent on some element of the verb phrase, at least in
languages like English (see Section 5.2.2). In (4.2a), the topic-comment
structure is expressed by the accent on the noun school and, in addition,
by low pitch prominence on the topic noun children. (Low pitch
prominence is, however, not a necessary condition for topic marking; see
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Definition of topic 123
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124 Pragmatic relations: topic
(4.2c') The CHILDREN went to SCHOOL, and the PARENTS went to BED.
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Definition of topic 127
Chapter 5, the types in (a), (b), and (c), which are analyzed here in terms
of their TOPIC STRUCTURE (or lack thereof), will receive a complementary
analysis in terms of their FOCUS STRUCTURE, and will be labeled "predicate-
focus", "argument-focus", and "sentence-focus" structures respectively.
In Lambrecht (in preparation) I will show that in spoken French these
information-structure categories are systematically distinguished via
different syntactic structures.
The characterization of "topic" adopted here may be summarized as
follows. A referent is interpreted as the topic of a proposition if IN A GIVEN
DISCOURSE the proposition is construed as being ABOUT this referent, i.e. as
expressing information which is RELEVANT TO and which increases the
addressee's KNOWLEDGE OF this referent. Following Reinhart (1982), we
may say that the relation "topic-of" expresses the pragmatic relation of
aboutness which holds between a referent and a proposition with respect
to a particular discourse. The term "pragmatic relation" should be
understood as meaning "relation construed within particular discourse
contexts." Topic is a PRAGMATICALLY CONSTRUED SENTENCE RELATION. In
what follows, I will try to make this somewhat vague characterization of
"topic" more precise.
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128 Pragmatic relations: topic
pragmatic relation between the entity and the proposition or with the
entity itself. Thus in the above-mentioned sentences, the individual
named "Pat" is the topic which the different propositions are about. The
referent of the expression Pat is a topic referent.
This common use of the term topic to denote a referent with a
particular relation to a proposition should be sharply distinguished from
the use of the term to refer to a LINGUISTIC EXPRESSION designating a topic
referent in a sentence. To refer to such an expression, I will use terms like
TOPIC EXPRESSION, TOPIC PHRASE, or TOPIC CONSTITUENT, instead of the
simple "topic." When referring to particular syntactic categories with
topic function I will use terms like TOPIC NP or TOPIC PRONOUN. In Section
4.5, an additional distinction will be drawn between LEXICAL TOPIC
EXPRESSIONS and PRONOMINAL TOPIC EXPRESSIONS. T O designate topic NPs
which are grammatically marked as such by their position or their form
and which cannot be identified with the grammatical relations subject or
object, I will use the category labels TOP (for left-detached topic
constituents) and A-TOP ("Antitopic," for right-detached topic
constituents). The ambiguity of the term "topic" is reminiscent of the
well-known ambiguity of the term "subject," which traditionally denotes
both a grammatical or logical relation between an argument and a
proposition and the syntactic constituent in which this relation is
instantiated in a given sentence.
If the distinction between "topic referent" and "topic expression" were
not drawn, it would be impossible, for example, to account for the
different information-structure statuses of the constituents Pat, her, and
she on the one hand and SHE and HER on the other in (3.29) and (3.30).
The two sets of expressions refer to the same entity, namely the person
called "Pat," who is the topic of both propositions. But while the
expressions in the first set are topic expressions, those in the second set
are not. Similarly, in example (3.31)
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Definition of topic 129
(b) it is a focus expression, i.e. its referent has a focus relation to the
proposition.
A similar point is made by Reinhart (1982) in an argument against a
definition of topic in terms of "old information." Reinhart discusses the
following simple question-answer pairs (focus marking added):
(4.5) Once upon a time there was an old king who lived in a beautiful castle.
The phrase an old king in the first clause of this sentence designates an
individual which has topic status in the discourse (the fairy tale is likely to
be at least in part about this king). However, at the point in the discourse
where this referent is first mentioned in the form of a lexical noun phrase,
this noun phrase is not a topic expression, because the clause in which it
occurs cannot be said to be ABOUT the referent of this phrase; rather the
clause INTRODUCES this referent in order to make it available as a topic for
subsequent predication. It is only with the relative pronoun who in the
relative clause that the referent enters an aboutness relation with a
proposition, making who a topic expression in that clause. (Notice that
this relative clause differs from the one discussed in (2.11) Ifinally met the
woman who moved in downstairs in that its proposition is not presupposed
but asserted.) Even though it may be natural and convenient to say that
the old king is "the topic of the sentence," insofar as that sentence is part
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134 Pragmatic relations: topic
Example (a) shows that it is difficult to construe the predicate "be the
topic of this course" as relevant information about the referent of the
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Topic and subject 135
subject in (4.8); but (b) shows that no difficulty of construal arises if the
subject-predicate relation is reversed, i.e. if the postverbal NP in (4.8) is
construed as the topic. The pragmatic articulation of the sentence in (4.8)
presents itself as a reversal of the one most commonly associated with the
given syntactic structure, leading to a certain increase in processing
difficulty. But unlike in the case of the highly anomalous (4.7), in which
topic-focus indeterminacy led to severely diminished interpretability, the
topic-focus reversal in (4.8) may be seen as a (more or less conventional)
violation of an information-structure principle for rhetorical purposes.
Example (4.8) is acceptable within the conventions of a written genre in
which added processing difficulty is made up for by the stylistic value of
unexpectedness.12
I would like to emphasize that the kind of topic-focus indeterminacy
manifested in (4.7) and (4.8) is NOT a common feature of spontaneous
spoken discourse. As far as written discourse is concerned, such
indeterminacy seems to be tolerable to different degrees in different
languages. The fact that examples such as (4.7) and (4.8) do occur in
English no doubt has to do with the previously mentioned fact that word
order in modern English is to a high degree grammatically (and not
pragmatically) controlled and that in principle both the topic and the
focus relation can be associated with the grammatical role of subject. As
the discussion in Section 1.3 showed, there is a striking difference between
modern English and modern French in this respect. In French the literal
translation of (4.7) in (4.7')
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Topic and subject 137
It goes without saying that under the minimal context provided here
the sentences on the right-hand side would normally not contain full
lexical subjects. Answers such as those in (4.11), which contain
pronominal or null subjects, would no doubt be more appropriate in
most situations:
(4.11) a. It HURTS.
b. Mi fa MALE.
c. II me fait MAL.
d. ITAI.
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140 Pragmatic relations: topic
have grouped them into two sets, according to semantic and formal
criteria which I will make explicit later on:
(4.13) a. Es regnet. / Pluit. "It is raining."
b. Gott ist. "God exists."
Es gibt gelbe Blumen. "There are yellow flowers."
Es findet ein Markt statt. "A market is being held."
In the thetic type in (4.13a), often exemplified with weather verbs, it
seems relatively uncontroversial to assume that the propositions
expressed in such sentences are logically simple in Marty's sense. They
do not predicate a property of some entity but they simply assert or
"pose" (hence "thetic") a fact or state of affairs. The type in (4.13b)
corresponds to the so-called "existential" sentence type, but as we shall
see it is not restricted to existentials.
To my knowledge, the first systematic attempt to apply Brentano's and
Marty's logical dichotomy to linguistic theory was made by Kuroda
(1972). According to Kuroda, the logical distinction between thetic and
categorical judgments is empirically confirmed in Japanese grammar in
the formal distinction between the particles wa and ga. For example, the
difference between the two sentences in (4.14)
(4.14) a. Inu ga hasitte iru. "The dog is running."
b. Inu wa hasitte iru. "The dog is running."
is analyzed by Kuroda as follows. Example (4.14a), which contains a ga-
marked NP, is a thetic sentence. It represents "the fact that an event of
running ... is taking place, involving necessarily one ... participant in the
event." The speaker's intention is directed in (a) toward the entity
participating in the event, i.e. the dog, "just insofar as it is a constituent
of an event." In the categorical sentence in (b) however, which contains
wa, "the speaker's interest is primarily directed towards the entity...and
the reason why he wants to give an expression to the fact that he
recognizes the happening of the event ... is precisely that he wants to
relate the occurrence of the event to this entity" (1972:162ff). The entity
to which an event is related by the speaker in this way is referred to by
Kuroda as the "subject," which is grammatically manifested in Japanese
as a wa-marked NP. Thetic sentences such as (4.14a), on the other hand,
in which the entity is only a necessary participant in an event, are called
"subjectless" by Kuroda.
It is clear that Kuroda's notion of "subject" is closely related to the
information-structure notion of "topic" or "theme," even though
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142 Pragmatic relations: topic
In (4.16), both (a) and (b) can be interpreted as reports of some striking
event and can be used as answers to the question "What happened?" But
the sentence cannot be GRAMMATICALLY marked as expressing a thetic
proposition if the subject is a referential pronoun. The sentence in (4.16c),
in which a pronominal subject carries prosodic prominence, can only be
construed as an identificational or "argument-focus" sentence, in which
the proposition that someone died is pragmatically presupposed.
Another (attested) example, illustrating the same contrast, is (4.17).
The sentences in (4.17) were uttered independently of one another and at
different times by two waitresses in a restaurant when each passed near
the door to the kitchen:
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144 Pragmatic relations: topic
c. Y'a le TELEPHONE qui SONNE! (y'a-clefting)
d. DENWA ga NATTE iru yo! (ga-marking)
The sentences in (4.19) are not strictly presentational, in the sense that
they do not serve to introduce the telephone as a referent into the
discourse. Rather they serve to announce an event of ringing, in which
the telephone is merely a necessary participant. Nevertheless, in each
sentence the non-topical status of the NP is indicated with the same
prosodic and/or morphosyntactic features as the "presented" NP in
(4.18).
I suggest the following explanation for the fact that the same
grammatical category is used to express both the presentational and
the event-reporting function. What both functions have in common is
that the sentence expressing the thetic proposition introduces a new
element into the discourse without linking this element either to an
already established topic or to some presupposed proposition. The thetic
sentence thus has an "all-new" character which distinguishes it both from
the categorical (or topic-comment) and from the identificational sentence
type. The difference between the presentational and the event-reporting
type is that in presentational sentences proper the newly introduced
element is an ENTITY (a discourse referent) while in event-reporting
sentences it is an EVENT, which necessarily involves an entity. (Even the
events of raining or snowing involve entities, i.e. rain or snow.) I will use
the term "thetic sentence" (i.e. sentence expressing a thetic proposition)
to designate a superordinate information-structure category which
includes the categories "event-reporting sentence" and "presentational
sentence," the latter including a deictic and an existential subtype.
Following Sasse (1987), I will sometimes also refer to event-reporting
sentences as "event-central" and to presentational sentences as "entity-
central" thetic sentences.
I would like to emphasize that the formal contrast between the marked
category of thetic sentences and the unmarked category of topic-
comment (or categorical) sentences crucially involves the grammatical
relation SUBJECT (or "distinguished argument"; see p. 350, note 14). It is
not the absence of any topic relation that characterizes thetic sentences
but the absence of a topic relation between the proposition and that
argument which functions as the topic in the categorical counterpart. As
we saw in Section 4.2.1, in the unmarked case this categorical topic
argument is the subject. It is in principle possible for non-subject
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Topic and subject 145
both the possessive determiner and the homophonous object pronoun her
are topic expressions. Thetic sentences may also contain locative topics,
such as the prepositional phrase in my soup in the sentence There were
three FLIES in my soup, whose topic status is expressed via lack of prosodic
prominence (see Section 5.3.3). What counts for the definition of the
formal category "thetic sentence" is that the constituent which would
appear as the subject (or distinguished argument) NP in a corresponding
categorical allosentence gets formally marked as a NON-TOPIC, resulting in
a departure from the unmarked pragmatic articulation in which the
subject is the topic and the predicate the comment. As with other
information-structure categories, the formal identification of this
category is made on the basis of the contrast with a possible
allosentence. I will return to the formal distinction between thetic and
categorical sentences in the disussion of focus structure in Chapter 5
(especially Sections 5.2.4 and 5.6.2).
An apparent problem for the definition of thetic sentences in terms of
the grammatical manifestation of the subject NP are thetic-categorical
pairs which involve no grammatical subject at all, as in this Czech
example, which parallels the examples in (4.10):22
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Topic and subject 147
The last sentence in this text can be said to have two topics and two
corresponding topic expressions: the topicalized object NP the product
and the subject /. Both are formally marked as such (non-canonical
position of the lexical NP, lack of accent on the pronoun). The subject / i s
topical because the whole passage in (4.22), including the last sentence, is
about the letter-writer and his feelings. We may call it the PRIMARY TOPIC.
But the last sentence, in addition to conveying information about the
writer, is also intended to convey information about the "product" (i.e.
the thesis) in relation to the writer. The reader learns as a fact ABOUT the
product that the writer is not happy with it. We may call the thesis a
SECONDARY TOPIC.
Now since both the writer and the product are presupposed to be
topics under discussion at the time the sentence is uttered, the two
referents can be expected to stand in a certain relation to each other in the
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148 Pragmatic relations: topic
sentence. We can therefore say that the point of the utterance is to inform
the addressee of the nature of the RELATION between the referents as
arguments in the proposition. The situation in (4.22) can be loosely
paraphrased as follows: given the writer and the thesis as topics under
discussion, the reader is informed that the relation between the two is that
between the subject (or experiencer) and the object (or theme) of the
predicate feel less good about. Thus a sentence containing two (or more)
topics, in addition to conveying information about the topic referents,
conveys information ABOUT THE RELATION that holds between them as
arguments in the proposition. The reason the proposition can be said to
be ABOUT this relation is because the existence of some relation between
two (or more) topics is already established before the sentence is uttered.
The assertion in such a sentence is then the statement of the nature of the
relation. 23
One might object to the view of there being more than one topic per
clause or sentence by saying that it makes the concept of topic vacuous or
near-vacuous. Do we want to say, for example, that in the answer
sentence in (4.23) (a variant of (4.9))
(4.23) Q: What ever became of John?
A: He married Rosa, but he didn't really love her.
both he and her are topic expressions? No doubt the answer in (4.23) is
intended primarily as information about John, therefore the two
occurrences of the pronoun he must be topic expressions. But this does
not entail that the unaccented pronoun her is not a topic expression as
well. Although the sentence primarily adds to our knowledge of John
(John being the primary topic), it also has the effect of increasing our
knowledge of Rosa, by informing us that she was not loved by her
husband. Both John and Rosa are under discussion at the time the clause
he didn't really love her is uttered. The communicative point of uttering
this clause is to inform the addressee of the nature of the relation between
the two topic referents.
Notice that while the clause he didn 't really love her may be said to be
ABOUT the relation between the two arguments, the same is not true of the
clause He married Rosa, in which Rosa is mentioned for the first time. In
the latter clause, Rosa does not bear a topic but a focus relation to the
proposition (see Section 5.1). The pragmatic difference between the two
clauses is morphosyntactically marked: the two topic expressions are
unaccented pronominals, while the focus expression is an accented lexical
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Topic and subject 149
(4.25) A Jewish Grandfather (G) has been talking about the fact that his
grandson is difficult to please. He gives one example-oatmeal:
G: And it's uh got ta good taste, its good. And the cereal-grandma e
don't like cereal but she finished to the last (dish) and I enjoy-I like it
too. It's tasty! And I uh (1.2) He didn't want the cereal, doesn't eat. I
said, "Todd, it wouldn't kill ya, taste it!"...
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150 Pragmatic relations: topic
was concerned with (e.g. how everybody likes it) here he is concerned
with the properties of the grandson (his rejection of the outstanding
cereal)" (Reinhart 1982).
As far as I can see, there is no grammatical evidence supporting
Reinhart's claim. It seems to me that the difference Reinhart is trying to
capture on the basis of this text is a difference in the pragmatic SALIENCE
of the various topic referents at given points in the discourse, not the
difference between topics and non-topics. It seems clear that the cereal is
more salient in the first part of the text and that the grandson is more
salient in the second part. And this difference in salience is reflected in the
fact that the more salient topic tends to be coded more often (though not
exclusively) as a subject. But it is not clear on what grounds topic status
of e.g. the pronoun it in it wouldn't kill ya can be excluded. By the same
token, there does not seem to be any principled reason besides pragmatic
salience to exclude the NPs grandma and / from topic status in the
sentences grandma e don't like cereal but she finished and / like it too. All
sentences containing two topic expressions have in common that the
referents of both expressions can be considered to be "under discussion"
at the time of utterance and that some relationship is known to exist
between them. The sentences then convey information about the nature
of this relationship.
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Topic, presupposition, and semantic interpretation 151
referent of this NP. Since the referent was touched upon in the question,
it was possible to construe it as an element of the pragmatic
presupposition required by the answer. The proposition "The children
are under discussion" or "The children are to be predicated something
of" is evoked by the presuppositional structure of the answer sentence in
(4.2a). Notice that this is not equivalent to saying that the referent of the
subject NP is ACTIVE in the discourse. The topichood of the referent is the
pragmatic relation it bears to the asserted proposition; the activeness of
its referent is a feature of the communicative setting. That the pragmatic
relation is not identical to the pragmatic property follows from the fact
that an active referent may also enter into a FOCUS relation with a
proposition (cf. Section 3.5). The relationship between topic and
activation will be further discussed in Section 4.4.
It is no doubt the inherent relationship between topic and pragmatic
presupposition that has led to the widespread terminological habit of
calling the topic of a sentence "presupposed." This habit is as misleading
as that of calling a definite noun phrase, or even its referent,
"presupposed" (cf. Section 2.3, example (2.12) and discussion). Any-
thing presupposed is propositional in nature (such as some shared belief
or knowledge), but topic referents are for the most part not propositions
but entities. Moreover, even propositional topics are not predicates but
arguments of, or adjuncts to, predicates. The fact that topic and
presupposition cannot be identified with each other was mentioned
earlier, in the discussion of example (4.2b). What is presupposed in a
topic-comment relation is not the topic itself, nor its referent, but the fact
that the topic referent can be expected to play a role in a given
proposition, due to its status as a center of interest or matter of concern
in the conversation. It is this property that most clearly distinguishes
topic arguments from focus arguments, whose role in the proposition is
always unpredictable at the time of utterance (see Section 5.1.1). One
therefore ought not to say that a topic referent "is presupposed" but that,
given its discourse status, it is presupposed to play a role in a given
proposition. To indicate the fact that an item is in the domain of the
presupposition, or belongs to the presupposition, I will say that it is IN
THE PRESUPPOSITION. The expression "in the presupposition" is the analog
of the expression "in focus" which I will introduce in Section 5.1.1.
The correlation between topic and presupposition is what has
motivated the use of the above-mentioned as-for construction (cf. Kuno
1972, Gundel 1976) and about construction (Reinhart 1982) as tests for
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152 Pragmatic relations: topic
In the about test, the sentence containing the putative topic expression is
embedded under a matrix containing the preposition about, whose
complement is the putative topic NP, as in (4.1"):
(4.1") He said about the children that they went to school.
Both in the as-for test and the about test, the topic referent is formally
marked as being in the presupposition by being coded in a portion of the
sentence which PRECEDES the clause expressing the proposition about it.
Notice that the phrase as for NP (as well as similar phrases in other
languages) can be appropriately used only if the NP referent is already a
potential topic in the discourse at the time the phrase is used, i.e. if the
referent is contextually accessible (cf. Ochs Keenan & Schieffelin 1976b).
Not only would it be impossible to use the as-for construction for a
brand-new referent (*As for a strange guy, I saw him last night) but it
would be highly inappropriate to use it with an inactive referent as well.
An utterance like As for your brother, I saw him last night is appropriate
only if the brother belongs to the set of referents under discussion. It is
worth observing, in this context, that the as-for phrase can ONLY be used
in this topic-establishing function, as witnessed by the unacceptability of
sentences like * As for WHOM did they go to school? or *They went to school
as for the CHILDREN. AS far as I know, as for is the only phrasal constituent
in English which may not function as a focus expression.
By acknowledging the inherent relationship (but not identity) between
topic and pragmatic presupposition we are in a position to understand
certain correlations between the topic status of a sentence constituent and
the semantic interpretation of the sentence containing this constituent. In
Section 2.3, I mentioned that the truth of a pragmatically presupposed
proposition cannot be affected by an element of negation or modality,
because the content of presupposed propositions is necessarily "taken for
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156 Pragmatic relations: topic
One cannot assess the truth value of a proposition if one cannot identify
the entity of which the predicate is said to hold. In pragmatic terms: one
cannot assess the information value and the relevance of a statement
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Topic, presupposition, and semantic interpretation 157
about a topic if one doesn't know what the topic is. Sentences whose
topic referents have an insufficient degree of pragmatic reality for the
interlocutor are therefore difficult or impossible to interpret.
A famous example of such a sentence is The present King of France is
bald, which was first discussed by Russell (1905) in connection with the
problem it poses to logicians. Since I am not concerned with the meaning
and truth conditions of sentences but with the information value of
utterances, I will not enter the debate over the so-called "truth-gap" issue
arising with this and similar sentences. Instead I will look at the sentence
from the point of view of information structure. In one of his
contributions to the debate, Strawson (1964) makes the following
observation:
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158 Pragmatic relations: topic
could hardly arise. If the phrase I'actuel Roi de France "the present King
of France" were to be construed as a topic expression, it would likely
appear in right-detached or left-detached position, i.e. the sentence would
be Le Roi de France il est chauve or // est chauve, le Roi de France. As
shown in Lambrecht 1981, both of these topic-marking constructions can
be used felicitously only in discourse situations in which the referent of
the NP is pragmatically accessible. In such a situation, the truth value of
the sentence could be normally assessed. If, on the other hand, the
sentence were uttered "out of the blue," without the King of France
being an accessible topic referent, this lack of accessibility would also
have to be expressed syntactically and the proposition would be likely to
appear in the form of the thetic sentence II y a le Roi de France qui est
chauve (literally "There is the King of France who is bald"), in which the
referent is formally marked as a non-topic. In this case, it again seems
possible to assign a truth value to the sentence, by determining whether
the "event" announced by that sentence is taking place or not.
It is worth pointing out that the bi-clausal, clefted, structure of this
spoken French sentence, with its initial existential (or presentational)
clause II y ale Roi de France, is remarkably similar to the logical structure
originally proposed by Russell to account for the semantic problem posed
by the English sentence. Expressed in plain English (with one minor
simplification concerning the uniqueness of the referent) Russell's logical
structure is: "There is a King of France, and he is bald." The important
difference between Russell's structure and the spoken French sentence is
that in French the noun phrase le Roi de France is DEFINITE, indicating
that its referent is treated as an identifiable entity in the discourse. This
entails that the existence of the referent is pragmatically taken for
granted. What counts for the proper use of this thetic sentence
construction is the activation state of the referent in the discourse (see
Lambrecht 1988a).
That an expression must not only have a referent in order to serve as a
topic but that this referent must be pragmatically established in the
universe of discourse of the interlocutors is demonstrated in the following
real-life example of a telephone exchange. Speaker A has dialed a wrong
number and is asking to speak to a person unknown to speaker B who
receives the phone call:
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160 Pragmatic relations: topic
expression. If the syntax of the sentence did not insinuate topic status of
the NP, no violation would be perceived.
(4.31) ( = Prince's 22a) [I graduated from high school as] an average sudent.
My initiative didn't carry me any further than average. History I
found to be dry. Math courses I was never good at. I enjoyed
sciences ... Football was my bag. (Terkel 1974:590)
(4.32) (= Prince's 22b) Sunday I was taking paper and pasting it together and
finding a method of how to drop spoons, a fork, a napkin, and a straw
into one package. The napkin feeder I got. The straw feeder we made
already. That leaves us the spoon and the fork. (Terkel 1974:516)
The referents of the topicalized NPs in these examples exhibit what I have
termed the activation states of textual and inferential accessibility
(Section 3.3.1). According to Prince, the referent of the NP history "is
inferable, via a set-to-element inference, from a set that is not mentioned
but that is itself saliently inferable from the high school 'frame'"
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Topic and the mental representations of referents 161
(4.33) This one we traded, this one we traded, this one she let me have, this one
she let me have, this one we traded; she let me have this one; this one we
traded.
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162 Pragmatic relations: topic
All occurrences of the phrase this one in this text have referents which are
highly accessible in the speech situation (the pictures were displayed on
the table in front of us and pointed to during the conversation) and all
but one are topicalized. It is clear that the difference between the
topicalized phrases and the canonical occurrence cannot be explained
here in terms of the cognitive states of the respective referents. Rather it
has to do with the nature of the relation between the referent and the
proposition. By leaving the object NP this one in canonical position in the
second-to-last clause the speaker marks the referent as having not a topic
but a focus relation to the proposition, i.e. as being an unpredictable
element within the proposition, thereby drawing special attention to it.
(In this particular case, the switch from the topic to the focus relation
may have been motivated by the desire to exploit the unexpectedness
inherent in the focus relation for rhetorical purposes.)
In insisting on the distinction between pragmatic relations and
pragmatic properties I am NOT denying the existence of a correlation
between the topic function of a referent and its cognitive activation state.
Indeed in order to make a referent INTERPRETABLE as the topic of a
proposition and in order to make the proposition INTERPRETABLE as
presenting relevant information about this topic, the topic referent must
have certain activation properties, which, in the case of the English
topicalization construction, are precisely the properties pointed out by
Prince. Prince claims-correctly I believe-that the sentences in (4.31) and
(4.32) could not be processed effectively if the hearer were incapable of
making the necessary inferences concerning the status of the topicalized
NP referents in the discourse. But the reason these sentences could not be
processed effectively is that a topic relation between a referent and a
proposition can be effectively construed only if the topic referent has a
certain degree of pragmatic accessibility. By its presuppositional
structure, the topicalization construction acts as an invitation to the
hearer to EXPLOIT the cognitive accessibility of a particular noun phrase in
a particular syntactic configuration. (Recall that pragmatic accessibility is
seen here not as the cognitive state of a referent in a person's mind but as
a potential for activation; cf. Sections 3.3 and 3.4.)
I believe that it is the condition of interpretability that provides the best
explanation for the relationship between topic function on the one hand
and the activation and identifiability properties of topic referents on the
other. In selecting a topic for a sentence, a speaker makes a
communicative decision as to the "point of departure" for the new
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164 Pragmatic relations: topic
high degree of control or as an experiencer, but is not a sufficient
condition. (Comrie 1981:550
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Topic and the mental representations of referents 165
topic, that the topic of a sentence is "the old information" is, to say the
least, misleading. However, it is equally misleading to assert that there is
no necessary relationship at all between the two parameters. This is what
I will demonstrate in the next section.
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Topic and the mental representations of referents 167
I believe the reason for the unacceptability of this sentence lies in the fact
that it is difficult to imagine a context in which it would be informative to
predicate tallness of an unidentified subject referent. Such sentences
violate the most elementary condition of relevance. The uninterpret-
ability of (4.35) is aggravated by the fact that the indefinite noun phrase a
boy cannot easily be construed as having a generic (and therefore
identifiable) referent, which could then be interpreted as the topic of a
gnomic statement. If the referent were interpretable as generic, the
sentence would become acceptable, even with a stative predicate.
Sentences like A boy is a boy or even A boy wants to be tall do not
pose the same difficulties of interpretation as (4.35).
That the unacceptability of (4.35) is indeed due to the pragmatic
indeterminacy of the topic referent, i.e. to a difficulty of interpretation,
and not, as originally claimed by Perlmutter and others, to some
semantic, let alone syntactic, incompatibility between indefinite noun
phrases and certain types of stative predicates becomes clear if we
compare (4.35) with the following modified version:
Example (4.36), with its anchored brand-new referent (see Section 3.2.1),
is clearly more acceptable in isolation than (4.35), even though its subject
noun phrase (a boy in my class) is still formally indefinite, and even
though its predicate is still stative. The difference in acceptability between
(4.35) and (4.36) is predicted by the Topic Acceptability Scale. By adding
the phrase in my class to the indefinite noun phrase a boy, the unspecified
set of all boys in the universe of discourse of the speech participants is
reduced to the much smaller set of all boys in the speaker's class, i.e. a set
which is referentially linked (or anchored) to the identity of the speaker
herself. As a member of this set, the referent becomes more identifiable,
hence more easily interpretable as a topic. The pragmatic-semantic
difference between the two indefinite noun phrases in (4.35) and in (4.36),
and the difference in acceptability it entails, is another piece of evidence
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170 Pragmatic relations: topic
NP appears after, rather than before, the verb, the preverbal position
being filled by a locative element. I will return to such constructions in
the discussion of presentational sentences in Section 4.4.4.1. For unused
referents, English may also resort to locative inversion constructions
involving verbs of motion, such as Here comes the sun or In hopped the
rabbit (see e.g. Bolinger 1977, Van Oosten 1978, Green 1980), although
such sentences tend to be stylistically marked.
There is a natural restriction on the number of unidentifiable or
inaccessible non-topical referents which can be introduced within one
sentence or clause. In Section 2.2, I quoted the sentence A clergyman's
opened a betting shop on an airliner (example (2.10)), in which all three
arguments are indefinite NPs with brand-new referents. Such sentences
are pragmatically so anomalous that they can be used only in special
contexts (see p. 345, note 17). In spontaneous discourse, sentences with
non-topical subjects strongly tend to be INTRANSITIVE, as in (4.37) and in
the examples of thetic sentences discussed in Section 4.2.2.
In many languages this cognitive constraint on the number of
inaccessible referents per clause is grammaticalized. For example spoken
French has a constraint on event-reporting sentences such that one NP
argument (the subject of the corresponding canonical sentence) must
appear in a clause of its own. Any additional NP must be an argument of
a subsequent clause. In Italian and Spanish inversion sentences of the
event-reporting type no lexical direct or indirect object NP may cooccur
with the postverbal subject (see Wandruszka 1981, Lambrecht 1987c).31
The same restriction holds for the thetic constructions involving
"impersonal" es and il in German and French and for the English
inversion constructions mentioned above. For VS constructions, the
constraint against cooccurring NPs with inactive referents can be
explained structurally, as a result of the fact that the language in
question does not tolerate the sequence V-NP-NP. There is no
contradiction between such a structural account and the pragmatic
account presented here. Notice however that a pragmatic explanation is
needed to account for the fact that PRONOMINAL NPS, i.e. NPs with active
referents, often cooccur more freely with non-topical postverbal subjects
than lexical NPs (see example (4.20) and discussion, and Lambrecht
1987c). A purely syntactic account of the unacceptability of V-NP-NP
sequences is also unable to account for the fact that such sequences are
acceptable if the second NP is an adjunct rather than a complement of the
verb. For example, while the French sentence *// a mange un garpon une
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Topic and the mental representations of referents 171
(4.39) a. Every time I went over to his house a major CATASTROPHE happened.
b. I had a problem with my car. The BATTERY went dead.
c. (Sitting at a computer terminal:) Oh shit! The SCREEN'S going dead.
d. If you was back East and you saw a sky like that you'd know SNOW
was coming.
(Sentence (4.40c) was shouted by a bus driver to the driver of another bus
he had been following.) Notice that in these examples the locative focus
expression could be omitted and the result would still be a possible thetic
sentence. The natural occurrence of such two-accent sentences is a feature
distinguishing English, whose constituent organization is to a high degree
grammatically controlled, from a language like (spoken) French, in which
sentences with preverbal focal subjects do not naturally occur.
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Topic and the mental representations of referents 173
topics or foci. Consider the contrast between the two sentences in (4.41)
(the relevant constituents are italicized):
(4.41) a. Marie malheureusement a perdu son ARGENT. "Marie unfortunately
lost her money."
b. Malheureusement elle Pa PERDU. "Unfortunately she lost it."
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174 Pragmatic relations: topic
information about the individuals who did the calling but only about the
person who received the call. The interpretation of they as non-topical is
confirmed in the approximately synonymous passive version in (3.29b)
Pat said she was called twice, in which the agent doing the calling is left
unexpressed because it is unknown or unimportant. Sentences (3.29a) and
(3.29b) are semantically equivalent in a way in which the members of the
structurally similar pair John called Mary and Mary was called are not.
To find examples of unaccented pronominals which could be topics by
the semantics of the predicate but which cannot be topical because of the
presuppositional structure of the clause in which they occur we may again
turn to thetic sentences. Such sentences may contain unaccented subject
pronominals even though their lexical subject NPs are not topics. For
example in the Spanish VS sentence Lleg-6 JVAN "JUAN arrived," the NP
Juan is not a topic constituent; therefore the third person suffix -6, which
counts as an unaccented pronominal in my analysis, has no topic referent
to refer to, hence itself cannot be a topic expression. The same
observation applies to the inflectional suffix -a in the Italian event-
reporting sentence Squill-a il TELEFONO in (4.19b).
Such apparent counterexamples to my claim that unaccented
pronominals are the preferred topic expressions can be accounted for
by interpreting the subject pronominals in such sentences as DEFAULT
morphemes which are required by the grammatical system of the
language. Most linguists would agree that the subject pronouns of
weather verbs in English, French, or German are required not for
semantic or pragmatic but for structural reasons. The reason for the
presence of the subject pronoun in It's cold is not the same when this
sentence is used to describe a meteorological condition as when it is used
to describe the temperature of someone's hand, even though the position
and the morphology of the pronoun are the same in the two situations. A
similar situation obtains with sentence-initial there in English, which may
function either as a subject place-holder (There arrived three soldiers) or
as a locative argument expression (There is your brother).
Whatever explanation is used to account for the dual function of such
morphemes will in my opinion also account for the dual function of the
person-number morphemes in inflectional languages. The default status
of the unaccented pronominals in the above-quoted thetic sentences is
consistent with my analysis of subjects as unmarked topics (Section
4.2.1). In sentences with unmarked presuppositional structure, i.e. in
topic-comment sentences, these unaccented subject-marking morphemes
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Topic and the mental representations of referents 177
(4.43) Once there was a wizard. He was very wise, rich, and was married to a
beautiful witch. They had two sons. The first was tall and brooding, he
spent his days in the forest hunting snails, and his mother was afraid of
him. The second was short and vivacious, a bit crazy but always game.
Now the wizard, he lived in Africa.
calling special attention to one element of the sentence for recall in the
subsequent discourse or situation. This recall may be needed because the
element is going to be used, directly or indirectly, in the ensuing
discourse, because what is going to be said later has some connection
with the element in question,-or because that element is relevant to
what is going to happen or be done in the reality. (Hetzron 1975:374)
Hetzron does not make use of the concepts of activation and referent
promotion, but his notion of "recall in the subsequent discourse" is
clearly related to these concepts. The reason why the referent of the NP a
wizard in (4.43) can be expressed at the beginning of the second sentence
in the preferred topic form he is that this referent was lexically expressed,
and thereby pragmatically activated, in the immediately preceding
sentence. The purpose of the first sentence in the text is thus to
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178 Pragmatic relations: topic
(4.44) A wizard once was very wise, rich, and married to a beautiful witch.
The strangeness of (4.44) follows from the fact that topic expressions with
unidentifiable referents are least acceptable on the Topic Acceptability
Scale in (4.34). If the sentence is not perceived as ill-formed, especially if
the word once is removed, this is due to the fact that the scale in question
measures pragmatic, not necessarily syntactic acceptability. Moreover, as
we will see later on, it is possible to pragmatically accommodate
unidentifiable referents to some extent.33
Because of the discourse function of presentational clauses, which is to
promote brand-new or unused referents to active status, the expressions
used to code the "presented" referents are indefinite or definite ACCENTED
LEXICAL NOUN PHRASES. Presentational NPs may not normally be
pronouns, since the referents of pronouns are already active.34 In some
languages, presentational clauses are used exclusively or with strong
preference for the introduction of brand-new (i.e. unidentifiable)
referents. For example in the so-called "inverted word order" construc-
tion in Chinese, in the English existential f/iere-construction, and in those
German and French presentational constructions which involve the
dummy subject markers es/il, only or mainly NPs with brand-new
referents may occur. (For the French 2'/-construction see Section 3.2,
example (3.18) and Lambrecht 1986b, Section 7.4.4.) In the case of
English, German, and French, this entails that mainly indefinite NPs are
tolerated in these constructions. This kind of quasi-grammatical
constraint is directly explainable in terms of the Topic Acceptability
Scale. Given that brand-new topic referents are lowest on the scale, the
need to avoid sentences having such topics is greatest. Therefore
grammaticalization is most likely to arise in those cases.
One common account of the meaning of presentational clauses is that
they assert the EXISTENCE of the referent of the postverbal NP (cf. the
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Topic and the mental representations of referents 179
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180 Pragmatic relations: topic
(4.43*) Once there was a wizard who was very wise and rich.
(see also example (4.5) above). Unlike the beginning of (4.43), where the
two clauses are juxtaposed, in (4.43') the second clause is grammatically
subordinated to the first and appears in the form of a relative clause
whose antecedent is the presented NP. The preferred topic expression is
now the relative pronoun who in the second clause. I will refer to the
complex construction illustrated in (4.43') as the BI-CLAUSAL PRESENTA-
TIONAL CONSTRUCTION. The relative clause in this construction, even
though it is grammatically marked as dependent, exhibits a number of
syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features which characterize it as a
special type which could perhaps be characterized as "dependent main
clause" (see the formal analyses in Lambrecht 1988b for English and in
Section 7.3 of Lambrecht 1986b for French). These features characterize
the two-clause structure in (4.43') as a grammatical construction which is
uniquely dedicated to avoiding violations of the Topic Acceptability
Scale. In English, bi-clausal presentational constructions may also
involve non-finite (participial) clauses, as in There was a dog running
down the street or There was a man arrested by the police. In Chinese, a
serial verb construction is used whose first verb is the existential predicate
you (see Li & Thompson 1981:61 Iff, LaPolla 1990:115ff).
The most common and grammatically most clearly marked presenta-
tional clause type is characterized across languages by the presence of a
limited set of predicates whose arguments have a highly non-agentive and
often locative case-role, such as "BE", "BEAT," "LIVE," "ARRIVE," "HAVE,"
"SEE," etc. (see Section 4.2.2, example (4.18) and discussion).37 The
crosslinguistic predominance of such predicates is a natural consequence
of the basic discourse function which all presentational sentences,
whether deictic or existential, have in common: they do not predicate
some property of the NP referent but they assert the presence of the
referent in the (external or internal) text world. The newly introduced
referent, rather than being depicted as participating in some action, event
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184 Pragmatic relations: topic
(4.48) CONTEXT: Once there was a wizard. He was very wise, rich, and was
married to a beautiful witch. He lived in a magnificent mansion by the
lake, had forty-nine servants, and owned an impressive collection of rare
books.
TOPIC SHIFT: NOW the wizard, he was very ambitious. He had been
planning for years to conquer the world and finally he was ready.
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Implications for syntactic theory 185
(4.49) Wex are the party of the new ideas. Wet are the party of the future. We\
are the party whose philosophy is vigorous and dynamic. The old
stereotype of the kind of pudgy, stolid, negative Republican- there may
be a few cartoonists^ around who^ still want to portray us^ as that2, but
lying through their$ teeth if theyy do.
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Implications for syntactic theory 193
(4.50) (Six year old girl, explaining why the African elephant has bigger ears
than the Asian elephant)
The African elephant, it's so hot there, so he can fan himself.
(4.51) (From an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a wealthy town in
Dade County, Florida, becoming a "fort against crime")
"What we are trying to do here is keep this community what it is, a
beautiful, safe place to live," said police chief Dick de Stefani. "Dade
County, you just can't believe the rise in crime."47
(4.52) (From a TV interview about the availability of child care)
That isn't the typical family anymore. The typical family today, the
husband and the wife both work.
(4.53) (Talking about how to grow flowers)
Tulips, you have to plant new bulbs every year?
(4.54) (Lecturer in an introductory linguistics course)
Other languages, you don't just have straight tones like that.
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194 Pragmatic relations: topic
same position as the linked one, it follows that the latter does not have to
be an argument NP within the clause.
The second piece of evidence for the extra-clausal, non-argument
status of detached lexical topics comes from the syntax of German. It is
well known that in German the finite verb of a main clause is always the
second constituent. Therefore any phrase which precedes the verb must
be a single syntactic constituent. If a constituent other than the subject
appears in initial position, the subject must follow the verb. Consider now
the following examples:
(4.55) a. Hans isst den Apfel. "Hans eats the apple" (SVO)
b. Den Apfel isst Hans. (OVS)
c. *Den Apfel Hans isst. (OSV)
d. Den isst Hans. "Hans eats it" (OVS)
e. Den Apfel den isst Hans. "The apple Hans eats it" (TOVS)
f. *Den Apfel isst Hans den. (TVSO)
g. Jetzt isst den Hans. "Now Hans eats it" (AdvVOS)
h. *Jetzt den isst Hans. (AdvOVS)
As the comparison of (4.55) (a) or (b) with (c) shows, the verb must
occupy second position in its clause in order for the sentence to be
grammatical. However, in (e) two constituents appear before the verb
and nevertheless that sentence is grammatical. It follows that only the
second constituent (i.e. the topicalized object pronoun den) can be a
constituent of the clause, as it is in (d). The contrast between (g) and (h)
shows that the detached topic NP does not have the status of an adjunct
to the predicate like the adverb jetzt "now1, which does occupy intra-
clausal position. The detached constituent den Apfel is therefore an extra-
clausal lexical topic NP.
The reader may have noticed that in example (4.55e) both the lexical
NP and the topicalized pronoun have accusative case marking. This case-
marking is optional on the lexical NP but obligatory on the pronoun.
This phenomenon of dual case marking is reminiscent of the dual case-
marking pattern described by Jelinek 1984 for Warlpiri, except that in
Warlpiri the lexical NP has ergative-absolutive marking while the intra-
clausal "agreement" marking is nominative-accusative. Whatever
explanation is given for the accusative marking on the NP in (e), it
does not affect the syntactic argument that the lexical topic constituent
cannot be a constituent of the same clause as the pronoun.
The German examples just examined raise a problem which I cannot
discuss here in any depth. This is the problem of the pragmatic difference
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Topic and pragmatic accommodation 195
between the topicalized object NP den Apfel in (b) or den in (d) and (e) on
the one hand, and the detached topic NP den Apfel in (e) on the other.
Both the topicalization and the detachment construction mark an NP
grammatically as a topic, but only the detached topic falls clearly under
the Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role. I am not aware of
any language-independent functional explanation which would account
for the difference between the two construction types and which would
allow us to assign to each of them its own invariable information-
structure properties. The difference seems to be at least in part one in the
cognitive accessibility state of the NP referent. Topicalization generally
seems to require a higher degree of accessibility than left detachment, but
much empirical research is necessary before any substantive claims can be
made to this effect.48
Whatever the exact differences between the various lexical topic-coding
strategies may turn out to be, such differences will not affect our general
empirical observation: languages with an apparently well-established
SVO or other canonical constituent pattern have a strong tendency to
violate this pattern under specific pragmatic conditions by placing lexical
topic NPs, especially potential subjects, outside the clause. This tendency
is not due to historical pressure but to a fundamental functional need. In
certain languages, including spoken French, this tendency is so strong
that the canonical pattern is hardly ever used in spontaneous speech.
Such languages, in which the basic or canonical pattern has restricted
distribution in language use, are of great theoretical interest for word-
order typologies and for syntactic theory in general. They pose in
particularly acute terms the general problem of the relationship between
abstract models of grammar and actual sentence structures.
The point of the preceding sections has been to demonstrate the existence
of a systematic, though flexible, correlation between the topic status of an
expression and the presumed cognitive state of the topic referent in the
hearer's mind at the time of an utterance. I have tried to account for this
correlation with the Topic Acceptability Scale in (4.34) and I have
observed that a number of syntactic constructions found across
languages have the function of promoting referents on this scale,
allowing speakers to preserve as much as possible the cognitively
preferred topic type, which is expressed as an unaccented pronominal.
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196 Pragmatic relations: topic
(4.56) ( = Reinhart's 21a) Because they wanted to know more about the
ocean's current, students in the science club at Mark. Twain Junior High
School of Coney Island gave ten bottles with return address cards inside
to crewmen of one of New York's sludge barges. (The New York Times)
(4.57) ( = Reinhart's 21b) When she was five years old, a child of my
acquaintance announced a theory that she was inhabited by rabbits.
(The New York Times)
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Topic and pragmatic accommodation 197
to the indefinite subject phrases students in the science club at Mark Twain
Junior High School of Coney Island and a child of my acquaintance
respectively. This kind of cataphoric reference to pragmatically non-
accessible items is a rhetorical convention, which is based on the rule of
accommodation for pragmatic presuppositions. Because of the nature of
the reading situation, readers can more readily accommodate as active
(or accessible) certain referents which are in fact new in the discourse
context.
This common phenomenon whereby a writer introduces a referent via
a linguistic expression or grammatical construction which normally
requires the presupposition that the referent is already introduced is
discussed by Clark & Haviland (1977) under the name of "addition." For
example if a reader finds the sentence The old woman died at the
beginning of a story, she knows, consciously or unconsciously, that she is
dealing with an intentional violation of a principle of information
structure. Such a violation is acceptable because the author of the story
can expect the reader to act cooperatively AS IF the referent of the NP the
old woman were already present in the reader's awareness by constructing
an antecedent for the NP which then can be "added" to the text world of
the story. In the case of (4.56) and (4.57), the cooperative effort necessary
on the part of the reader to interpret these sentences is accomplished all
the more easily since the referents of the subject noun phrases are
pragmatically ANCHORED (Section 3.3) in the modifying prepositional
phrases in the science club at ... and of my acquaintance. Notice that the
acceptability of the two sentences would be severely diminished if these
prepositional phrases were missing (cf. examples (4.35), (4.36) and
discussion). I therefore do not think that examples such as these can be
invoked as arguments against the postulated inherent connection between
topic function and cognitive accessibility of the topic referent. Rather the
conventionalized character of these exceptions indirectly confirms this
connection. Such exceptions are interpretable precisely against the
background of the presuppositional structure conventionally associated
with topic-comment sentences.50
It is interesting to observe that the pragmatic accommodation of an
unidentifiable referent is easier when the referent is grammatically
marked as a topic than when it is marked as a focus constituent. While
the above-quoted story opening The old woman DIED, which has topic-
comment structure, is rather conventional, the corresponding opening
involving the thetic sentence The old WOMAN died would be rather
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198 Pragmatic relations: topic
unusual. At first glance, this difference seems surprising. Given that topic
referents must be accessible while focus referents have no such
requirement (see Section 5.4.1), we might expect the second version to
be more natural. That it is not is due to the nature of subjects as
unmarked topics (Section 4.2.1). Since a subject is expected to be a topic,
and since topics must be pragmatically accessible, the invitation for
accommodation is more strongly expressed-hence more readily followed
by the reader-in the topic-comment version than in the thetic version.
This fact also shows, incidentally, that the often-made claim that
presentational sentences are typically found at discourse beginnings is
unwarranted.
Here is another striking example of a violation of the topic accessibility
constraint which I think is best explained as such a rhetorically motivated
deviation from normal usage. Consider the following passage from a
newspaper article on the problem of US army registration (the relevant
topic expression is again italicized):
(4.58) Of equal importance is the fact that objecting registrants can say they
oppose the policy of registration and will not cooperate with a draft. The
letter of protest I sent to the Selective Service at the time I handed my
registration card to the post office clerk stated exactly that. (The Daily
Californian, September 1982)
The prime candidate for topic function in the second sentence is the
sentence-final pronoun that, whose referent is the propositional content
of the last two clauses in the first sentence, a referent which is discourse-
active at the time the pronoun occurs. Nevertheless that is not a topic
expression because of its association with the "rhematizing" adverb
exactly and the ensuing (implicit) focal accent. Without this adverb, the
sentence could have been formulated as That was stated in the letter ... or
I stated that in the letter ... The intended topic in (4.58) must therefore be
the italicized complex subject noun phrase. This phrase is stylistically
peculiar in that it requires the pragmatic accommodation of at least four
presuppositions: (i) the presupposition evoked by the definite article, i.e.
that the reader knows of and can identify a certain letter written by the
author of the article (the letter was not mentioned earlier in the article);
(ii) the presupposition evoked by the proposition expressed in the
restrictive relative clause starting with / sent, i.e. that the writer protested
the draft by sending a certain letter to the Selective Service at a certain
time; (iii) the presupposition that the writer handed his registration card
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Topic and word order 201
(Mithun 1987) that in certain languages the very notion of "basic word
order" is not applicable. According to Mithun, in such languages no
known pragmatic principle governs the choice of the various alternative
word order possibilities offered by the syntax. If this claim is correct, the
topic-first principle does not apply to such languages.
The occurrence of focus-initial sentences such as the one mentioned
above leads us back to the discussion concerning the relationship between
syntactic structure and information structure (see Section 1.4.2). Given
that sentence-initial position is cognitively speaking an eminently salient
position, it would be a priori surprising if the prominence associated with
this position could only be exploited for a single function, such as the
marking of the topic relation. As I observed earlier, in English, German,
and French, and no doubt in many other languages, it is possible to use
the construction traditionally referred to as "topicalization" both for
"topicalizing" and for "focalizing" the fronted non-subject NP, the
difference being marked only via accent placement. It has also been
observed by Prague School scholars that even in Slavic languages non-
thematic constituents may occur sentence-initially for reasons having to
do with "emphasis" (see e.g. Firbas 1966a).
Without going into much detail here, I would like to point out that
some of the apparent differences among languages with respect to the
adherence to, or disregard for, the topic-first principle disappear if we
make the suggested categorial distinction between lexical and pronominal
topic expressions. From my characterization of the preferred topic
expression as an unaccented pronominal argument, whose function is to
express the grammatical and semantic role played by a pragmatically
ALREADY ESTABLISHED topic referent in a clause it follows that the position
of such a pronominal expression is functionally speaking IRRELEVANT.
Once a topic referent is pragmatically established, i.e. once the function
of the topic expression is no longer to ANNOUNCE the topic referent but to
mark its role as an argument in a proposition, there is no longer any
functional reason for the topic to appear at the beginning of the sentence.
For the preferred-topic expression it is functionally speaking more
important to be in close association with the predicate than to appear in
sentence-initial position, since it is the predicate that governs the semantic
and syntactic relations in the clause. Unaccented pronominal topics
therefore tend to occur in or near the position in which the verb itself
occurs, i.e. towards the beginning of the sentence in verb-initial or verb-
second languages and towards the end in verb-final languages.53 When
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204 Pragmatic relations: topic
(4.60) Wenn er/der isst, macht er/*der so komische Gerausche. "When he eats
he makes kind of funny noises."
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5 Pragmatic relations: focus
206
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Definition of focus 207
Within the framework developed here, the focus of a sentence, or, more
precisely, the focus of the proposition expressed by a sentence in a given
utterance context, is seen as the element of information whereby the
presupposition and the assertion DIFFER from each other. The focus is
that portion of a proposition which cannot be taken for granted at the
time of speech. It is the UNPREDICTABLE or pragmatically NON-RECOV-
ERABLE element in an utterance. The focus is what makes an utterance
into an assertion.
This notion of focus is implicit in much previous work on focus and
related phenomena. For example it is implied in Bolinger's early
definition of what he calls the "information point" of a sentence:
We can say that the prosodic stress ... marks the "point" of the
sentence, where there is the greatest concentration of information, that
which the hearer would be least likely to infer without being told.
(1954:152)
More explicitly the notion is expressed in Halliday's (1967) definition of
focus:
Information focus is one kind of emphasis, that whereby the speaker
marks out a part (which may be the whole) of a message block as that
which he wishes to be interpreted as informative. What is focal is "new"
information; not in the sense that it cannot have been previously
mentioned, although it is often the case that it has not been, but in the
sense that the speaker presents it as not being recoverable from the
preceding discourse ... The focus of the message, it is suggested, is that
which is represented by the speaker as being new, textually (and
situationally) non-derivable information. (Halliday 1967:2040
The concept of focus as the element of information in a sentence whereby
shared and not-yet-shared knowledge differ from each other is also
closely related to the one used by Jackendoff (1972). Jackendoff, whose
analysis builds on those of Halliday and Chomsky (1970), defines the
"presupposition of a sentence" as "the information in the sentence that is
assumed by the speaker to be shared by him and the hearer" and the
"focus of a sentence" as "the information in the sentence that is assumed
by the speaker not to be shared by him and the hearer" (1972:230). For
Jackendoff, the focus is thus the COMPLEMENT of the presupposition in a
sentence.
The concept of "focus" I will adopt is in many respects similar to
that used by my predecessors. But while Chomsky, Jackendoff, and
others have applied this focus notion mainly to so-called "focus-
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Definition offocus 209
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210 Pragmatic relations: focus
designatum, but its role as the second argument of the predicate "go-to"
in the pragmatically presupposed open proposition "speaker went to x."
Equally inaccurate would be the claim that the new information is
expressed in the prepositional phrase to the movies, since the directional
meaning of the preposition to is recoverable from the word where in the
question.
The information conveyed by the answer in (5.1) is neither "movies,"
nor "the movies," nor "to the movies" but the abstract proposition "The
place I went to last night was the movies." It is only as the predicate of
this abstract proposition that the expression the movies-ox rather its
denotatum-may be said to be the focus in (5.1). Thus when we say that
the phrase the movies is the focus of the answer in (5.1) what we mean is
that the denotatum of this phrase stands in a pragmatically construed
relation to the proposition such that its addition makes the utterance of
the sentence a piece of new information. This pragmatic relation between
a denotatum and a proposition will be called FOCUS RELATION. In the reply
in (5.1) it is the establishment of such a focus relation between the
denotatum the movies and the rest of the proposition that creates the new
state of information in the addressee's mind. The function of FOCUS
MARKING is then not to mark a constituent as new but to signal a focus
relation between an element of a proposition and the proposition as a
whole. In those cases where no such relation exists, i.e. where the focus
element coincides with the entire proposition, the function of focus
marking is to indicate the ABSENCE of a focus-presupposition contrast (see
Section 5.7.2).
The intuitive appeal and terminological convenience of the notions
"old information" and "new information" are such that these terms are
often misleadingly used even in carefully worked-out analyses. Consider
the question-answer pair used by Jackendoff (1972:229) to illustrate the
concepts of focus and presupposition:
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Definition of focus 211
(5.1') Q: Where did you go last night, to the movies or to the restaurant?
A: We went to the RESTAURANT.
In the answer in (5.1') the denotatum of the NP the restaurant can safely
be assumed to be discourse-active at the time of utterance since it was
mentioned in the immediately preceding question. It is "old," not "new,"
in the sense that it does not need to be activated in order to be efficiently
processed as an argument in the proposition. Nevertheless this
denotatum has a focus relation to the proposition, hence the constituent
coding it is a focus expression, hence it must be accented. What makes
this constituent focal is not the assumed cognitive state of the
representation of its referent in the addressee's mind, nor the nature of
the semantic relation between it and the predicate (the semantic role of
the focus argument in the reply, whether it is the movies or the restaurant,
can be expected to be directional), but rather the fact that it is this
denotatum, and not another possible one, that is chosen to supply the
missing argument in the open proposition "speaker went to x." It is in
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Definition of focus 213
what is novel is the fact that a particular denotatum is chosen as the agent
argument. This is what I referred to above as the FOCUS RELATION. This
focus relation is perhaps better characterized as pragmatic than as
semantic.
The second proviso concerns the fact that what Akmajian calls the
"focus component of the semantic reading" is closely related to what I
have called the "(pragmatic) assertion" in Chapter 2. Akmajian thus
conflates here two notions which I think ought to be distinguished:
"pragmatic assertion" and "focus." The expression "[x = Mitchell]"
indicates a relation between an element which is, and an element which is
not, part of the presupposition, given that the x stands for "the (set of)
individual(s) that urged Nixon to appoint Carswell," which is not a focus
denotatum. To capture the fact that the focus is the COMPLEMENT of the
presupposition it is necessary to separate the two terms of the relation.
I propose then the following modified analysis of Akmajian's example:
the expression *'[x urged Nixon to appoint Carswell]" in (5.3') is the
PRAGMATIC PRESUPPOSITION (the "old information"); the expression "[x =
Mitchell]" is the ASSERTION (the "new information"); and the right-hand
side of the equation which constitutes the assertion is the FOCUS. In this
analysis, the focus is indeed a term, but a term in a pragmatic relation.
The word "focus" is then to be understood as shorthand for "focus of the
assertion" or "focus of the new information."
My definition of "focus" is given in (5.4). The terms "(pragmatic)
presupposition" and "(pragmatic) assertion" in (5.4) are as defined in
example (2.12) of Chapter 2:
(5.4) FOCUS: The semantic component of a pragmatically structured
proposition whereby the assertion differs from the presupposition.
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Definition of focus 215
the noun phrases the movies and Mitchell} It follows from my definition
of "focus" that focus domains must be constituents whose denotata are
capable of producing assertions when added to presuppositions. As we
shall see, such denotata are either PREDICATES or ARGUMENTS (including
adjuncts), or else complete PROPOSITIONS. This entails that focus domains
must be PHRASAL categories (verb or adjective phrases, noun phrases,
prepositional phrases, adverbial phrases, and sentences). Focus domains
cannot be LEXICAL categories. This is so because information structure is
not concerned with words and their meanings, nor with the relations
between the meanings of words and those of phrases or sentences, but
with the pragmatic construal of the relations between entities and states
of affairs in given discourse situations. Entities and states of affairs are
syntactically expressed in phrasal categories, not in lexical items.
Let us look at an example. While a predicate phrase can express the
focus of a proposition, a predicator by itself cannot. Consider (5.5):
(5.5) And then, when we'd finished talking about pigs, we started talking TO
the pigs.
In the main clause, the preposition to alone is accented and we could say,
with Bolinger, that this preposition constitutes in some sense the
"information point" of the clause, since the remaining elements we,
talk, and the pigs, as well as their semantic relation to each other, are
pragmatically recoverable. Nevertheless the predicator to cannot by itself
be the focus constituent of that clause. Since its denotatum is purely
relational, it cannot supply an element of information whose addition to
a presupposition would result in an assertion. The string "we talked x the
pigs" is not a viable presupposition. Thus while the question-answer
pairs in (5.6)-though stilted-make sense
(5.6) a. What was the relation between you and the pigs? - A talking relation,
b. What did you do to the pigs? - Talk to them.
the exchanges in (5.6') do not:
(5.6') a. *What was the talking relation between you and the pigs? - A to-
relation.
b. *What did you talk the pigs? - To.
In (5.6), the NP a talking relation and the VP talk to them are capable of
supplying meaningful complements to the presuppositions created by the
questions, but the expressions involving the bare preposition to in (5.6')
are not. The focus domain in (5.5) is the prepositional phrase to the pigs
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216 Pragmatic relations: focus
(or the verb phrase started talking to the pigs, see Section 5.6.1), not the
preposition to.
The above remarks lead us to an important conclusion. Since, on the
one hand, the referent designated by the complement of the preposition
(the pigs) is not only discourse-active but also topical in the sentence-the
sentence is about the relation between the speakers and the pigs-but
since, on the other hand, this noun phrase is nevertheless part of the focus
domain, it follows that focus domains must be allowed to contain non-
focal elements. (As we shall see, the reverse is not true, i.e. focus elements
may not be part of topical domains.) I will return to this important
conclusion in Section 5.3.3.
Here is another example, involving a focus domain containing a
modifier:
(5.7) a. Which shirt did you buy? - I bought the GREEN one.
The GREEN one.
*GREEN.
The question in (5.7a) may be answered either with a full sentence or with
a full noun phrase, but not with the adjectival modifier alone, even
though the constituents which distinguish the second from the third
version, i.e. the and one, are fully predictable elements in the answer (the
definite article is the symbol of the identifiability of the referent, the
unaccented pronominal one is a topic expression with an active referent,
see Section 4.4.3). Thus the focus domain of the answer must be the NP
the green one (or the VP bought the green one), not the adjective green.
Indeed what the addressee is being informed of is not the color of a shirt
but the identity of a purchased item. The string "I bought the x shirt" is
not a viable presupposition. This is so because a modification relation
within a noun phrase is necessarily pragmatically presupposed, as an
application of the lie-test (Section 2.3) will reveal. Therefore an adjectival
modifier alone cannot constitute a focus domain. Notice, however, that
the ill-formedness of the third answer in (a) is not due to the fact that an
adjective cannot serve as a focus domain. As (5.7b) shows, the adjective
phrase green does constitute a well-formed focus domain if its
designatum is construed as the predicate of an asserted proposition. In
this sentence the addressee is indeed being informed of the color of a
shirt. The string "The shirt is x-color" forms a viable presupposition.
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Definition offocus 217
It is important to state from the outset that focus domains may contain
constituents denoting pragmatically presupposed propositions. We saw
that the proposition which is evoked by the modification construction the
GREEN one in (5.7a), i.e. "the shirt is green," is pragmatically presupposed.
Nevertheless, the NP which codes this proposition is in focus. Similarly,
in the following variant of example (5.3), in which the proper noun
Mitchell is replaced by an indefinite noun phrase:
(5.3") One of his close COLLABORATORS urged Nixon to appoint Carswell.
the referent of the subject one of his close collaborators is in focus, but the
proposition evoked within the focus NP, i.e. that Nixon has close
collaborators, is pragmatically presupposed. If someone were to
challenge the utterance in (5.3") by saying "That's not true," this
challenge would involve the identity of the agent who did the urging, not
the notion that Nixon has close collaborators. Notice also that the
possessive determiner his in (5.3"), referring to the individual "Nixon," is
a topic expression, whose pragmatic status is unambiguously expressed
by the fact that it is an unaccented referential pronominal (see Section
4.4.3). The status of this determiner is comparable to that of the NP the
pigs in (5.5) and the pronoun one in (5.7a), all of whom are topical
expressions within focus domains.
Focus domains may not only contain constituents coding pragmati-
cally presupposed propositions but they may be coextensive with such
constituents. A clear example is the adverbial clause When I was seventeen
in example (2.8), uttered in reply to the question When did you move to
Switzerland? Both the time relation expressed by when and the
proposition "I was seventeen" are "old" in the discourse. As I
emphasized before, what creates the assertion is not the focus denotatum
by itself but the establishment of a RELATION between the denotatum and
the proposition. In the reply in (2.8), the assertion is created by
establishing a time relation between two known situations. I will return to
the issue of presuppositions within focus domains in Section 5.4.3.
Let me summarize the analysis presented in this section. The focus of a
proposition is that element of a pragmatically structured proposition
which makes the utterance of the sentence expressing the proposition into
a piece of information. It is the balance remaining when one subtracts the
presupposed component from a given assertion. When a sentence evokes
no presupposition, focus and assertion coincide. Like the topic, the focus
is an element which stands in a pragmatically construed relation to a
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218 Pragmatic relations: focus
(4.2) d. (John was very busy that morning.) After the children went to
SCHOOL, he had to clean the HOUSE and go shopping for the PARTY.
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Focus structure and focus marking 223
What happened?
a. My CAR broke down.
b. Mi si e rotta (ROTTA) la MACCHINA.
c. J'ai ma VOITURE qui est en PANNE.
d. KURUMA ga KOSHOo-shi-ta.
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230 Pragmatic relations: focus
see note 6, p. 354). In French, and in one of the two Italian versions, a
cleft construction is used, i.e. the semantic content of the proposition is
syntactically represented by a sequence of two clauses. (The cleft
construction is obligatory in French but not in Italian, which also has
the-more natural - option of using a subject-verb inversion construc-
tion.) Notice that the first of the two clauses in the cleft construction (E la
mia UACCHINA, C'est ma VOITURE) has the syntactic and prosodic form of a
predicate-focus construction, while the second (relative) clause is entirely
unaccented, i.e. has no focus at all. In other words, the focus articulation
of the pragmatically structured proposition, in which the focus
corresponds to an argument in semantic structure, is grammatically
expressed by means of a sequence of two clauses neither of which is
formally marked as having argument-focus structure. The focus meaning
of these two-clause sequences is thus non-compositional, in the sense that
it is not the computable sum of the meaning of its parts. Rather it is a
property of the complex grammatical construction as a whole. While this
construction is clearly motivated pragmatically, neither its form nor its
interpretation are predictable on the basis of general syntactic and
semantic properties of the grammar.
The various focus-marking devices found in the constructions in (5.11)
have one formal feature in common: in all four languages, the NP
expressing the focus denotatum is the only accented constituent in the
sentence. Prosodically, i.e. in terms of accent placement, the argument-
focus structure can therefore be characterized as the REVERSAL of the
predicate-focus structure, in which only the predicate constituent
necessarily carries an accent. This prosodic difference between the
topic-comment type and the identificational type directly reflects the
difference in communicative function. In (5.10) it is pragmatically
predicated of the speaker's car that it broke down; in (5.11) it is
pragmatically predicated of a broken-down thing that it is the speaker's
car. (This formulation is somewhat misleading and will be revised below;
see also the remarks in Section 4.1.1 about the non-topic status of
presupposed open propositions.) In the former sentence, the semantic-
syntactic subject is in the presupposition and the semantic-syntactic
predicate is in focus; in the latter sentence, the semantic-syntactic subject
is in focus and the semantic-syntactic "predicate" is in the presupposition.
The scare quotes around the word "predicate" in the preceding sentence
are the expression of a terminological and definitional dilemma:
"predicate" and "presupposition" seem to exclude each other. It is this
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Focus structure and focus marking 231
dilemma that Jespersen had in mind in the passage from his Philosphy of
Grammar quoted at the end of Section 2.2. Recall that according to
Jespersen (and other linguists of his time, see p. 355, note 9) the definition
of the predicate of a sentence as "the element which is added as something
new to the subject" does not apply to a sentence like Peter said that when
used in reply to the question "Who said that?", a sentence which we can
now categorize as having argument-focus structure. (The terminological
dilemma is less acute with the formulation "the subject is in focus" since
the term "subject," unlike "predicate," is commonly used to refer both to
a grammatical relation and to a syntactic sentence constituent.)
The terminological dilemma mentioned here is is an expression of a
deeper, conceptual, problem which deserves to be elucidated, as it is a
potential source of misunderstandings and confusion. In the present
analysis, the term "argument-focus structure" applies to a sentence
construction in which a designatum which functions as an argument on
the semantic level of the proposition serves as the focus portion on the
level of information structure. In (5.11), the semantic theme argument
required by the predicate break down, which syntactically appears as the
subject NP my car, is the focus element of the pragmatically structured
proposition "the thing that broke down is the speaker's car." (An
impoverished version of this proposition is represented in the Assertion
line in (5.11') "X = car.") Now notice that in this pragmatically
structured proposition the focus is in fact construed as a PREDICATE,
namely the predicate "(is) the speaker's car." This means that in an
argument-focus sentence like (5.11) the designatum of a subject NP (here
my car) is construed simultaneously as an argument on the level of
semantics and as a predicate on the level of information structure.
To capture terminologically the conceptual distinctions I am drawing
here it may be helpful to use alternative labels for "focus" and
"presupposition" which prevent the identification of predicate with
focus and of subject with presupposition while at the same time capturing
the perceived parallel. For lack of a better alternative, I suggest the
expressions PRAGMATIC PREDICATE and PRAGMATIC SUBJECT, which contrast
with SEMANTIC PREDICATE and SEMANTIC SUBJECT. Thus in (5.11) we can say
that the syntactic predicate phrase (or verb phrase) broke down codes both
the semantic predicate "broke down" and the pragmatic subject "the x
that broke down," while the syntactic subject phrase my car codes both
the semantic subject "speaker's car" and the pragmatic predicate "(is) the
speaker's car." Notice that the terms "pragmatic predicate" and
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Focus structure and focus marking 235
5.2.5 Summary
The pragmatic articulations of the three focus-structure categories are
summarized in Table 2. Notice that the words "argument" and "predicate"
in the top line refer to the semantic argument and the semantic
predicate respectively.
The feature distribution in Table 2 reflects the above-mentioned fact
that the argument-focus type is the reversal of the predicate-focus type.
For the sentence-focus type, it reflects the non-binary semantic structure
which characterizes thetic propositions (see Section 4.2.2). The sentence-
focus structure exhibits neither the topic-comment articulation of the
predicate-focus structure nor the focus-presupposition articulation of the
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238 Pragmatic relations: focus
seems compatible with pragmatic readings which do not fit the given
situation.
In one reading of this sentence the fact that you and your interlocutor
will meet again is pragmatically presupposed and what is asserted is only
your hope that the next meeting will be longer than the first one; in this
case the temporal adjunct phrase will receive the focus accent (/ hope we
will meet again for more than five MINUTES). In another reading of the
sentence what is asserted is that you hope for a future meeting, resulting
in the undesirable presupposition that your present meeting was in fact
longer than five minutes; in this case the accent will fall on again (I hope
we will meet AGAIN for more than five minutes). In either case, your
utterance conveys the wrong message. Let us then try to avoid the two
misleading readings by accenting both relevant portions of the sentence: /
hope we will meet AGAIN for more than five MINUTES. Although this
utterance is less misleading than the previous ones, it seems nevertheless
odd. We have the desire to pause after the first accent, suggesting that the
prepositional phrase which follows is not part of the same clause but
belongs to an incomplete separate clause expressing a separate assertion.
The intended piece of information would be more clearly (though less
concisely) expressed in a bi-clausal sequence like / hope we will meet AGAIN
and I hope it'll be for more than five MINUTES.14
Facts such as these suggest that there are constraints on the amount of
asserted information compatible with given clausal structures. I must
leave this interesting topic for future research. The issue brought up here
is related to the remarks at the end of Section 4.4.2 concerning the
number of unidentifiable referents that can be introduced in a single
clause. It is also related to the Principle of the Separation of Reference
and Role (see Section 4.5.1). Stimulating suggestions concerning the
existence of constraints on the amount of information that can be
packaged in a single clause are found in Givon 1975a, Chafe 1987, and
DuBois 1987.
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Prosodic accents: iconicity, rule, default 239
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Prosodic accents: iconicity, rule, default 243
The two sentences in (5.14) have the same meaning and can be used in the
same discourse context to convey the same piece of information. In both
languages, the accent which defines the focus domain falls within the
object noun phrase, which is the last phrase in the sentence, and within
this phrase, it falls on the last word. But while in English this last word is
the head of this phrase, in French it is the adjective modifying the head.
This difference is clearly not the result of a difference in communicative
intentions. It is not the case that in English the noun job is the point of the
information while in French more importance is attributed to the
modifier interessant. If we were to put the accent on interesting in English
the result would be a different focus reading. (In French, the two readings
are compatible with the same prosodic structure.) What remains constant
in the two languages is not the association of the accent with a narrow
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244 Pragmatic relations: focus
semantic denotatum but its final position within the focus domain (here
the verb phrase).
Further examples showing the need for grammatical rules of sentence-
accent placement are easy to adduce. Consider the English question in
(5.15a) and its spoken French equivalent in (5.15b):
The two sentences have the same meaning and can be used under the
same discourse circumstances (the speaker may e.g. ask this question
while pointing to the individual designated with the demonstrative
pronoun that). Nevertheless the sentence accent falls on a different word
in the two languages. If sentence prosody were entirely determined by
iconic considerations - the prosodic point of prominence coinciding with
the pragmatic information peak - we would expect the same word to be
prominent in English and in French. In fact, given the presuppositional
structure of WH-questions, in which the non-WH portion of the sentence
is normally pragmatically presupposed, we would expect the accent to fall
on the question word, as it does in French. However, here as before, the
accents are assigned on structural grounds, i.e. they fall on the last
accentable constituent of the sentence (the French pronoun fa is an
antitopic-i.e. post-clausal-constituent and as such not capable of
carrying a sentence accent, see Lambrecht 1981). I will return to the
specific issue of the accentuation of WH-questions in Section 5.4.4.
To explain the difference in accent placement in the two sentences in
(5.15) one might want to invoke some language-specific semantic
motivation. For example, since both who and that are (in a rather
vague sense) "new" to the discourse, one might argue that each language
simply picks one of the two new elements as the bearer of the accent.
Besides the fact that such an explanation would introduce unwelcome
randomness into the notion of iconic motivation, it could not account for
the existence of the alternative French version of (5.15b) in (5.15b'):
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Prosodic accents: iconicity, rule, default 245
One may argue that the accent on the predicate need in English is at least
indirectly motivated iconically: the pronoun one is unaccented because
the referent "brick" is active in the context; however no such argument
can be made for French. The presence of the accent on une runs counter
to any narrow iconic account. (Notice that the French sentence has no
"contrastive" connotation whatsoever: the point of (5.16b) is not to ask
for ONE rather than two or more bricks.) It is true that the pronominal en
"of it, of them" shows the lack of prominence expected from topical
anaphoric expressions; but the presence of the accent on une is not
similarly motivated.
The limitations of a narrow iconic view of accent placement can be
demonstrated also within the prosodic system of a single language. A
striking example, which I have referred to before, is the prosodic
expression of the thetic-categorical contrast in English, as illustrated e.g.
in the earlier-mentioned pair JOHNSON died vs. Truman DIED, or in the
contrast between (5.10a) My car broke DOWN and (5.12a) My CAR broke
down. This contrast is clearly not amenable to an iconic explanation (an
observation which should not obscure the fact that it also resists any
explanation in purely syntactic terms). To take another example, consider
the French sentences in (5.17), illustrating three syntactic allosentences
for the question "Where are you going?" Examples (a) and (b) represent
spoken French, while (c) represents the standard written form (notice
that (a) is NOT an echo question like the corresponding English sentence
You're going WHERE?):
While there may be a subtle pragmatic difference between (a) and (b), and
while there clearly is a register difference between (a)/(b) on the one hand
and (c) on the other, these differences are not differences in focus
structure. Nor are they differences in emphasis in any clear sense of this
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Prosodic accents: iconicity, rule, default 247
Finally, Ladd (1978:85), who, like Schmerling 1976 and Selkirk 1984,
rejects the very notion of "regular stress rules," proposes the following
version, which he calls the "Revised Focus Rule": "Accent goes on the
most accentable syllable of the focus constituent." Like Halliday's tonic
placement rule, Ladd's version of the phrasal accent rule - which I take to
hold, mutatis mutandis, for English, French, and many other languages -
captures an important generalization, provided, of course, that it is
complemented with a principled account (not provided by Ladd) of what
constitutes a "focus constituent" and what the "most accentable syllable"
within such a constituent is. One of the goals of the present analysis is to
provide such an account. The reader should keep in mind that in the
present framework any accent placement rule is seen as applying not only
to focus domains but to pragmatically construed semantic domains in
general (see the preliminary remarks to that effect in Section 5.1.2).
It is a generally acknowledged - though not uniformly interpreted - fact
that what Ladd calls the "most accentable syllable of the focus
constituent" strongly tends to be located at, or towards, the end of
that constituent, at least in languages like English and French. As a
general rule, we may say that a sentence accent serves to mark the right
boundary of a pragmatically construed semantic domain. This semantic
domain may extend leftward towards the beginning of the sentence, i.e.
its major portion may PRECEDE the accented word. It is a fundamental
principle of information structure, i.e. of grammar, that a sentence accent
marks the END of a semantic domain, whose BEGINNING is marked by non-
prosodic means, in particular by phrase structure. I will call this
fundamental principle the GENERAL PHRASAL ACCENT PRINCIPLE. This
principle can be stated as follows:
(5.18) GENERAL PHRASAL ACCENT PRINCIPLE: A phrasal accent marks the right
boundary of a syntactic domain expressing a pragmatically construed
portion of a proposition.
Notice that Ladd's simple term "focus constituent" has been replaced in
(5.18) by the cumbersome "syntactic domain expressing a pragmatically
construed portion of a proposition." This is necessary because the
domain in question may be either a focus domain or a topic domain.
Notice also that the "syntactic domain" mentioned in (5.18) is not
necessarily coterminous with "syntactic constituent." As we have seen,
and as I will show in more detail in the next section, the activated
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250 Pragmatic relations: focus
close COLLABORATORS, my CAR, and the green one (see also Section 4.2.2,
example (4.20) and discussion).
In English, unaccented topic constituents may also PRECEDE the
accented constituent in a focus domain, as in (5.20), which I borrow
again from Ladd (1978:84):
(5.20) I'm leaving for Crete TOMORROW. (= Ladd's (31))
It so happens that the accented final constituent following the topic Crete
is the deictic adverbial tomorrow, an expression type which normally does
not attract a focus accent (see Section 5.6.1 below). Since such adverbs
are usually unaccented, the accent on tomorrow in (5.20") tends to be
interpreted as "contrastive." In view of the analysis to be presented in
Section 5.6.1, it is important to realize that in (5.20), as in (5.19) and
(5.16), the shifted accent does NOT necessarily signal the contrastive
argument focus of an identificational sentence (as in I'm not leaving for
Crete TODAY, I'm going there TOMORROW). The sentence would be equally
appropriate in a context like "What do you MEAN I never go to Crete; I'm
going there TOMORROW," where the fact that the speaker is going to Crete
is not pragmatically presupposed but asserted. I take the prosodic status
of such topical constituents within focus domains to be a strong
confirmation of the reality of the category "topic" as a formal category in
the grammar of English.
Examples such as (5.16a), (5.19), and (5.20) confirm the observation,
first made in Section 5.1.1 (examples (5.5), (5.6) and discussion), that
topical non-subject constituents with active referents may occur within
focal verb phrases. This fact allows us to draw an important conclusion
concerning the relationship between prosodic focus marking and
syntactic structure, a conclusion which I have hinted at repeatedly in
the preceding sections: it is possible to match focus structure and phrase
structure only under the condition that syntactic focus domains be
allowed to contain non-focal elements.24 There can be no one-to-one
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252 Pragmatic relations: focus
(antitopic) position, rather than directly under S or VP. For example the
spoken French versions of (5.19) and (5.20) might be as in (5.21a) and
(5.22a), rather than as in the corresponding (b) sentences whose basic
structure is similar to English in the relevant respects:
(5.23) Jerry Brown also smoked pot twenty-five years ago. But he forgot to
Exhale.
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Prosodic accents: iconicity, rule, default 253
(5.24) a. I DiDn't.
b. I did NOT.
c. *I DID not.
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254 Pragmatic relations: focus
the focus accent in the reply falls on the semantically empty function
word to.26 In (5.25) the entire sentence except the preposition to is
unaccented. The function of the accent on to is to mark the proposition
"There's nothing to eat (in the kitchen)" as a correction of the erroneous
pragmatic presupposition "There is something to eat in the kitchen"
which was evoked in A's utterance. It is not to mark the word to as the
newest or most important element of the sentence. (This case is thus
different from that of the accented preposition to in (5.5) We started
talking TO the pigs, which in some pretheoretical sense could indeed be
said to be "the most important semantic element" in the sentence).
The prosody of (5.25) is clearly not amenable to any iconic account of
accent placement. Example (5.25) is of special theoretical interest as it
shows with great clarity that the interpretation of an accented constituent
as representing the "new information" or the "new element" in a
sentence is misleading. At the same time it shows with equal clarity that
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258 Pragmatic relations: focus
(3.27) I heard something TERRIBLE last night. Remember MARK, the guy we
went HIKING with, who's GAY? His LOVER just died of AIDS.
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260 Pragmatic relations: focus
In the (a) examples, the pronouns 10 and MOI are syntactically marked as
topic expressions. The accents on the pronouns cannot therefore be focus
accents. This is confirmed by the fact that the pronouns could be
deaccented without a concomitant change in focus structure (Io PAGO -
Moi je PAYE). In fact, these pronouns are semantically and syntactically
speaking omissible altogether, making focus status of their referents
logically impossible (see Section 5.2.1, example (5.10) and discussion). In
(3.31b), on the other hand, the pronouns are syntactically marked as
being in focus, by appearing in postverbal position. The accents on the
pronouns therefore are focus accents. These pronouns could not be
deaccented (let alone omitted) without causing the sentence to be
prosodically ill-formed. Since every sentence must have a focus to be
informative, every sentence must have at least one accent, and this accent
is necessarily a focus accent. (The last statement does not necessarily
apply to sentences with non-prosodic focus marking; see the discussion of
WH-questions below.)29
Let us now return to the focus-newness correlation view. It is clear that
any claim concerning a correlation between focus and the cognitive state
"inactive" can be made only for focus constituents to which the
activation parameter can be applied, i.e. to referential constituents in
the sense of Section 3.1. It is easy to demonstrate that even for such
constituents the strong version of the focus-newness correlation view
cannot be upheld. Referential constituents may carry a focus accent even
if their referents can in no way be said to be "new." Consider the
sentences in (5.28) (a variant of (4.3)):
The foci of the answers in (5.28) are argument foci, i.e. they provide the
referent inquired about with the word who in the preceding question.
(The answers would be well-formed if the subject and the verb were
deleted.) Notice that only in (d) is the referent of the focus phrase
necessarily new to the discourse: it is marked as unidentifiable, hence
necessarily inactive, via the indefinite article. In (a) and (b) the referent is
active, due either to its anaphoric status in the text-internal world
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264 Pragmatic relations: focus
structure. I will return to this issue in Section 5.7, where I will suggest an
interpretation of the two accent functions which is neutral with respect to
the focus-activation distinction.
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Focus and the mental representations of referents 265
In (5.30a) the second instance of the verb go receives the focus accent, due
to its final position in the focus VP forgot to go, even though it is
anaphorically related to the VP go shopping in the first part of the
sentence. As (5.30b) shows, it would be inappropriate to deaccent go and
to put the main accent on forgot, in spite of the fact that the latter verb
expresses the "newest" denotatum in the proposition. In (5.31a), on the
other hand, the noun stuff, which is anaphorically linked to the
antecedent food, is necessarily unaccented, even though it is not lexically
identical to its antecedent. If accented, as in (5.31b), its anaphoric status
would be canceled and stuff would refer to something other than the food
in question.
The same situation obtains in the following short dialogues:
(5.32) A: I know what INSTINCT means.
B: Oh yeah? What does {instinct/it} MEAN?
Oh yeah? #What does INSTINCT mean?
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272 Pragmatic relations: focus
relevant aspects of the information structure of (5.34) (b) and (c) are
represented in (5.34b') and (5.34c'):
(5.34) (b) and (c) are instances of the prosodic type discussed in Section
5.3.3, in which a predicate-focus domain includes a topical object
constituent, causing the focus accent to fall by default on the last
"accentable" syllable preceding the topical object.
Let us now take a closer look at example (5.34a), in which the
propositional content of the complement clause may or may not
represent mutually shared knowledge. Let us first take a situation in
which the knowledge of the proposition expressed in the complement
clause in (a) is not assumed to be shared between the speaker and the
addressee, i.e. in which the sentence is uttered with the intent to make the
addressee aware of the fact that the speaker knows that the addressee lied
to her. In this situation, the utterance of (5.34a) establishes a new shared
discourse referent, i.e. the referent of the proposition "You lied to me,"
which will then be added to the discourse register. After being
established, this discourse referent necessarily has the status "identifi-
able." In being established, the referent is necessarily also being activated
in the hearer's mind, hence the necessary presence of an accent in (5.34a).
Notice that this activation accent is at the same time the focus accent for
the entire sentence. It marks the higher VP didn't realize that you LIED to
me as the focus domain of a predicate-focus sentence. In contrast to (b)
and (c), the complement of realize in (a) has a FOCUS RELATION to the
matrix proposition.
Next let us assume a situation in which the content of the complement
clause in (5.34a) is already pragmatically presupposed, i.e. in which the
fact that the speaker was lied to by the addressee is shared knowledge
between the two. In this situation the accent on lied again has the
function of establishing a focus relation between the complement clause
and the rest of the proposition, marking the higher predicate as the focus
domain of the sentence and the complement as being in focus. At the
same time, the accent promotes the already identifiable referent of the
complement clause from inactive to active state in the mind of the
addressee. The complement clause is then an example of a focus
constituent with a pragmatically presupposed propositional denotatum.
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274 Pragmatic relations: focus
The relative clause in (5.36) carries an accent, even though it does not
express an assertion, i.e. even though the fact that someone moved in
downstairs from the speaker constitutes already shared knowledge. This
accent is required because the referent of the entire complex noun phrase,
which includes the modifying relative clause, has a focus relation to the
proposition. The larger sentence in (5.36) is a topic-comment sentence
with predicate-focus structure, therefore a focus accent is required
somewhere in the higher verb phrase met the woman who moved in
downstairs. The General Phrasal Accent Principle assigns this accent to
the final constituent of the focus domain, which is the final constituent of
the direct object NP, which happens to contain a clause coding a
pragmatically presupposed proposition. The accent is assigned to the
same position to which it would be assigned if the sentence were I finally
met my new downstairs NEIGHBOR, in which the object NP contains no
relative clause.
Now let us assume a discourse situation in which it is known that a
man and a woman have moved in downstairs from the speaker and in
which this fact has been recently mentioned in the discourse. In such a
situation, the speaker might say:
(5.36') I've only met the WOMAN who moved in downstairs.
In contrast to (5.36), the relative clause in (5.36') is unaccented. The
prosodic difference between the relative clause in (5.36) and that in (5.36')
results from the different pragmatic relation between the denotatum who
moved in downstairs and the rest of the proposition in the two situations.
While in (5.36) the presupposed relative clause proposition is part of the
focus denotatum, in (5.36') it is topical in the discourse. What the two
sentences have in common is that the referent of the entire complex noun
phrase the woman who moved in downstairs has a focus relation to the
proposition, hence that this noun phrase must receive an accent. They
also have in common that the proposition expressed in the relative clause
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278 Pragmatic relations: focus
In the (a) sentence in (5.40), the open proposition "x urged Nixon to
appoint Carswell" is both pragmatically presupposed and active in the
discourse. It would be odd to use this sentence in a situation in which
someone's having urged Nixon to appoint Carswell was not presently
under discussion in one way or another. (Of course, it would not be
impossible to use it in such a situation; this would simply show that the
speaker assumes that the addressee is able to accommodate the required
activeness presupposition.) In contrast, it seems difficult to interpret the
(b) sentence as evoking the same presupposed open proposition, but
where the denotatum of this proposition would be in an INACTIVE state. In
order to mark the predicate portion in (a) as both presupposed and less
than fully active it is necessary to evoke the presupposition morpho-
syntactically, in the form of a clause expressing a saturated proposition,
as e.g. in (c), where it appears as a nominalized topic argument to the left
of the matrix predicate, or in (d) where it appears as a relative clause to its
right (for a discussion of //-cleft sentences with accented relative clauses
see Prince 1978).
Notice that it would be inaccurate to say that in a sentence like (5.40a)
the discourse-active state of the predicate denotatum is marked via lack
of prominence on the verb. To say this would contradict the claim I made
in Section 5.4.2, according to which prosodic prominence is not
distinctive with predicates in the way it is with arguments. Only the
arguments contained WITHIN the predicate (i.e. Nixon and Carswell) are so
marked. To see that it is indeed not the prosodic status of the verb that
accounts for its pragmatic construal in presupposed open propositions let
us look at the following pair:
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(5.41) a. (ils TRAVAILLENT pour NOUS) mais c'est le GOUVERNEMENT qui PAYE
they work for us but it is the government which pays
b. (die ARBEITEN fur UNS) aber BEZAHLEN tut die REGIERUNG
they work for us but pay-INF does the government
c. (they WORK for us) but the GOVERNMENT PAYS
In the situation of utterance, the proposition "x pays for the work done
by the workers" is taken as presupposed but not necessarily activated and
the fact that x is the government is asserted. The pragmatic articulation of
the proposition is made formally explicit in French. The denotatum of
the predicate NP le gouvernement, which is the semantic subject of the
proposition, is unambiguously marked as focal (via syntax) and that of
the relative clause qui paye, which is the semantic predicate of the
proposition, is unambiguously marked as presupposed (via syntax) and
as inactive (via prosodic prominence). A similar unambiguous marking
effect is found in the German version in (b) with its topicalized (hence
presupposed) yet accented predicate bezahlen "to pay" and its inverted
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280 Pragmatic relations: focus
(hence focal) subject die Regierung "the government." As for the English
sentence in (c), it is syntactically and prosodically unmarked for its
pragmatic articulation. Since it can be used under the same discourse
circumstances as (a) and (b) the predicate phrase pays can be interpreted
as non-focal, the accent indicating the not-yet-active status of its
denotatum. But this pragmatic construal is merely compatible with the
given structure; it is not marked by it. The same structure can also receive
(and normally does receive) a predicate-focus interpretation.
The above observation concerning the marking of the activation states
of the denotata of presupposed open propositions is consistent with the
observations made in Sections 3.1 and 4.1 concerning the fact that
propositional referents are expressed in ARGUMENT categories (see
examples (3.1), (3.2), (4.2b) and discussion). Since open propositions of
the type in (5.40a) are semantically incomplete, their denotata do not
constitute referents which could be stored in the discourse register, i.e. in
the long-term memory of the speech participants. Only those activation
changes which involve the mental representations of discourse referents
are reflected in the formal contrasts discussed in Chapter 3, in particular
the morphological contrast between lexical and pronominal coding. Non-
argument categories, such as the tensed VP in (5.40a), are subject to
different cognitive manipulations, involving short-term memory pro-
cessing, such as those described by Hankamer & Sag in their above-
mentioned study.
What has been called the "presupposition" in the Chomsky-Jackendoff
tradition is then only one kind of presupposed proposition, i.e. an open
proposition with a recently activated denotatum. The word "presuppo-
sition" is used here in a rather special sense. Being incomplete, such
propositions by definition have no truth value, or-using the concepts of
the present framework - they are not represented as discourse referents in
the minds of the speech participants. Since they have no independent
referential existence outside the sentences in which they occur they cannot
be stored as identifiable entities in the discourse register. Their denotata
can therefore not be properly presupposed, i.e. they cannot be considered
part of the common ground between the speaker and the addressee.
The above analysis of the activation status of presupposed open
propositions raises an important question, which unfortunately I can
only touch upon briefly here: when is an open proposition accessible
enough in the discourse for the constituent expressing it to go
unaccented? Consider the short dialogues in (5.42):
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Focus and the mental representations of referents 281
Among the replies in (5.42), the one containing the unaccented noun
pocket in (d) is clearly the least acceptable. This reply can only occur in
the form of a predicate-accented sentence. The locative phrase in his
pocket provides the referent inquired about with the question word where,
hence it must appear in the focus domain in the reply. But how to
account for the contrast between (a) and (b) on the one hand, and (c) on
the other, none of which contain a lexical noun phrase? This contrast
indicates that the possibility of taking a predicate denotatum as active is
not only determined by the presence or absence of a referential expression
but also by the semantics of the predicator.
The question Where's my pencil? sets an expectation for a reply whose
focus will be the indication of the place of the pencil and whose topic will
be the pencil. In languages in which the relationship between grammatical
relations and sentence positions is less fixed than in English a reply to this
question will tend to have the form of a topic-comment sentence in which
the pencil is the initial topic NP and the locative expression the final focus
expression. For example the most natural German equivalent of (5.42a)
would be Den hat HANS, lit. "It has John," where the sentence-initial topic
is an accusative object and the final focus NP a nominative subject. In
English, an argument-focus sentence is used instead, in which the location
of the pencil is expressed by the initial subject John.26
The reply in (5.42b) is similar to that in (a) but it adds some semantic
content to the predicate. Rather than simply stating the place of the
pencil, (b) also indicates how the pencil got from its former to its present
location. This semantic change from be to take does not require a change
in focus structure, presumably because of the common-sense inference
that when certain kinds of objects are not at their usual place it is because
they have been taken away. The designatum "take" can therefore be
pragmatically accommodated as discourse-active, hence the verb took can
remain unaccented in the sentence. But consider now the reply in (c). This
reply is similar to (b) in that, in addition to indicating the new location of
the pencil, it also provides some explanation of why the pencil is not at its
normal place. However this time the indication of the transfer of the
object from its old to its new location entails a difference in focus
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Focus and the mental representations of referents 283
individual ate this cookie, i.e. I take the proposition "Someone ate the
cookie" to be uncontroversial (unless it is a rhetorical question suggesting
the answer Noone). The first presupposition is evoked by the NP
construction, the second by the sentence construction as a whole. The
assertion expressed by (5.43) is then the expression of my desire for my
addressee to tell me who that individual is. (Recall that in the present
framework assertions are not limited to declarative sentences; see Section
2.3.) In asking my question, I normally also assume that my addressee
knows the identity of the referent, i.e. that she can answer my question.
However that assumption is not a presupposition evoked by the
grammatical structure of information questions but merely a felicity
condition on the use of questions in general. One normally does not ask
questions without assuming that one can get an answer. I am not
concerned with the latter kind of assumption.38
To take another example, which I have used before, in asking the
question in (5.15a)
(5.15a) Who's THAT?
I normally presuppose not only the presence of a particular individual in
the universe of discourse (for example in the text-external world) who is
identifiable to my addressee but also-and in this case somewhat
trivially - that this individual has a certain identity. The question in
(5.15a) presupposes the open proposition "That identifiable individual
has x identity" and asserts the speaker's desire to find out what that
identity is. That (5.15a) indeed evokes these presuppositions is shown by
the bizarreness of WH-questions in which the identifiability of the
referent is not taken for granted, like Who's someone? or Who's a guy over
there?
Since it is the WH-expression that evokes the set of possible fillers of
the empty argument position in the presupposed open proposition, the
only constituent in (5.43) and (5.15a) which qualifies as the focus domain
is the question word who. WH-questions are thus a particular type of
argument-focus construction. We would therefore expect the main
sentence accent to fall on the WH-phrase. However, in our examples
the accent falls on the final constituents cookie and that. It is clear that
this sentence-final accent cannot be a focus accent but only an activation
accent. At the time the question is uttered, the referents of the NPs the
cookies and that, though identifiable to the addressee, have not yet been
activated in the addressee's mind, or, perhaps more accurately, have not
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Focus and the mental representations of referents 285
(5.43') Q: Qui (c'est qui) a mange le biscuit? "Who ate the cookie?"
A: C'est moi. "ME," "I did."
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286 Pragmatic relations: focus
possibility of making such shortcuts that accounts also for the occurrence,
in English, of questions like (5.48)
(5.48) Where's a piece of paper?
as uttered by someone who needs a piece of paper but who is not sure
that there is one available in the speech situation. What makes such
questions strange (and for the present author unacceptable) is the clash
between two mutually exclusive presuppositional structures: that of the
indefinite noun phrase and that of the WH-question construction. While
the latter indirectly evokes the existence of the referent in the universe of
discourse, the former indirectly questions it.
5.5 Contrastiveness
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Contrastiveness 287
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288 Pragmatic relations: focus
In the same vein, the marked structure in (3.21) above (TOM is the oldest)
seems to convey more strongly the notion "contrary to some stated
alternative" than the equally possible The oldest is TOM, where the focus
accent is in its unmarked final position and the rest of the proposition
may or may not be in focus. However, intuitions are not clear-cut with
respect to such sentence pairs and it seems impossible to determine which
structure is contrastive and which one is not. A similar situation obtains
in the two versions in (3.30) above. Here too, Halliday's characterization
of contrast does not necessarily apply. The assertion in these sentences
does not imply the existence of some previously entertained candidate to
which the referent of the focus NP is the correct alternative.
That contrastiveness in Halliday's sense cannot be the only factor
explaining the use of accented pronouns is shown also in the following
Spanish example (from a conversation reported in Silva-Corvalan
1982:107; prosodic marking added):
In (5.51) the assertion that the person who made the cake is the speaker is
not a contradiction of some other previously stated or imagined
alternative. It is a neutral reply whereby the speaker picks out one of
two candidates under consideration. In the inversion structure, with the
focal subject YO following the verb and the topical object lo preceding it,
both the topic and the focus argument appear in their respective
unmarked positions. By its information structure, (5.51) is not an
argument-focus sentence but a topic-comment sentence in which the
object is the topic and the subject in focus.
For a sentence to be perceived as contrastive the proposition need not
have argument-focus structure. This is shown in example (5.52):
In the second clause of this example, the focus domain is the VP met you,
rather than the NP you alone (unless it were known from the context that
the speaker had met various people before meeting the right one). The
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Contrastiveness 289
focus domain containing a "contrastive" focus argument may even be the
entire sentence, as in the thetic structure (2.5):
(2.5) Look, here's ME.
Halliday's notion of contrastiveness does obviously not apply to such
sentences with broad foci since the focus domain covers here not only a
referent (the "alternative candidate") but also a state of affairs. The verb
phrase met YOU and the sentence Here's ME do not express "predicted or
stated alternatives."
To account for those occurrences of accented pronouns or nouns with
active referents which are not captured by Halliday's definition of
contrast, Chafe (1976) develops a notion of contrastiveness that differs
from Halliday's (besides being more explicit) mostly in that it does not
take the notion "contrary to some predicted or stated alternative" to be a
defining criterion. For Chafe, contrastiveness involves three factors: (i) a
background knowledge of some sort, e.g. the awareness shared by the
speaker and the hearer that someone did something (a pragmatically
presupposed open proposition, in the present framework); (ii) a set of
possible candidates for the role played by the element which is being
contrasted; and (iii) the assertion of which of these candidates is the
correct one. Chafe interprets contrastiveness as an exceptional feature
which cancels what he considers to be the normally holding correlation
between the occurrence of anaphoric or deictic pronouns, activeness of a
referent, and low pitch (see Section 3.3). According to Chafe, discourse-
active items can receive an accent only when contrastive in this revised
sense.
The problem I see with Chafe's definition is that the cognitive category
it defines is not reflected in a corresponding grammatical category. The
crux is condition (ii), concerning the set of possible candidates for the
focus role. Chafe writes that "contrastive sentences typically appear on
the surface to be indistinguishable from answers to so-called WH
questions" (1976:36), the latter NOT being contrastive for him. He then
observes that his model of a contrastive sentence, RONALD made the
hamburgers, does in fact not need to be contrastive but can be used also
as an answer to the question Who made the HAMBURGERS?, in which no
limited set of candidates is implied. Chafe's criterion for distinguishing
the two cases is that in the contrastive reading "the speaker assumes that
a limited number of candidates are available in the addressee's mind"
(p. 34), while in the non-contrastive reading such an assumption is not
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Con trastiveness 291
(3.20b) I saw Mary and John yesterday, SHE says HELLO, but HE'S still
ANGRY at you.
In this sentence, the accented pronouns in the two clauses code two active
topic referents which are contrasted with one another. The function of
such contrastive topics is entirely different from that of contrastive foci,
even though some pretheoretical notion of contrastiveness may apply to
both. Indeed the notion of topic is incompatible with the idea of
correction or contradiction associated with contrastive foci. Contra-
dicting or correcting a statement entails NEGATING it or some part of it.
However, as we saw in Section 4.3, topics are outside the scope of
negation.43
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Contrastiveness 293
M: Non, c'est MOI qui fais la cuisine, TOI tu peux faire autre CHOSE.
no it is i who do the cooking YOU-TOP you-SUB can do other thing
The left-detached NP la cuisine expresses the topic and the clefted NP moi
the (argument) focus, corresponding to the ga-marked NP in Japanese.
Like Japanese, French distinguishes the two types of contrastive
expression morphosyntactically.
French also permits the alternative version in (5.54"):
(5.54") M: Non, c'est MOI qui fais la CUISINE.
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294 Pragmatic relations: focus
(5.55) Our French teacher, a crusty character named Bertram Bradstock, made
clear that SPEAKING French was an unnecessary LUXURY: foreigners were
expected to speak ENGLISH.
(In the original only the word speaking is highlighted.) In (5.55), the
complement clause speaking French was an unnecessary luxury has
predicate-focus articulation, the finite verb phrase expressing a comment
about the topic "speaking French." (The entire complement clause
functions as a focal argument within the larger VP made clear that
speaking French was an unnecessary luxury, which expresses a comment
about the French teacher; we can ignore that for the point at hand.)
Within the subject constituent speaking French, the denotatum "speak-
ing" is naturally interpreted in (5.55) as contrasting with another
denotatum, i.e. "writing" or "reading." However, as in the previously
discussed cases of contrastiveness, this interpretation is due to an
inference from the context, perhaps aided by the reader's own experience
of foreign-language learning; it is not directly determined by the prosodic
structure of the utterance. In the constituent speaking French the accent
falls on the participle by default, due to the fact that the referent
"French" expressed in the object NP is an already activated topic.
The topic-focus articulation of the sentence in (5.55) is made
syntactically explicit in the following (admittedly clumsy) paraphrase:
(5.55') (Our teacher made clear that)TOp[in studying FRENCH ] Tor[ SPEAKING it ]
Poc[ was an unnecessary LUXURY ].
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Contrastiveness 295
"the so-called topic is simply a focus of contrast that has for some reason
been placed in an unusual position at the beginning of the sentence."
While the noun phrase the play may be intuitively felt to be contrastive, it
cannot be contrastive in the sense intended by Chafe. Among his three
definitional criteria-a background knowledge (a pragmatically presup-
posed open proposition), a set of possible candidates, and the assertion of
which candidate is the correct one - only the second applies. (Recall that
this is precisely the criterion which makes his definition unoperational.)
In the topicalization construction illustrated in (5.56) no background
knowledge is taken for granted, i.e. the open proposition minus the
topicalized argument is not pragmatically presupposed. The focus
domain is the predicate phrase minus the topicalized constituent, the
latter being positionally marked as being outside the focus. The
topicalized NP can therefore not be said to provide a "correct
candidate," i.e. the missing argument in a presupposed open proposition.
Chafe's above-quoted characterization (with the proviso concerning
the second criterion) applies only to the syntactically similar but
prosodically different "focus-movement" construction (Prince 1981b),
illustrated in (5.57) (an attested utterance), in which the fronted
constituent indicates an argument-focus domain:
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Marked and unmarked focus structure 299
Both answers are compatible with the question, but they rely on
different pragmatic presuppositions. In (b) the presupposition created by
the question is taken to be "The SPE was reviewed by x"; in (c) it is taken
to be "Something was done with the SPE" or simply "The SPE is the
topic for a comment." The reply in (5.59b) is playful only because of its
semantic content, given what we know about the nature of the book in
question and the nature of the Reader's Digest. The answer in (5.59c) is
playful both because of its semantic content and because of the fact that
the pragmatic presupposition chosen for the answer clashes with the most
likely presupposition of the question, i.e. that the medium for
promulgation is publication in book form.
A playful exploitation of focus ambiguity is found also in the example
in (5.60), a first-grader joke told by my daughter. Notice that A's first
utterance is a WH-question, hence the proposition expressed in the
sentence minus the WH-element is taken to be shared knowledge at the
time the question is asked; the accentuation facts in this utterance are
thus a matter of reactivation or "second-instance focus" (see Sections
5.1.2 and 5.4.4):
(5.60) A: Dad, why do birds fly SOUTH?
B: I give up.
A: Because it's too far to WALK.
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300 Pragmatic relations: focus
The (mildly) funny effect of the answer to the question in (5.60) is due to
the fact that the information structure of the reply is not consistent with
that of the question. (The joke is thus built on uncooperative
conversational behavior.) By uttering her question, A activates in B's
mind the referent of the presupposed proposition "Birds fly south." Since
the predicate phrase is accented it allows for two readings: one "narrow,"
in which the matter of inquiry is the direction of the flight-south
contrasting e.g. with north-the other "broad," in which the matter of
inquiry is the behavior of birds in the fall-flying south contrasting e.g.
with staying home. In the narrow reading, the principle of accent
interpretation is iconic, the focus coinciding with the smallest accented
constituent. In the broad reading, the interpretation is based on the
General Phrasal Accent Principle.
In both readings, the denotatum of the directional argument south is
being activated in the question together with that of the verb. The force
of the joke is that the answer given by A requires a pragmatic situation in
which the direction of the birds' migration has in fact already been
activated and in which the matter of inquiry is instead the manner of
locomotion. The required presupposition would be properly evoked by
the alternative question in (5.60'):
(5.60') Why do birds FLY south?
Both in (5.60) and in (5.60') the question presupposes knowledge of the
entire proposition "Birds fly south." However in (5.60') it is not this
entire proposition that is being activated by the question but only part of
it. The sentence requires a discourse situation in which the directional
argument has been activated prior to the time the question is uttered.
Let us take a closer look at the interpretation of the two prosodic
patterns in the questions in (5.60) and (5.60'). To simplify matters, I will
use the declarative counterparts of the two sentences in (5.61):
(5.61) a. BirdsflySOUTH.
b. Birds FLY south.
As stated above, sentence (5.61a) has two readings. It could answer the
question "What do birds do?" or "Where do birds fly?" But what about
(5.61b)? According to the generalization mentioned above, we also expect
this sentence to have two interpretations since the accented verb phrase
indicates an unmarked focus domain. This expectation is indeed borne
out. The first reading, which comes to mind most readily, is the "narrow"
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302 Pragmatic relations: focus
While the interpretation of Ladd's example (9), in which the accent falls
on the subject, seems uncontroversial, his example (10) does not confirm
the "most important point" mentioned at the beginning of the quote. It is
true that (10) can have the indicated function, with the accented
constituent yesterday as an argument-focus domain. But (10) also has a
predicate-focus reading. For example (10) could be used in a reply to
someone complaining that John doesn't take good care of the shed in his
backyard: IVhat do you mean, John's not doing anything about the shed.
He just painted it YESTERDAY! (In this case, the verb painted may receive a
secondary accent, but this accent is non-distinctive.) On this reading,
sentence (10) is parallel to example (5.20) I'm going to Crete TOMORROW.
To take another example, upon seeing a a strange-looking person in the
street I can say / saw that guy YESTERDA Y, without necessarily contrasting
yesterday with today or some other day.
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304 Pragmatic relations: focus
painted the SHED yesterday is used to answer the question "What's new?"
its focus is "the whole sentence." The same belief is expressed in Comrie's
statement that sentence (5.58d) (Bill went straight home) has sentence
focus when used as a reply to the question "What happened?" However,
as I observed earlier, context questions do not require specific focus
structures for their replies; they merely suggest preferred readings. If the
subjects John and Bill in the two sentences above are unaccented, they
necessarily function as topics, even if these sentences are uttered in reply
to the question "What happened?" As a result, these sentences cannot
have sentence-focus structure, i.e. their subjects cannot be in focus. To
take another example, I can use the sentence I lost my WALLET either as a
reply to "How are you doing?" or to "What happened?" In both
situations, I am using a sentence with topic-comment articulation and
predicate-focus structure. The preferred "eventive" interpretation is
merely a function of the semantic content of the proposition; it is not
determined by the prosodic structure of the sentence. For a sentence to
qualify as having sentence focus its subject must be marked via prosodic
prominence. But subject accentuation is not a sufficient condition for
sentence-focus construal, as we have repeatedly seen before. In English,
only sentences which have both accented subjects and non-accented
predicates can, under certain semantic conditions, be said to belong to a
formal category "sentence-focus structure" (see Section 5.6.2 below).
On the basis of the above observations, I would like to propose the
following general principle of interpretation for VP-accented sentences:
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306 Pragmatic relations: focus
only (a) is needed. The interpretation represented in (b) "comes for free,"
given the general role of predicates in sentence prosody (Section 5.4.2).
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308 Pragmatic relations: focus
Bolinger notes that, given the minimal context created by the question,
"prosodic stress" in the answers will most likely fall on the subject noun
husband in (a), (c), (g), and (h), but on the sentence-final words (scene,
ladder, neck, accident, irresponsible and jail, respectively) in the six
remaining answers. The two patterns are contrasted in (5.66') and
(5.66"):
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Marked and unmarked focus structure 309
While both versions in (a) have predicate focus, the versions in (b) do not
both have sentence focus. This is so because in predicate-focus sentences
the category-defining feature is the accent on the predicate, leaving open
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312 Pragmatic relations: focus
noun has relative prosodic prominence in the former but not in the latter
sentences. Since the sentence-focus and the narrow-focus patterns are
formally identical, he concludes that they must be interpreted in the same
way. If they were not, i.e. if two identical prosodic patterns could have
two different meanings, the iconic principle of accent assignment would
be jeopardized. It is important to be aware of this view because it
reappears, under one form or another, in many of the subsequent
analyses, including more formally oriented ones.
The next analysis which deserves to be mentioned is the one by
Halliday (1967). Halliday does not discuss the sentence-focus pattern per
se, but it is clear that the rules he formulates cannot account for this
pattern. As indicated in the quote at the beginning of this chapter,
Halliday defines the "information focus" as "that whereby the speaker
marks out a part (which may be the whole) of a message block as that
which he wishes to be interpreted as informative." Halliday is careful to
observe that the focus may sometimes be "(the whole) of a message
block," i.e. he in principle allows for sentence focus. However, his accent
placement rule (quoted in Section 5.3.2), according to which "the tonic
falls ... on the last accented syllable of the item under focus," does not
allow for the sentence-focus pattern since it prevents the subject from
being accented if the predicate is also under focus.
The same problem mars Jackendoffs (1972) analysis, which is
influenced by Halliday's (see Section 5.1.1). Jackendoff attempts to
reconcile the Nuclear Stress Rule of Chomsky and Halle (1968) with the
insight that accent assignment correlates directly with the mental states of
speakers and hearers. His accent rule, which I quoted in Section 5.3.2, is
formally more explicit than Halliday's in that the "item under focus" of
Halliday's definition is now characterized in terms of phrase structure.
Like Halliday, Jackendoff does not deal with sentence-focus structures
per se. It is clear, however, that his stress-assignment rule fails to account
for the sentence-focus pattern, for the same reason as Halliday's tonic
placement rule fails to do so. The "regular stress rules" which Jackendoff
refers to would assign stress to the final syllable of the verb phrase, not to
the subject noun. This is so because these rules do not make the
distinction between verbs and nouns, or predicates and arguments, later
postulated by Schmerling and Selkirk (see Section 5.4.2).
Ladd's (1978) approach to accent placement avoids the pitfalls of the
nuclear-stress-based approach by postulating the theoretical construct of
the "default accent" (see Section 5.3.3). This construct allows Ladd to
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Marked and unmarked focus structure 313
preserve the basic insight of Halliday's approach while avoiding its flaws.
The default accent principle allows the "most accentable syllable" of the
focus constituent to be located further towards the beginning of the
constituent, if the syllable which would normally carry the accent is
"deaccented" for pragmatic reasons (see example (5.19) and discussion).
However, Ladd's approach does not account for the accent pattern in
sentence-focus sentences. Unlike the unaccented object nouns in topic-
comment sentences like John doesn't READ books, the unaccented
predicates in sentence-focus sentences are not "deaccented." Their
denotata are not discourse-active or otherwise recoverable from the
discourse.
The next analysis which I would like to mention is the one by Culicover
& Rochemont (1983). These authors follow the Chomsky-Halle tradition
in that they treat stress assignment as a purely formal matter. Focus stress
assignment takes place in the syntactic component of the grammar, by
means of a silent morpheme or placeholder which gets phonologically
realized at the level of surface structure (comparable to the silent
syntactic question morpheme of some early versions of transformational
generative grammar). The authors claim that "the identification of the
constituent in focus cannot be stated in terms of either the prosodic
pattern, or the contextual beliefs that are implicated in the interpretation
of focus; and the assignment of stress cannot be a function of the
contextual beliefs" (1983:123).
Culicover & Rochemont's argument-whose main goal is to defend a
hierarchical and "modular" approach to grammatical theory against the
evidence from focus prosody adduced by other linguists-is too complex
to be summarized here. For the purposes of the present discussion, it is
sufficient to quote the following observation which the authors make in a
footnote:
An unfortunate consequence of this characterization of generalized
presentational focus is that it allows (a), below, in contexts where the
sentence is used to initiate a discourse, but excludes cases like (b-c) in
similar contexts:
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314 Pragmatic relations: focus
The above footnote says essentially the same thing as Bolinger in the
earlier-quoted passage, except that this time Gricean principles of
interpretation are invoked. The lack of accent on the predicate in the
two sentences in question, which constitutes an exception to their rules, is
explained by Culicover & Rochemont by saying that the denotata of
these predicates are "context-construable," i.e. pragmatically recoverable
from the discourse context.
Besides the fact-established beyond doubt by Schmerling (1976),
Fuchs (1980), Faber (1987), and others-that the sentence-focus pattern
is by no means restricted to what Culicover & Rochemont (following
Gueron 1978) call "natural verbs of appearance," I do not see how
Grice's Cooperative Principle can be used to justify the claim that the
denotata of such verbs can be considered context-construable. The
weakness of the approach to sentence-focus construal in terms of Gricean
maxims is apparent also in Culicover & Rochemont's discussion of the
following example:
The authors claim that (5.71) is appropriate only in a context in which the
previous occurrence of a loud noise is "mutually believed" by the speaker
and the addressee. This is clearly false. The falseness of this claim
appears, for example, in the fact that, in the appropriate universe of
discourse, the corresponding NEGATED proposition can also have
sentence-focus construal:
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Marked and unmarked focus structure 315
The Phrasal Focus Rule, which has a recursive effect, allows the domain
of a focus accent to "spread" from smaller to larger constituents.
Condition (ii) of (5.72) is motivated by the need to account for the
asymmetry between arguments and predicates with respect to the
interpretation of prosodic prominence (see the quote from Selkirk in
Section 5.4.2 above). To take a simple example, the Phrasal Focus Rule
accounts for the fact that the sentence in (5.73) can have the two focus
interpretations in (a) and (b):
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316 Pragmatic relations: focus
(5.74) S
Det N,
Selkirk's rule predicts that in the sentence Her HUSBAND died only the
subject NP may be a focus, i.e. it allows only for argument focus and
excludes the sentence-focus interpretation. The focus of the subject NP
cannot spread to the verb since the accented subject is neither the head of
the VP nor contained within the VP as an argument of V. Noticing the
problem, Selkirk makes the following comment:
Selkirk's comment embodies the same claim as the one made in the quote
from Culicover & Rochemont above. By suggesting that it may be
"possible in a felicitous discourse to utter sentences out of the blue where
only the subject NP, and not the entire sentence, is being focused" Selkirk
claims in fact that a non-focused constituent can constitute "new
information" and "old information" at the same time, invalidating her
own focus definition.50
The last analysis which I would like to mention here is the one by
Gussenhoven (1983). Gussenhoven characterizes focus "as a binary
variable which obligatorily marks all or part of a sentence as
[ + focus] ... [ + focus] marks the speaker's declared contribution to
the conversation, while [-focus] constitutes his cognitive starting point"
(pp. 380, 383). Gussenhoven then formulates the "Sentence Accent
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Marked and unmarked focus structure 317
such sentences will have to contain two focus domains in order to receive
two accents.52 While this is formally easy to accomplish - the first focus
domain contains only an argument (using option Y in part (a) of (5.75)),
the second only a predicate-it begs the question of why the predicate
constitutes a separate focus domain in (5.77) but not in (5.76).
Gussenhoven's analysis, though formally correct, is notionally inad-
equate in that it leaves unexplained how a single argument constituent
can constitute a focus domain. Even though Gussenhoven does not
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318 Pragmatic relations: focus
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A unified functional account of sentence accentuation 325
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326 Pragmatic relations: focus
(5.82) That was a STUDENT of mine. Her HUSBAND had a HEART attack.
The purpose of the utterance in (5.82) was to explain why the speaker had
left a discussion among colleagues in order to talk to the student in
question. In the given situation, the proposition expressed in the second
sentence in (5.82) was not to be construed as conveying information
about the subject referent since this referent was not topical at the time of
utterance. What was topical was the student, expressed in the possessive
determiner her. But the same sentence, in a different utterance context,
could be used to convey information about the husband (What about her
family? - Her HUSBAND recently had a HEART attack but her KIDS are doing
FINE). In this case, the first of the two accents would be a topic accent,
serving to establish the referent as the topic with respect to which the
proposition is to be interpreted as relevant information. What both
readings have in common is that the accent on the subject indicates the
establishment of a pragmatic relation between the referent of the subject
constituent and the rest of the proposition. It is this relation that is
expressed by the accent, not the topic-focus distinction. The latter is left
underspecified by the structure of the sentence.57
The formulation of the appropriateness conditions for the use of
unaccented referential expressions in example (5.80) and the functional
distinction between topic accent and focus accent allow us also to
account in a straightforward fashion for a class of sentences which have
posed problems for previous analyses (see Ladd 1978:78ff). I have in
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A unified functional account of sentence accentuation 329
One possible argument in favor of the analysis in (5.85') is the fact that
the sentence in (5.85') could be conceived of as an answer to the multiple-
WH question Who treads on whose foot? Since a WH-word in a question
can be used to determine the (argument) focus portion of an answer
(Section 5.4.4), one could argue that those denotata in (5.85) which
correspond to the two WH-words in the question must be foci.
The main reason why the multiple-focus analysis is to be rejected is
that the Assertion line in (5.85') is ill-formed. A single proposition cannot
express two assertions, therefore it cannot have two foci (see the criticism
of Gussenhoven's sentence-focus analysis in Section 5.6.2.2 above). My
rejection of the analysis in (5.85') is supported by two grammatical
observations. The first is that a single sentence cannot be clefted twice.
For example, a structure like (5.87) is ill-formed:
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330 Pragmatic relations: focus
(5.88) a. C'est qui qui a mange le fromage? "Who ate the cheese?"
it is who who has eaten the cheese
b. Qui a mange quoi? "Who ate what?"
c. *C'est qui qui a mange quoi? "It is who who ate what?"
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332 Pragmatic relations: focus
"What did she do?" and not "Who did she send a book to?" The latter
question seems appropriate only in the context of (5.89b). In (5.89a), both
accented constituents are then in focus. Within the present framework,
these accents are predictable on the basis of the principle in (5.80), since
the referents of both constituents have a pragmatically non-recoverable
relation to the proposition.
But the pragmatic construal of (5.89a) in which both accented NPs are
in the focus domain is not the only possible construal of the sentence. The
reason this construal is strongly preferred is that the object NP is
indefinite and therefore most likely to be interpreted as having a "new"
(i.e. unidentifiable) referent. Since unidentifiable referents cannot serve as
topics, the accent on the NP cannot be a topic accent. But topic construal
of an accented object NP is not impossible. To see that the prosodic
structure of (5.89a) is in principle compatible with an interpretation in
which the direct object is in the presupposition let us compare (5.89) with
the exchange in (5.90):
(5.90) Q: What are you going to do with the DOG and the CAT while you're
away?
A: I'll leave the DOG with my PARENTS and the CAT can stay OUTSIDE.
In the reply in (5.90) both the dog and the cat are (contrastive) topic
expressions with active referents. The only difference is that the topic is a
direct object in one clause and a subject in the other. The first clause is
about the relation between the speaker and her dog; the second clause is
about the cat only. (In spontaneous speech, the first clause might be more
natural if the direct object were topicalized - The DOG I'll leave with my
PARENTS-but this is not an absolute requirement in English.)
In the reply in (5.90), both topic expressions must be accented, even
though their referents were mentioned in the preceding sentence: since
there are two referents competing for argument status in the proposition
the relation which the one chosen enters into with the proposition is non-
recoverable at the time the sentence is uttered. It is true that by the time
the referent "the dog" is mentioned in the first clause, the referent "the
cat" has in a sense become a predictable topic for the second clause.
However, it cannot be considered an established topic from the point of
view of information structure. This is shown by the following
observation. If the NP the cat in the second clause were replaced by
the anaphoric pronoun it, this pronoun would naturally be interpreted as
referring to the already established topic of the preceding clause, i.e. the
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A unified functional account of sentence accentuation 333
dog. For the purpose of the principle in (5.80), the relation of the referent
to the proposition does therefore not count as established at the time of
utterance. In the reading under consideration, the two nouns dog and cat
are not focus expressions but topic expressions. The focus accents in the
sentences are the final ones, i.e. those on parents and outside.
In the analysis I am proposing, Selkirk's recursive focus-embedding
rule quoted in (5.72) becomes unnecessary, even for the alternative
interpretation of (5.89a) in which both book and Mary are in focus. In the
latter case, even though book is in focus, the focus DOMAIN, which is the
predicate, is marked by the final accent on Mary alone. The accent on
book is required by virtue of (5.80), since this constituent does not express
an established topic with an active referent. In the analysis of focus
adopted here, a clause can have only one focus domain. It would be
redundant to mark this domain more than once.
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6 Summary and conclusion
334
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336 Summary and conclusion
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338 Summary and conclusion
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Summary and conclusion 339
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340 Summary and conclusion
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Notes
1 Introduction
1 A similar both very negative and very positive appraisal of the theoretical
importance of information structure research may be found in Morgan
(1982) and Morgan & Sellner (1980). For some promising attempts at
explaining the nature of movement rules in functional terms see e.g. Creider
(1979), Erteshik-Shir & Lappin (1979), and Van Valin (1986).
2 Unfortunately, though it makes good sense to speak of the "information
structure" of a sentence or utterance (parallel to "syntactic structure,"
"semantic structure," etc.), it is less natural to speak of "information
structure" as a component of grammar, parallel to "syntax," "semantics,"
etc. I will nevertheless adopt this usage, in order to avoid the proliferation of
terms.
3 For an illuminating discussion of the meanings of "pragmatics" and the
history of the term in linguistics and philosophy see Chapter 1 of Levinson
1983.
4 Here and elsewhere in this book I am using the terms "truth-conditional,"
"truth conditions," "truth" as convenient labels to refer to those aspects of
the meaning of sentences which in some (hopefully) intuitive sense do not
require pragmatic judgments. I am not convinced that it is always possible or
even useful to distinguish "semantic meaning" from "pragmatic meaning."
5 This is not to deny that conversational implicatures may themselves become
conventionalized and grammaticized, as research on conventional implica-
tures, beginning with Grice, has shown. See in particular Horn 1984.
6 Danes's "grammatical" level corresponds roughly to the level of the
morphosyntactic expression of grammatical relations in American linguis-
tics. This explains why, in the quote on p. 7, Danes refers to intonation,
word-order variation, etc. as "extra-grammaticai" means of linguistic
organization.
7 Among the linguists who have made explicit statements to this effect are T.
Givon and P. Hopper. For a recent critical appraisal of "extreme"
functionalist views see Comrie (1988).
8 An important discussion of the theoretical relevance of the notion of
"competing motivations" in grammar is presented in DuBois (1985).
Compare also Dressier (1980:110): "Die Sprache wird als ein Feld von
Konflikten universaler Tendenzen der Sprachkomponenten ... angesehen."
341
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342 Notes to pages 12-23
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Notes to pages 24-34 343
20 See e.g. Mathesius 1928, Thompson 1978, Comrie 1981:Section 3.5. For a
discussion of the semantic diversity of the English subject (compared to
subject in German) see Hawkins 1981.
21 Italian, like Spanish, German, and countless other languages, does permit
placement of an "argument" focus (see Section 5.2.3) in clause-initial
position. An utterance like La MACCHINA mi si e rotta would be appropriate in
a "contrastive" context, e.g. as an explicit contradiction of a previously made
statement that some other object, e.g. the speaker's bicycle, broke down. In
cases of metalinguistic correction of previous statements, non-phrase-final
accent is possible even in French.
22 Even though English permits such constructions as / had my car break down
on me which are formally and pragmatically related to the French avoir-
construction, the exact equivalent I have my car which broke down would not
be acceptable in the given discourse context. For discussion of the use of
English have in bi-clausal presentational constructions see Lambrecht 1988b.
For a detailed analysis of the syntax and semantics of English have see
Brugman 1988.
23 The characterization of topic-focus relations as "pragmatic" and of
anaphoric relations as "semantic" is in my opinion neither theoretically
nor empirically justified. The fact that the latter have been much more
investigated in generative linguistics than the former is due to methodological
bias, not to an inherent difference in kind.
24 For some stimulating suggestions concerning the ways grammatical patterns
may emerge through discourse see Hopper 1987. In Lambrecht 1986b
(Section 7.2.1.2) I suggest an explanation of the grammaticalization process
which led to the use of the French avoir-construction illustrated in example
(1.3).
25 For discussion of the concept of motivation within the theoretical framework
of Construction Grammar see Goldberg 1992.
26 My basic distinction between topical and focal fronted non-subject
constituents is rather crude. For more subtle distinctions see Ward 1988, in
particular his Chapter VII on "ironic preposing," involving fronted predicate
phrases.
27 A different view of the syntactic similarity of the two preposing constructions
is expressed by Ward (1988). Ward sees the similarity in syntactic structure as
being motivated by an overriding similarity in discourse function: the
sentence-initial coding of a "backward looking center."
28 This point is also made forcefully in Comrie 1988.
29 A detailed criticism of Akmajian's analysis of the Mad Magazine sentence
type is presented in Lambrecht 1990.
30 For general discussions of the notion "grammatical construction" and
statements about the framework of Construction Grammar see Fillmore
1988, 1991, Fillmore, Kay, & O'Connor 1988, and Goldberg 1994 (especially
Chapters 1 and 2). See also recent work by Zwicky (1987, 1989), Manaster
Ramer (forthcoming), and Zadrozny & Manaster Ramer (ms). For syntactic,
semantic, and pragmatic analyses of individual grammatical constructions or
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344 Notes to pages 34-49
2 Information
1 I am not claiming that the theory presented here is exhaustive. A more
complete treatment of information structure would have to include e.g. an
account of tense and aspect and the distinction between foregrounding and
backgrounding in narratives (see e.g. Hopper 1979 and many of the papers in
Hopper (ed.) 1982) or of the notion of "empathy" as discussed in much work
by Susumo Kuno, etc. I will unfortunately have little to say about these
notions in this study. Finally, nothing will be said about the abundantly
studied field of intonation, which I consider to be distinct from the study of
focus prosody (see Section 5.3.1).
2 The notion of a bipartition in the universe of discourse is found e.g. in
Fillmore's (1976) distinction (for written texts) between "external contextua-
lization" and "internal contextualization," in the distinction between
"enonciation" and "enonce" which is made in much work by Ducrot and
other French scholars, a n d - i n the case of narrative discourse-in the
traditional distinction made by German scholars between "Erzahlwelt"
("narration world") and "erzahlte Welt" ("narrated world").
3 This example was pointed out to me by Sue Schmerling.
4 See Brown & Levinson 1987 and references therein. For the role of deixis in
the expression of politeness, see also Koike 1989.
5 For a very detailed discussion of the deictic fAere-construction and of the
syntactic and pragmatic differences that separate it from the "existential"
f/iere-construction see Lakoff 1987.
6 I am grateful to Sue Schmerling for providing this example.
7 The sequences There's YOU and There's ME are also well-formed in the non-
deictic "listing" type of f/iere-construction, as when I ask you Who's going to
the party? and you answer Well, there's ME, there's YOU, there's JOHN, etc. (see
Rando and Napoli 1978).
8 The present discussion has greatly benefited from comments made by
Matthew Dryer on an earlier version.
9 Examples (2.9) and (2.10) may also be distinguished by their relative news
value or by the surprise effect which they are expected to create in a given
discourse. This news-value or surprise feature is independent of the categories
analyzed here. See the analysis of the French avo/V-cleft construction in
Lambrecht 1988a.
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Notes to pages 51-61 345
10 It is not strictly impossible for me to inform the hearer of the fact that
someone moved in downstairs by saying (2.11), but this would be a peculiar
and indirect way of conveying this message. See the discussion of "pragmatic
accommodation" in Section 2.4 below.
11 As pointed out to me by Paul Kay, there are some possible counterexamples
to the general claim concerning the presuppositional status of restrictive
relative clauses. For example, in the sentence The man who marries Lucy had
better be very rich and very understanding the relative clause modifying man
seems to imply that such a man may not exist and that Lucy may never find a
husband; it seems therefore that the proposition expressed by it cannot be
taken for granted in the ahove-described way. Nevertheless, application of
the lie-test to this sentence yields the correct result, i.e. the proposition in the
relative clause remains unchallenged. As I emphasized earlier, what is
(presupposed to be) "known" is not the truth of the proposition "a man
marries Lucy" but a mental representation of this proposition.
12 Notions similar or related to the notion of "pragmatic presupposition" as
defined here have been discussed by various authors under various labels:
"common background belief (Stalnaker 1974), "speaker presupposition"
(Kempson 1975, Stalnaker 1978), "common ground" (Stalnaker 1978),
"antecedent" (Clark and Haviland 1977:4), "presuppose" (Ducrot 1972), etc.
13 This consciousness presupposition is different from the presupposition
concerning a referent's sex, social status, etc. evoked by the CHOICE of a
pronoun (see e.g. Green 1989:83 and the example from Stalnaker in Section
2.4 below).
14 Presupposition (ii) is strictly speaking not evoked by the relative clause alone
but by the grammatical construction defined by the specific structural
combination of the relative clause with the matrix clause. In different
syntactic environments, relative clauses may express asserted propositions, as
e.g. in the French example (1.3).
15 See especially the quote from Prince 1981a. The point is also hinted at in
Fillmore 1985a, footnote 25.
16 In Section 5.6 I will argue that the sentence / went to the movies is unmarked
for the presuppositional status of the predicate, so that the presupposition
"the speaker went somewhere" is in fact not formally evoked by the answer
but merely compatible with it.
17 In the case of (2.10), the necessary background can be provided by
introducing this sentence with "I read the strangest thing in the paper
today" (Sue Schmerling, p.c), i.e. by embedding it in a text genre in which
presuppositionless sentences are conventionally tolerated.
18 Useful overviews of different approaches to presupposition are presented in
Kempson 1975 (Chapters 3 and 4) and Levinson 1983 (Chapter 4). A
summary of the linguistic phenomena which have been accounted for in
terms of presupposition (and arguments in favor of alternative pragmatic
accounts for some of these phenomena) is offered in Green 1989 (Section
4.2). A proposal for unifying pragmatic and semantic presupposition, based
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346 Notes to pages 64-72
on the theory of frame semantics, is made in Fillmore 1985a. See also Kay
1992, especially Section 1.1.
19 This point is already emphasized in Schmerling's (1976:76ff) discussion of the
relationship between stress assignment and presupposition. However,
Schmerling fails to observe the difference between (2.15a), where the
proposition is, or may be, pragmatically presupposed, and (2.15c), where it
is pragmatically presupposed AND previously mentioned in the discourse.
20 An explanation for this and similar facts of presupposition is provided by
Fillmore (1985a) in terms of semantic FRAMES. Fillmore observes e.g. that the
frame necessary to interpret a sentence like Her husband has no teeth is
provided by general human experience, while the frame necessary to interpret
the sentence Her husband has no walnut shells must be construed on the basis
of context.
21 The phenomenon referred to here as "accommodation" was also discussed by
Grice, under the label of "exploitation" (see Levinson 1983:26). It is also
hinted at in Ducrot 1966. The concept of pragmatic accommodation is put to
use e.g. in Kay's (1990) analysis of the word even. An interesting account of
the psychological effects of pragmatic accommodation in eyewitness
testimonies is given in Loftus & Zanni 1975. The term "accommodation"
(Latin accommodatio) was used, in a different yet related sense, by classical
rhetoricians (e.g. Cicero and Quintilian), to refer to the obligation of the
orator to accommodate his speech to the intended audience.
22 In this case, the question would be similar to a question like "When did
Hitler invade Poland?" asked by a history teacher to test a student's
knowledge.
23 One often-noticed exception is the cross-linguistically attested special
construction known to Latin grammarians as the cu/M-inversum construc-
tion. An English example would be He was just sitting down to eat when he
remembered that he had forgotten to wash his hands. In this sentence the
proposition "when he remembered P " is not presupposed but asserted.
24 In Chapter 5 it will become possible to define the feature in question more
concisely, in terms of the concept of focus: a j/nce-clause cannot express the
focus of a pragmatically structured proposition. For a presuppositional
analysis of the difference between French car "for, because" and puisque
"since" see Ducrot et al. 1980:47ff.
25 For the presuppositional structure of such verbs as "admit" see in particular
Fillmore 1971b and the reply in McCawley 1975.
26 The adverb really would itself be understood via conventionalized
accommodation in this context. One normally does not insist on something
being "real" unless the reality of the thing is challenged by someone. Another
case of conventionalized pragmatic accommodation which I recently became
aware of is the use of thank you on such signs as "Thank you for not
smoking." The fact that I personally tend to interpret such signs as insulting
while others find nothing wrong with them seems to indicate that here the
conventionalization is still an ongoing process for some speakers.
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Notes to pages 74-90 347
3 The mental representations of discourse referents
1 As in the previous chapter (cf. example (2.12) and discussion), I am using the
term "proposition" for convenience to designate the situations, states, or
events denoted by propositions.
2 I am leaving open here, somewhat arbitrarily, the issue of the anaphoric
function of tense morphemes (see Partee 1984). While I will subsume
temporal expressions like yesterday, in 1936, or before she went home under
the category "referential expression" (they can be anaphorically referred to
with then), I will have nothing to say here about bound morphemes like the
suffix -erf in she laughed, which may be said to anaphorically refer to the time
at which the laughter occurred, much in the way in which the pronoun she
anaphorically refers to its referent.
3 Extensive use of the file metaphor is made in Heim's (1982) theory of the
semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases.
4 See Bally 1965:287ff for an analysis of the function of the article in French.
Some of the idiosyncrasies of definiteness marking in German are discussed
in Lambrecht 1984b.
5 See Fauconnier 1985 for a discussion of the indicative/subjunctive contrast in
(3.5) in terms of mental spaces.
6 Cf. Lambrecht 1988b for further details about such relative clauses.
Concerning the use of verb-second syntax in spoken German relative
clauses cf. also Schuetze-Coburn 1984 and references therein.
7 See Lyons (1977:193ff) for further discussion of the difficult issue of generic
reference.
8 That the word un(e) in l'un(e) is the indefinite article rather than the
numeral one is indicated by the fact that in order to refer to two of the three
windows in question one could not say *les deux d'elles but only deux d'elles
or deux d'entre elks (Danielle Forget, p.c).
9 I am grateful to Karl Zimmer for making me aware of the Turkish facts.
10 The term "Brand-new" in the quote from Prince will be discussed in Section
3.4. Prince does not make use of the concept of identifiability but positions
anchored discourse entities on a continuum from "given" to "new."
11 The same unwarranted claim concerning a correlation between preverbal
definiteness marking and postverbal indefiniteness marking in locative
sentences such as (3.12) is made by Hetzron (1975:351) about Arabic,
Russian, Amharic, Turkish, Japanese, Finnish, and Hungarian. Considerable
confusion has arisen also in numerous discussions of the relationship between
definiteness and word order in Chinese (see the useful summary in LaPolla
1990:Ch. 3).
12 The notion of "frame" will be further discussed below. Notice the interesting
fact, observed across languages, that in / broke my leg the leg which is broken
is in fact not uniquely identified by the possessive my.
13 The idea of a discourse or text as a cognitive frame is developed in Lambrecht
1984b, where certain formal constraints on a class of nominal expressions
which are explainable in terms of narrow semantic frames are demonstrated
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348 Notes to pages 90-104
to apply also to contexts where the only common frame is the ongoing text in
which the expressions occur.
14 This example was provided to me by Charles Fillmore.
15 Sometimes a single lexical item is interpreted as being associated with
different semantic frames, depending on the article, as shown in the
difference between He is a father and He is the father (Charles Fillmore,
p.c). The former implies generic fatherhood ("the father of one or more
children"), the latter a paternal relation to a specific child ("the father of the
child").
16 A less contrived example illustrating the construction in (3.18d) is the
following, from a letter by Voltaire: II m'est tombe entre les mains I'annonce
imprimee d'un marchand "The printed advertisement of a merchant fell into
my hands" (lit. "There fell into my hands the printed advertisement of a
merchant").
17 Cf. the passage from Chafe 1976 quoted in Section 1.1.
18 What Chafe calls here "active" vs. "inactive" corresponds to what was called
"given" vs. "new" in Chafe 1976. Chafe's notion "accessible (semi-active),"
which does not figure in Chafe 1976, is closely related to what I called
"evoked" (following Prince 1979) in Lambrecht 1981 and "recoverable" in
Lambrecht 1987. To avoid misunderstandings, it should also be noted that
Chafe, like many other researchers, applies the term "information" to single
concepts as well as to propositional units.
19 It has been claimed (Dan Everett, talk given at UC Berkeley, March 1986),
that in the Amazonian language Piraha active referents are never
pronominalized across sentences, resulting in constant repetition of lexical
noun phrases.
20 A similar point is made in Erteshik-Shir & Lappin 1983.
21 With this generalization I depart from Chafe, according to whom any
difference in accentuation marks a difference in activation state.
22 In Prince's terminology, active and accessible referents are grouped together
under the label "evoked," inactive referents being labeled "new."
23 This example is due to Lenny Moss, who made me aware of the specific
correlation between shared background knowledge and the interpretation of
discourse-active pronouns illustrated with this example.
24 Randy LaPolla reminds me that the sentence in (3.23) evokes the stereotype
of the husband who comes home thinking his wife is cheating on him. The
husband's utterance is then a way of telling his wife that he knows.
25 A striking, attested, example of interpretation of an unaccented pronoun via
pragmatic accommodation was reported to me by Charles Fillmore. At the
end of a linguistics conference in London, a fellow linguist invited Fillmore to
join him in a fish restaurant which was famous for its plaice, but he had to
decline the invitation. Running into the same linguist at another conference
five years later he greeted him with the question: "How was it?" And the
answer was: "Excellent." This example is also a good illustration of the
earlier-mentioned fact that "context or scene is all-important" in making a
referent identifiable (Chafe 1976:40).
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Notes to pages 109-124 349
26 For a- more detailed text analysis illustrating similar categories see Prince
1981a.
27 I remember distinctly having to accommodate the presuppositional structure
of his lover when the sentence was uttered to me, i.e. I did not know of the
existence of such a person.
28 For an analysis of various syntactic processes of this sort see Hankamer &
Sag 1984. See also Section 5.4.2 below.
29 It is important to distinguish the prosody of His LOVER just died of AIDS in
(3.27), which has the focus accent on the final noun and a degree of intensity
on the noun lover, from that of His LOVER just died, in which the focus accent
falls on the subject noun, as in example (1.1) My CAR broke down (cf. Sections
4.2.2, 5.2.4, and 5.6.2 for further discussion of this sentence type).
30 For the use of such verbs as "remember" or "run into" as presentational
predicates see Ochs-Keenan & Schieffelin 1976a.
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350 Notes to pages 126-136
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Notes to pages 137-155 351
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352 Notes to pages 156-182
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Notes to pages 183-203 353
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354 Notes to pages 203-224
55 See Vennemann 1974, Hyman 1975, Givon 1976, Harris 1976, Bailard 1981.
All of these authors interpret the antitopic construction as an afterthought
phenomenon, whose overuse motivates the diachronic change of one basic
word-order type to another. For arguments against the afterthought
interpretation of antitopic constituents see Lambrecht 1981:75ff.
56 Recall that the topic RELATION proper is expressed with the pronoun, not the
detached NP; see the remarks to that effect in Section 4.5.1.
57 See the syntactic description of French antitopics in Lambrecht 1986b,
Section 6.1. The restriction on the position of antitopic NPs is covered by the
syntactic principle referred to by Ross (1967) as the "Right-roof constraint."
58 For some useful warnings concerning the label "VOS language" see DuBois
1985.
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Notes to pages 227-236 355
7 There is clear syntactic evidence, which I cannot present here, that the French
NP ma voiture and the Japanese NP kuruma wa are not arguments of the
verb, i.e. are not subjects (see Section 4.5.1). It remains to be seen whether the
same evidence can be made to bear on the Italian NP la mia macchina. If it
can, lexical topic NP and subject role would coincide only in English.
8 See Benes's (1968) distinction between "contextually independent," "semi-
dependent," and "dependent" sentences. According to Benes, answers to
questions are semi-dependent sentence types. Benes also distinguishes
between answers to questions and responses to situations: the former are
more likely to occur in the form of single constituents, such as NP, while the
latter tend to be more explicitly propositional, such as "(It was) NP (who)
VP." In Czech (Mirjam Fried, personal communication), the response to the
context question in (5.11) could be of the form "It was (my) car," or perhaps
"Broke down to me car," but not "Car," while the response to the question
"What broke down?" could be either of the form "Car" or "Broke down to
me car," but not "It was (my) car."
9 What I call the "pragmatic predicate" was referred to in an older tradition as
the "psychological predicate," see e.g. Paul 1909, Ch. 6. For readers
interested in the history of linguistics I would like to mention that the focus-
structure representation involving a variable, as used by Jackendoff,
Akmajian, myself, and others was already used by Karl Kraus in his classic
discussion of subject and predicate in German (Kraus 1932, reprinted in
Kraus 1956:289ff). For an interesting, if somewhat confusing, discussion of
the terminological and conceptual issues at hand see Danes 1966. A highly
instructive survey of the history of the terms "subject" and "predicate" is
presented in Sandmann 1954.
10 See the analyses of examples (1.1) through (1.3) in Chapter 1.
11 In Lambrecht (1987c) I suggest that the particle ga, instead of being a "case"
marker, as the grammatical tradition has it, might be better analyzed as a
focus marker, which is used anytime a subject is not a topic, i.e. anytime a
sentence does not have predicate-focus structure. This would account for the
use of ga in both (5.11) and (5.12).
12 An interesting example of a main clause expressing a presupposed
proposition is the following utterance (observed by Sue Schmerling, p.c),
which was made by someone who had just spent two hours in church:
(i) OH my knees are hurting.
In (i), the clause my knees are hurting, which is syntactically an independent
sentence, is marked as pragmatically presupposed via complete deaccentua-
tion. Even though (i) contains no overt marker of grammatical subordination
it is clear that the proposition "my knees are hurting" serves as a
presupposition for the complaint expressed in the word oh and that the
sentence is an assertion only because of this relation. Without the word oh,
the sentence would necessarily receive a focus accent on some other
constituent. Sentence (i) poses an interesting challenge to semantic and
syntactic theory.
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356 Notes to pages 237-246
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Notes to pages 249-276 357
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358 Notes to pages 277-290
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Notes to pages 291-316 359
As I argued for example (5.41c), the SVO structures in (i) have two possible
focus construals. The sentence can be construed either as parallel to H's
utterance in (5.53) and (5.53'), with the subjects as contrastive topics and the
objects as contrastive foci, or as parallel to the French (5.54"), with the
subjects as argument foci and the predicates as presupposed but inactive. The
latter construal may involve extra prominence on the subject pronouns and
perhaps a fall, as opposed to a rise, in pitch contour (see note 57 below). I will
return to the difficult issue of contrastive two-accent sentences in the next
section.
46 It is relevant to observe that the witty formulation in (5.55) is difficult to
replicate in French, for the reasons mentioned in the discussion of examples
(5.21) and (5.22). A sentence modeled after the English one, such as Notre
professeur de franpais ne laissait aucun doute que PARLER franpais etait un luxe
superflu, sounds unnatural. More natural would be a version whose syntax
would be similar to that of (5.55'), in which the topic status of franpais is
made syntactically explicit, such as: Notre professeur de franpais ne laissait
aucun doute que dans I'enseignement du franpais, parler la langue etait un luxe
superflu.
47 See the classic analysis of this phenomenon in Chomsky 1970. Notice that
there is one accent position that Chomsky does not take into account: that on
the subject.
48 To account for the difference between the broad and the narrow reading of
an unmarked focus structure, Van Valin (1993) proposes the concepts of
"potential focus domain" and "actual focus domain." In the case of
argument-focus construal of a predicate-focus sentence the focus argument
would then represent the "actual focus domain."
49 Notice that in my analysis, the difference between (a) and (b) in (5.73) need
not be accounted for by rule (see Section 5.6.1).
50 It deserves to be mentioned that Selkirk's Phrasal Focus Rule would make
the correct prediction for sentence-focus structures if one were to assume that
such sentences do not have a VP node. In this case the predicate died in (5.74)
could be in focus, given condition (ii) in (5.72), assuming that V would be the
head of S in such structures and that the subject NP would be an argument of
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360 Notes to pages 317-330
V. In Lambrecht 1987b, I suggest that this may in fact be the correct syntactic
analysis, but the empirical evidence I have been able to adduce for English
(based mostly on constraints on VP conjunction) is relatively weak.
51 Notice that Gussenhoven's definition of "focus domain" is not identical to
mine (see Section 5.1.1).
52 The proposition "Trespassers will be prosecuted" may be amenable to
sentence-focus construal if the generic reading is replaced by an eventive one:
TRESPASSERS will be prosecuted!
53 In terms of the taxonomy of markedness types in Lyons 1977 (Section 9.7),
the sentence-focus members of the pairs are semantically and distributionally,
but not formally, marked. The contrast does not appear in the presence vs.
absence of a formal feature, as e.g. in unhappy vs. happy, but in the sets of
contexts in which each member can be used.
54 The motivation for the grammatical form of sentence-focus constructions
across languages is generalized in Lambrecht 1987b in the form of the
following principle:
THE PRINCIPLE OF SUBJECT-OBJECT NEUTRALIZATION IN SENTENCE-FOCUS
CONSTRUCTIONS: A sentence-focus construction is cross-linguistically
characterized as a construction in which the lexical NP which
corresponds to the subject argument in the underlying proposition is
marked with some or all of the prosodic and/or morphosyntactic
features associated with the OBJECT NP in a predicate-focus construction.
In sentence-focus constructions, the subject is in some important sense
"absorbed into the predicate" (see Chafe 1974).
55 The analysis also accounts in a straigthforward way for the oddness of
example (3.23) {Where is he?) as used in the context described in Section
3.3.2.
56 The difference between established and not-yet-established topics with active
referents may be marked also by morphosyntactic means, as in the case of the
contrast between German er and der discussed in Section 4.6 (examples (4.60)
and (4.61)).
57 It is possible that the two pragmatic construals of (5.82) correlate with a
difference in intonation. In the topic-comment construal, the subject NP may
have what Jackendoff (1972:258), following Bolinger, calls a B-Accent,
involving a rise in pitch, while in the event-reporting construal the NP may
have an A-Accent, involving a fall in pitch (see also Gundel 1978). I am in no
position to determine whether this correlation is systematic.
58 Compare also example (4.48), where a detached lexical constituent with an
active referent indicated a shift from one propositional "topic of discourse"
(En? 1986) to another.
59 The unacceptability of (5.87) can no doubt also be explained on syntactic
grounds, e.g. by invoking the nature of the second that complementizer as a
barrier preventing an anaphoric relation between the null complement of the
preposition on and its null antecedent in the first complementizer position.
60 This observation is made by Hirschbiihler 1978, as reported in Erteshik-Shir
1986:141.
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Notes to page 338 361
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Wald, Benji. 1983. "Referents and topics within and across discourse units:
observations from current vernacular English." In F. Klein Andreu (ed.),
Discourse perspectives on syntax. New York: Academic Press.
Wandruszka, Ulrich. 1981. "Typen romanischer Subjektinversion." In Rohrer
(ed.). 369-380.
1982. Studien zur Italienischen Wortstellung. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Ward, Gregory L. 1988. The semantics and pragmatics of preposing. New York:
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Wartburg, Walther von. 1943 (1970). Einfiihrung in Problematik und Methodik der
Sprachwissenschaft. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Watters, John R. 1979. "Focus in Aghem: a study of its formal correlates and
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Waugh, Linda R. 1982. "Marked and unmarked: a choice between unequals in
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Woodbury, Anthony C. 1987. "Meaningful phonological processes: a considera-
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Index
a/>oi//-construction, 149, 151, 152 109; textual, 100, 109; types of,
aboutness, 118-19, 157; see also topic 99-100, 109, 186
accent, see sentence accent vs. pragmatic relation, 49, 76, 112-116,
accentable syllable, 247, 251 151, 257-258, 323
accented constituent, 214 of predicates, 264-269, 278, 280-281,
with active referent, 97, 286ff., 323-325 315
coding presupposed proposition, 61-62, prosodic marking, 95-99, 106-109; see
218-219, 269-280 also sentence accent
discourse condition on, 325 and word order, 101
unmarked for activation, 96, 97, 98, 106, and presupposition, 62, 229, 269-285
251, 263, 266-269 and topic, 160-168
see also sentence accent active referents, see activation state,
accessibility, see activation state, semi- activeness
activeness addition (Clark & Haviland), 197
accessible referents, see activation state adverb, see topic, scene-setting
accommodation of presuppositional adverbial clauses, see presuppositional
structure, 65-73, 103-104, 278 structure, background-establishing
conventionalized or grammaticalized, afterthought, 203, 254 n. 55
70-73, 285, 353 n. 33 agreement, 42, 205
rule of, 67 emergence, diachronic, 192
see also exploitation marker vs. pronominal argument,
activation, 6, 38, 54, 57, 93-105, 109, 177 175-176
accent vs. focus accent, 112-113, 218, 219, object agreement in French, 175
259, 283, 309 suspended, in thetic sentences, 352 n. 32
coactivation of types with tokens, 107, Akmajian, A., 9, 30, 32-33, 212
249 Allerton, D. J., 103
definition, 324 allosentence, 6, 9, 17, 35, 120, 145, 202, 223,
and focus, 269-286 235, 242
and identifiability, 105 prosodic, 242, 255, 256, 257, 310, 322
of presupposed propositions, 62, 269-285 ambiguity, see vagueness
state of referents/denotata, 93-101, 323 anaphora, deep (or model-interpretive), 269;
activeness, 41, 93-97, 204; see also surface, 269
arguments, 264-269; anaphoric expressions, 343 n. 23, 38, 187;
deictic adverbs, 110, 303; see also pronouns, pronominal
detached constituents, 186, 203ff. anchoring of referents, 85-86, 88, 92, 105,
inactiveness, 94-97, 166; correlation 167, 197
with object and focus, 114 Andrews, A., 350 n. 8
accessibility/semi-activeness, 88, 93-94, animacy hierarchy for topics, 168
99-100, 110, 160, 166, 183, 186, 193, antecedent (Clark and Haviland), 345 n. 12
203; correlation with subject and antitopic construction, 118, 123, 128, 175,
topic, 114; factors causing it, 100; 182, 202-205
inferential, 100, 109; as potential for activation state of antitopic referents,
activation, 104, 114; situational, 100, 203-204
376
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Index 111
case marking, 205 brand-new referents, 105, 109, 166, 178; see
non-contrastive nature, 183 also identifiability
in spoken French, 158, 244, 251-252, 284 anchored vs. unanchored, 105, 167, 197
in German, 192, 204 as subjects, 168-169, 178, 352 n. 33
in SOV languages, 182, 192, 202 Brentano, F., 139
processing implications, 203 Bresnan, J & S. Mchombo, 13, 175
prosody, 203 bridging (Clark & Haviland), 70
syntax, 205 Brown, P. and S. Levinson, 344 n. 4
see also right-detachment, right-
dislocation, A-TOP constituent canonical
Arabic, 138 ambiguity of term, 190
arbitrariness, see motivation sentence model, 189-191
argument, 75, 224, 342 n. 16; see also word order, 16, 311
activation state see also markedness
argument focus, see focus structure case hierarchy for topics (Givon), 168
Aristotelian view of judgement, 351 n. 18 case marking, 42, 187
<w/or-construction, 149, 151-152, 182 dual, 194
accessibility condition on referent, 152 in antitopic construction, 205
aspect, 344 n. I, 349 n.6 categorical judgment, 138-140
assertion, pragmatic, 6, 48, 54, 57, 283 c'esl-cMX, French, 115, 123, 135, 223, 233,
definition, 52 279, 293, 330
as relation between propositions, 57-58, Chafe, W., 2, 77, 93ff, 118, 138, 165, 238,
68, 226-228, 234 258, 263, 266, 287, 289, 295, 318, 360
without presupposition, 60 n. 54
and truth value, 63 Chinese, 83, 118, 138, 178, 180, 347 n. 11
associative relations (Saussure), xiii Chomsky, N., 8, 9, 118, 189, 207, 232, 240,
A-TOP constituents, 128, 188, 203, 284; see 270, 280, 338, 359 n. 47
also antitopic Chomsky N. & M. Halle, 267, 312
Auger, J., 353 n. 46 Clark, H., 99
Austin, J. L., 4 Clark, H. & S. Haviland, 70, 75, 102, 345
autonomy of syntax, 8, 9, 10, 11 n. 12,
avoir, French, as a presentational predicate, cleft constructions, 17, 22, 26, 123, 138, 230,
22, 25, 352 n. 37 233, 279, 330
avoir-cleft construction in spoken French, and pragmatic accommodation, 70-71
14, 22-23, 123, 145, 158, 169, 234 event-reporting, in spoken French, 14, 22,
23, 138, 158
see also c'esl-cletl, pseudocleft, relative
background-establishing clauses, 125-126 clauses, WH-cleft
backgrounding, 125, 344 n. 1, 350 n.7 comment, 121, 232; see also topic-comment
Bailard, J., 354 n. 55 common background belief (Stalnaker), 345
Bally, C , 12, 20, 351 n. 18, 352 n. 39 n. 12
Bantu languages, 138 common ground (Stalnaker), 59, 271, 345
Barnes, B., 353 n. 41 n. 12
Basic Focus Rule (Selkirk), 315, 321 between speaker and hearer, 71
basic-level vs. subordinate categories, 282 between speaker and third party, 71
because, presuppositional structure, 69, 346 competence, pragmatic vs. grammatical, 9
n. 24, competition in grammar, 9, 12, 25, 26, 341
BeneS, 355 n. 8 n.8
bi-clausal presuppositional construction, complete thought, 189
129, 180, 184 Comrie, B., 13, 163, 297, 341 n.7, 343 n.28
bir, Turkish, 83, 85 consciousness, 76
Bolinger, D., 97, 138, 207, 241, 242, 266, consciousness presupposition, see
290, 307, 311, 356 n. 18, 360 n.57 presupposition
Boni, Cushitic, 138 see also activation
bootstrapping, pragmatic, 92, 105 Construction Grammar, 13, 34, 343 n.30
Borkin, A., 70, 71, 358 n. 42 constructional focus marking, 224
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378 Index
context-construable (Culicover & detached constituent
Rochemeont), 314 accessible status of referent, 183, 186, 193,
contextual articulation, 153 203-205
contexually free vs. bound vs. neutral, 124, vs. adjunct, 194
126, 153, 355 n. 8 extra-clausal position, 192-194
contrast between allosentences as principle pronouns, 183
of interpretation, 120, 145, 255, 319, relation to clause, 193
339; see also allosentence detachment constructions, 181-184
contrastive basic discourse function, 183
accent, 245, 287 and case agreement, 205
within topic NP, 294 diachronic reanalysis, 192, 195, 354 n. 55
focus, 286-291 in spoken French, 126, 138, 158, 251-252,
in spoken French, 292-293 284
in Japanese, 292-293 in German, 192, 194, 204
topic, 124, 183, 291-295, 298 dual case marking, 194
in spoken French, 292-293 processing implications, 185ff.
in Japanese, 292-293 syntax, 192-195, 205
contrastiveness, 17, 212, 253, 286-295, 303 substandard/unplanned character across
and conversational implicature, 291, 303, languages, 182, 185
328 terminology, 352 n. 39
definitions, 287, 289 universality, 191
as a gradient notion, 290 and verb agreement, 192
and the two discourse words, 287 see also left/right-detachment, antitopic,
Contreras, H., 138, 169 A-TOP, topic, TOP
counterassertiveness/ determiner
counterpresuppositional, 236 accented, 35
Creider, C , 341 n. 1 definite, indefinite, 53, 78
Culicover, P. & M. Rochemont, 27, three-way distinction, 80
313-315, 356 n. 18, 358 n. 39, 358 demonstrative, 78, 172
n.42 possessive, 19, 78-79,91-92, 172,249, 251
omi-inversum construction, Latin, 346 n. 23 relation with subordinating and
Czech, 86, 145, 200, 355 n. 8 nominalizing morphemes, 78
as topic, 19
da, German, in presentational sentences, 179 devik ciimle, Turkish, 202
Dahl, O., 44, 45, 101, 139 Dik, S., 7, 10, 118, 193, 236
Danes, F., 6-7, 355 n. 9 Discourse Condition on Unaccented
das vs. dass, German, 78 Constituents, 324
deaccentuation (Ladd), 248-249, 255, 313, discourse referents, 74-77, 112, 155
342 n. 13 entities, 74
default accent, see sentence accent establishment in discourse, 42
definite and indefinite article, see determiner expressed in argument/adjunct categories,
definite descriptions, 78 75
definiteness, grammatical, 79-87, 268 introduction into discourse, 23, 39
non-universal character, 84-87, 92, pragmatic construal, 101-105, 267
107-109 processing in discourse, 267-268
see also identifiability propositional, 74, 270
de-focused NP, 303; see also antitopic expressed in argument categories, 75,
deictic adverbials, activation state of 280
referent, 110, 303 expressed anaphorically, 75-76
deixis, 4, 38, 110, 179, 187, 303 discourse register, 74, 280
and politeness, 38 dislocation, see detachment
denotatum, 37 distinguished argument, 350 n. 14
der, die, das vs. er, sie, es German, 204, 360 Dixon, R. M. W., 12
n.56 do-construction, emphatic, 71-72
der erne...der andere, German, 85 doch, German, 72
designaturh, see denotatum Dressier, W., 341 n.8
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Index 379
DuBois, J., 238, 341 n.8 Fillmore, C , 7, 11, 34,90, 344 n. 2, 345 n. 18,
Ducrot, O., 344 n. 2, 345 n. 12, 346 n. 21, 346 346 n. 20, 351 n.27
n.24 Fillmore, Kay, & O'Connor, 13, 33, 343
dummy subjects, see unaccented n.30
pronominal, il/es impersonal finite, non-finite, see tensed, non-tensed
Firbas, J., 7, 117, 199
focal, 214; see also in focus
ecology of grammar, 9, 175, 339 focus
economy of form in grammar, 31, 175 accent
ellipsis or surface anaphora, 112, 135-136, vs. activation accent, 208, 219, 259, 263,
268, 269; see also anaphora, deep or 269-285, 309
model-interpretive on atonic pronouns in French, 356 n. 20
emergence, verbs denoting, 351 n.21 in compounds, 240
empathy, 344 n. 1 on constituents with "non-new"
emphasis, 201, 239, 358 n.41
referents, 260 '
En?, M., 183, 184, 353 n.42
on constituents expressing presupposed
epexegesis, 202
equational relation vs. topic-comment propositions, 269-280
in derivational formations, 240
relation, 232 on predicates/verbs vs. arguments/
ergative languages, 350 n. 14 nouns, 264-269, 315
Erguvanli, E., 182, 203 position, 22, 265
Erteshik-Shir, N. & S. Lappin, 52, 59, 63, vs. topic accent, 275, 325
341 n.1 see also sentence accent
es impersonal, German, 170, 178, 352 n. 36 and activation states, 257-262, 269-286
event (term), 349 n. 6 and anaphora, 136
event-reporting sentence, 14, 124, 126, 133, and assertion, 213
137-146, 169, 222 broad interpretation of unmarked focus,
in German, 255-256
17, 296, 300
and presentational sentence, 143-144
contrast within words, 240, 252, 356 n. 16,
eventive construal of propositions, 304, 310;
356 n. 17
see also event-reporting sentence
constituent
evidential particles, 240
with active referent, 257ff.
evoked referents, 348 n. 18
denoting presupposed proposition, 217,
exad, Hebrew, 84
219, 269ff.
exhaustive interpretation of identification
sentence-initial, 31, 200, 201, 343 n.21,
sentences, 123
353 n. 52; see also focus movement
exhaustive listing (Kuno), 292
definition, 213
exhaustiveness condition, 291
domain, syntactic, 214-217, 221, 243
existence vs. location, 179, 352 n. 35
containing non-focal elements, 216,
existential sentences, 30, 39, 140, 179, 180
vs. locative sentences, 179, 352 n. 35 217, 218, 228, 250, 253, 275, 357 n. 24
see also thetic sentences, presentational potential vs. actual (Van Valin), 359
n.48
sentences
and ellipsis, 136
explanation in linguistics, 11-12, 26
marking, 14, 58, 214, 218, 221-225, 226,
exploitation of presuppositional structure,
229-230, 234
70, 346 n. 21; see also
vs. activation marking; see focus accent,
accommodation
expressive use of intonation, 239 activation accent
extraposition, 203, 275-276 constructional, 223-225
morphosyntactic, 223-225, 292
prosodic, 223-225; see also focus accent
Faber, D., 138, 310, 317 multiple-focus analysis, 329
factive verbs, 61 narrow construal of unmarked focus, 17,
fairy-tale openings, syntax, 177-178, 180, 64, 296, 300, 303, 354 n. 5; see also
352 n. 33 argument focus
familiarity, see identifiability and "new information", 257-263
Fauconnier, G., 347 n. 5 and predicate, 213
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380 Index
focus (continued) Fuchs, A., 138,351 n.20
projection, 214, 243, 296-322 function and form in language, 28-29, 31, 32
and questions, see WH-questions functional
relation, 210, 213, 261, 275 linguistics, 9, 10
vs. activation state, 257-263, 269ff. vs. formal approaches to grammar, 9-11
unpredictable/non-recoverable nature, underspecification of prosodic structure,
6,98, 151, 162,207,211,218,273 306, 326
relational nature, 39, 115, 209, 212, 217, underspecification of syntactic structures,
240 29-32
second-instance focus, 220, 299, 354 n.4 Functional Grammar, 7, 10, 13
structure, 221-238 Functional Language Perspective, 2
argument-focus structure, 222, Functional Principle (Keenan), 156-157
228-233; marked nature, 296ff.; functionalist views of syntax, extreme, 10,
prosodic marking, 296-304; as 26, 341 n. 7
reversal of predicate-focus structure,
230 ga, Japanese, 137-138, 140, 229, 234,
combinations, 40, 186, 236-237, 293 292-293, 319, 355 n. 11
and types of communicative function, Gabelentz, G., 349 n. 5
222 gapping, 111, 268
vs. constituent structure, 251 General Phrasal Accent Principle, 247, 273,
homophony, 225, 321, 235 274, 276, 295, 300
marked vs. unmarked, 296-322 generative, xiii, 257, 339
predicate-focus structure, 20, 222, generic referents, 82-83, 167
226-228, 259; prosodic marking, German, 72, 76, 78, 80, 82, 85, 95, 133, 138,
296-304; unmarked nature, 228, 154, 170, 173, 179, 182, 192, 194, 204,
279-280, 296ff.; see also Principle of 255-256, 264, 279, 342 n. 17, 343
Predicate-Focus Interpretation n. 20, 343 n. 21, 347 n. 4, 347 n. 6, 352
sentence-focus structure, 14, 222, n. 36, 356 n. 14, 360 n. 56
223-235; absence of presupposition, Gilligan, G., 191
233; absence of topic-comment given referents, 109, 348 n. 18; see also
relation, 234; marked nature, 296ff.; activeness
prosodic marking, 245, 307-322; given-new contract (Clark & Haviland), 102
formal similarity with argument- Givon, T., 13, 117, 177, 225, 238, 354 n.5
focus structure, 321 Goldberg, A., 343 n.25, 343 n.30, 346 n. 13
of WH-questions, 283 Gould, S. J., 9
vagueness, 305-306 Government and Binding theory, 190
and word order, 31, 200 grammar, organization, 6, 7, 11, 12, 31
Focus Interpretation Principle (Selkirk), 267 grammatical constructions, 34, 227, 318, 343
focus-movement construction, 31, 201, 225, n.30
295; see also topicalization definition (Fillmore), 34
focus-newness correlation, 258ff. expressing information-structure
focus-presupposition articulation, 350 n. 8 distinctions, 35, 227; see also
focus-presupposition sentences, 207-208 antitopic, cleft, cuw-inversum, do-
frames, semantic, 345 n. 18, 346 n. 20 construction, left-detachment,
definition (Fillmore), 90 subject-predicate, presentational,
and presupposition, 346 n. 20, 345 n. 18 topic, thetic, etc.
and referent activation, 99-100, 104, 160 expressing speakers' attitudes, 35, 239
and referent identification, 88, 90-92 expressing speech-act varieties, 35
French, 14, 22-23, 25, 30, 72, 76, 80, 82, pragmatically marked/unmarked, 29, 35
84-85, 92, 115-116, 124, 126, 135, prosodic, 318
137, 138, 143, 149, 156, 158, 170, 178, types, 34-35
182,186, 200,223, 225, 234,243, 244, grammatic(al)ization, 10, 29, 343 n. 24
245, 251-252, 277, 284-286, 292-293, Green, G., 345 n. 18
342 n. 19, 352 n. 36, 352 n. 37, 356 Grice, H. P., 4, 5, 314, 346 n.21
n.20, 359 n. 46 Gundel, J., 118, 151, 193
Fried, M., 341 n. 9, 349 n. 3 Gussenhoven, C , 316-318, 329, 357 n.26
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Index 381
Halliday, 2, 7, 12, 117, 207, 246, 287, 303, inactive referents, see activation states,
312 unused referents
Hankamer, J. & I. Sag, 269, 280 inferentially accessible referents, 100, 109
Harris, M., 354 n. 55 inflectional morphemes, see unaccented
Hatcher, E., 169 pronominals
have, presentational, 343 n. 22, 352 n. 37 informatics (Vallduvi), 2
Hebrew, 84 information, 43-50
^reconstruction, 39-43, 169-170, 179 lexical or referential, 47
Hetzron, R., 177 vs. meaning, 43, 46, 61
himself, presuppositional structure, 350 n. 9, non-segmentable nature, 47-49, 58, 208,
375 n. 30 209, 221, 251
Hohle, T., 214 propositional, 44-50, 224
Hopper, P., 343 n. 24, 344 n. 1 constraint on amount of, per clause,
Horn, L., 123, 291, 329, 351 n. 19, 351 n.26, 237
351 n.27 relational nature, 46, 48-49, 209, 212
Horvath, J., 27 information packaging, 2
Hyman, L , 354 n. 55 information questions, see WH-questions
information structure
iconicity of pitch prominence, 96-97, 225, definition, 5
241-245, 254, 266, 312; see also and diachronic linguistics, 28, 29
onomatopeia examples of formal manifestation, 13-25
identifiable referents, see identifiability in English, 19-20, 24
identifiability, 6, 57, 77-92, 109 in spoken French, 22-23
number of unidentifiable referents per in Italian, 20-22, 24
clause, 170 general characterization, 1-6
degrees, 84-85 interpretive views, 27-28
and (in)definiteness, 79-87, 105 negative views, 1, 341 n. 1
vs. familiarity, 77, 89 place in grammatical system, 3, 6-13
grammatical marking, 78-87, 105, vs. pragmatics, 4-5
107-109, 277 prosodic coding, see sentence accent,
via case marking, 79 activation, focus
via determiner, 79 and syntax, 25-31
via numerals, 79, 83-85 term, 2, 341 n. 2
via word order, 79, 86, 347 n. 11 violation of, conventional, 135
in Turkish, 85 inheritance relations
and presupposition, 77-79 between focus-structure types, 236-237
of referents in discourse, 87-92 between grammatical constructions, 40,
and topic, 165ff. 356 n. 13
as a universal cognitive category, 87 interaction among grammatical
identification relation, 232 components, 12, 24, 25, 27, 338; see
identificational sentences, 122,126,142,222, also modularity
261, 349 n. 4; see also argument focus intonation, 344 n. 1, 109-111, 239
vs. copular topic-comment sentences, 123 inversion
and uniqueness/exhaustiveness, 122-123 locative, 170
idiomaticity vs. regularity in grammar, perceptual nature, 320
33-34 prosodic, 18, 234, 320-322
//-construction, impersonal, in French, 30, subject-auxiliary, 30, 305
92, 170, 171, 178 subject-verb, 18, 22, 40, 143, 169, 170,
(il) y a-construction in French, 123, 158, 225, 230, 233, 288, 301, 319, 338, 342
352 n. 36 n. 14
implicature constraint on cooccurring object, 170
conventional, 341 n. 5 of topical subjects in Romance and
conversational, 4, 160, 257, 291, 296, 328, German, 342 n. 17
329, 341 n. 5 inverted word order
generalized, 291, 303 in Chinese, 178
in focus (term), 214 in Turkish, see devrik ciimle
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382 Index
i/-cleft construction, 70-71 of r/iere-sentences, 344 n.7
Italian, 20-22, 24, 115, 116, 138, 143, 223, l'un(e), French, 84-85
225, 342 n. 14, 343 n. 21 Lyons, J., 350 n. 15, 352 n.29, 360 n. 53
Jackendoff, R., 9, 207, 208, 210, 246, 263, "Mad Magazine" sentences, 32, 35
270, 280, 299, 312, 318, 360 n. 57 Malagasy, 205
Japanese, 83, 124, 126, 130, 137-138, Malay, 83
140-141, 143, 182, 192, 223, 229, 234, man, German, 95
292-293, 319, 355 n. 11 marked/unmarked
Jelinek, E., 175, 191, 194 activation state of referents, see accented/
Jespersen, O., 50, 200, 203, 231 unaccented constituents
focus structure, 296-322
Karttunen, L., 155 information-structure sequence, 15
Kay, P., 346 n. 21 members of pairs of ailosentences, 17
Keenan, E., 156, 205, 353 n.43 presuppositional structure, 64, 67-68
kein, German, and topicalization, 154 sentence-accent position, 15, 17, 20
Kempson, 56, 345 n. 12 word order, 15, 17
knowledge, 44, 52 markedness, 15-18, 98
vs. consciousness, 93, 261, 270, 334 distributional, 17, 18, 360 n. 53
knowledge presupposition, see formal, 360 n. 53
presupposition lexical, 306
Koenig, J. P., 356 n. 13 in prosody, see accented/unaccented
Koike, D., 344 n. 4 constituent
Kramsky, J., 86 cognitive value of marked patterns, 18
Kraus, K., 349 n. 5, 355 n. 9, 358 n. 38 semantic, 360 n. 53
Kuno, S., 118, 130, 136, 138, 143, 167, 292, syntactic, 15-16, 29, 126, 280, 305
344 n. 1, 353 n. 56 Marty, A., 139, 154, 349 n. 5
Kuroda, S.-Y., 139-140, 141, 143 Mathesius, V., 12, 138
Matsumoto, Y., 350 n. 10
Ladd, R., 239, 247, 248, 302, 313, 326, 356 Maxim of Quantity, 159
n. 18, 358 n. 42 meaning
Lakoff, G., 282, 344 n. 5 vs. denotation, 37
language psychology (Sprachpsychologie), lexical vs. relational, 37
2, 122 propositional, 15
LaPolla, R., 237 conversational, 15
Larsson, E., 353 n. 54 memory, 76
Lashley, K. S., 101 and identifiability, 88
Latin, 84, 346 n. 23 short-term, long-term, 93-94, 268, 280
left-detachment, left-dislocation, 152, 177, Michaelis, L., 343 n.30
181-184 Mithun, M., 191, 199, 200, 201
in French, 126, 138, 158, 292, 293 modularity in grammar, 27
and topic establishment, 181ff., 204 Morgan, 1. (& M. Sellner), 341 n. 1
and topic shift, 183, 184 motivation in grammar
vs. topicalization, 194-195, 353 n.48 vs. arbitrariness, 255, 320
see also TOP constituent vs. autonomy, 26-29
Lewis, D., 67 pragmatic, 24, 25, 29, 41, 43, 116, 338
lexical vs. pronominal coding of referents, vs. prediction, 29, 320, 343 n. 25
see pronominal semantic, 116
Lexical Functional Grammar, 13 movement rules, 1, 341 n. 1
Li, C. & S. A. Thompson, 12, 24, 118, 351
n. 21 naming function of lexical noun phrases,
Liberman, M., 356 n. 15 186-187
lie-test (Erteshik-Shir & Lappin), 52, 59, 63, natural topic hierarchy, 168
216 negation
listing interpretation and markedness, 64
of identificational sentences, 123 in argument-focus sentences, 64
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Index 383
and presupposition, 62-64 Partee, B., 347 n. 2
and topic, 153-155, 291 Paul, H., 2, 12, 349 n. 5, 351 n. J8, 353 n. 51,
and topicalization, 154 353 n. 52, 355 n. 9, 358 n. 38
within-frame vs. cross-frame negation Payne, J. R., 153
(Fillmore), 351 n.27 Perlmutter, D., 167
neutral descriptions (Kuno), 138, 143 phrasal accent, see accent. General Phrasal
"new/old information", 45-50, 51-52, 210 Accent Principle
vs. new/old referent or denotatum, 48, 50, Phrasal Focus Rule (Selkirk), 315, 321
258, 348 n. 18 Pierrehumbert, J., 356 n. 15
see assertion, focus, presupposition pitch prominence, see sentence accents
news sentences (Schmerling), 138, 267 placeholders in generative grammar, 27, 313
news value, 344 n. 9 polarity, 236
nominalization, 75 possessive, see determiner
correlation with presupposition, 76 possessor advancement in German, 256, 357
non-compositionaiity of cleft constructions, n.27
230 pour ce qui est de NP, French, 182
non-recoverable pragmatic relation, 325 pragmatic construal of discourse referents,
see also focus relation 101-105, 267
non-subjects as topics, 146-147, 200 via contextual clues, 101-102
normal intonation, 338 delayed construal, 102
normal stress, 255 in antitopic construction, 102
noun phrase, lexical via frame inferences, 103-104
accented, with active referent, 97 pragmatic relation, 127
case marking, 187 establishment, 323, 326, 328
correlation with focus function, 262 see also properties vs. relations in
correlation with object function, 262 information structure
naming function, 186-187 Pragmatic Universe of Discourse
referring vs. relational function, 184-188 (Kempson), 56
role in the canonical sentence model, 189 pragmatics, 2, 4, 7
role in presentational clauses, 178 conversational pragmatics, 4, 5, 56
unaccented, 95, 324 discourse pragmatics, 2, 4, 5
unmarked for activation, 98, 106 vs. information structure, 4
see also pronominal vs. lexical coding lexical pragmatics, 4
Nuclear Stress Rule, 267, 312, 331 Prague School of Linguistics, 2, 6, 12, 117,
null anaphora, pragmatic constraints on, 138
135-136 predicate
null instantiation of arguments, 136 and activation state, 264-269, 280-282,
null subjects, 191 298
numerals as indentifiability markers, see concept, 222, 230-233
identifiability vs. comment, 121
existential, 180
object and "new information", 47-50, 111,
correlation with focus relation, 42, 169, 231-232
262 pragmatic, 231, 304, 358 n. 38; see also
correlation with inactiveness, 262 subject, pragmatic
correlation with lexical coding, 262 presentational, 143, 180, 314, 349 n. 30,
topical, 146ff., 161 351 n. 21, 352 n. 37
accented, 332 pronominal, 76
pronominal, 175 psychological, 122, 355 n.9
Ochs, E., 136 and reference, 75, 267-268
Ochs Keenan E., & B. Schieffelin, 353 n.42 semantic, 230, 231, 279, 304
O'Connor, M. C , 357 n. 28 traditional definition, 121
"old information", see new/old information as topic, 76
one, 80, 106, 249 unmarked for activation, 264-269, 278,
onomatopoeia, 243 280-281, 315, 321
oratio perfecta, 189 weather, 140, 141, 174
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384 Index
predicate (continued) presuppositional situations, 65
see also subject-predicate sentences, presuppositional structure, 65-73
comment accommodation of, 65-71, 103-104
predicate-accented sentences, 304, 322, 331 of adverbial claues, 67-69, 125, 346 n. 23
predicate focus, see focus structure of definite NP, 53, 227
predicating vs. presentational sentences, of possessive NP, 91-92, 227
177, 180-181 of pronouns, 98, 106; see also pronouns
predictable/recoverable relation, see topic of relative clauses, 23, 51-56, 70-71, 129,
relation 130, 274, 345 n. 14, 350 n. 11
predictability in grammar, see motivation of topicalization construction, 161-163
preemption, 256, 310 of verbs of judging, 70, 346 n. 25
preferred-clause construction, French, 25, unmarked, see markedness
30,165 of WH-questions, 282-286
preferred topic expression, 172ff., 186, 201; preverbal vs. postverbal position of
see also unaccented pronominal constituents, 40-43, 86-87, 128, 138,
presentational articulation, 350 n. 8 146, 227; see also inversion
presentational sentences, 39-43, 115, 129, Prince, E., 2, 3, 31, 71, 85-86, 99, 105, 160,
138, 143, 177-181 225, 278, 295
deictic vs. existential, 179 Principle of Predicate-Focus Interpretation,
in Chinese, 180 304, 309
and event-reporting sentences, 143-144 Principle of the Presumption of Ignorance/
and indefinite subjects, 143, 168 Knowledge (Strawson), 46, 51, 60,
processing implications, 185ff.
119
semantic role of subject, 180-181
Principle of Relevance (Strawson), 119
pseudo-agentive, 181 Principle of the Separation of Reference and
see also /iere-construction, there-
Role, 184-191, 203, 238, 252, 268
construction
analogy with thetic-categorical
presuppose (Ducrot), 345 n. 12
distinction, 188
presupposed, misuse of term, 53, 151; see
and canonical sentence model, 189ff.
also proposition
Principle of Subject-Object Neutalization in
presupposition, existential, 53, 78, 154-155
of topic referents, 154-155 sentence-focus constructions, 321
presupposition, pragmatic, 6, 14, 48, 61-78 n.54
and activation, 229, 269-286 Principle II (Schmerling), 266
cancelling of, 155 Pro-Drop parameter, 190-191
in Chomsky-Jackendoff tradition, 280 pronominal vs. lexical coding of referents,
consciousness presupposition, 53-54, 56, 95, 96-98, 107-109, 173, 262, 280
104 syntactic differences, 172-173
contextually evoked, 57 pronominal-argument languages, 191
creating or making of, 66-70 pronouns
definition, 52, 60 (Stalnaker) accented vs. unaccented, 115-116,
and focus relation, 279-280 172-173, 260, 323
in the presupposition (term), 151, 214 cooccurrence in single clause in French,
knowledge presupposition, 52-53, 56 175
grammatical marking, 277 bound or atonic, in French, 356 n. 20
layered, 220, 354 n. 4 case marking, 187
lexicogrammatical expression, 55-57, 60, indefinite, 156
65, 227 marked for activeness, 98, 106
and negation, 62-64, 152-153 role-oriented function, 187
relevance presupposition, 54, 56, 150-151, topic pronouns vs. focus pronouns,
167 262 115-116, 175,260
speaker presupposition (Stalnaker, see also pronominal coding of referents,
Kempson), 345 n. 12 unaccented pronominals
within focus domain, 218, 253, 269-280 properties vs. relations in information
presupposition, semantic or logical, 61-64 structure, 49, 76, 112-116, 127,
see also proposition 160-161, 163-164, 258, 273, 274, 323;
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Index 385
see also activation state vs. pragmatic resumptive pronouns, 182, 352 n. 39
relation diachronic reanalysis as agreement
propos vs. theme, 351 n. 18 markers, 192
proposition, 43, 53 Revised Focus Rule (Ladd), 247
vs. denotatum of proposition, rhetorical question, 283
terminology, 53 right-detachment or right-dislocation, see
knowledge of, 44 anti topic
pragmatically structured, 6, 52 Right-Roof constraint, 354 n. 57
presupposed Rivarol, 199
activation status, 271, 277-280, 281 Role and Reference Grammar, 13
complete or saturated, 270-277 Romance, 138, 169, 342 n. 17
functioning as argument, 218, 277 Rosch, E., 282
focal, 273 Rumanian, 352 n.31
open or incomplete, 122, 229, 277-282 Russell, B., 157, 189
prosody, prosodic, see sentence accent Russian, 141, 200, 342 n. 14
pseudocleft construction, see WH-cleft
construction
salience, pragmatic, 41, 150, 173; see also
topicality
quant a, French, 182 Sandmann, M., 355 n. 9
question-answer test, 121, 134, 150, 297 Sapir, E., 189
Sasse, H. J., 138, 139, 144
really, presuppositional structure, 346 n. 26 Saussure, F., xiii
reciprocal accent pattern (Ladd), 326-327 scene-setting expressions, see topic
recoverable referents, 348 n. 18 Schachter, P., 130
reference-oriented vs. role-oriented schema, 99; see also frame
expressions, 187, 190, 199, 201 Schmerling, S., 138, 266, 267, 287, 318, 346
differences in grammatical behavior, 187 n. 19, 351 n.21, 356 n. 18, 357 n.33
referent, 37 Selkirk, E., 208,239,243, 263, 267, 315-316,
vs. mental representation of referent, 318, 329, 331-333, 356 n. 18
37-38, 74 semi-active referents, see activation state,
see also discourse referent accessibility
referential files, 77 sentence (term), 222
referring expression, 75, 156; see also noun sentence accent (prosodic accent), 94-98,
phrase, definite description 238-257
regular stress rules, 247, 312; see also normal A-accent vs. B-accent, 360 n. 57
stress on constituents expressing presupposed
Reinhart, T., 118, 127, 129, 149, 150, 151, propositions, 269-280
156, 196, 257 default, 21, 25, 248-257, 266, 271, 279,
relations vs. properties in information 294, 312, 324
structure, see properties vs. relations on function words, 253-254
relative clause general function, 208, 263, 323-325
asserting, 23, 234, 345 n. 14 oxytonic, in French, 25, 356 n. 20
appositive, 23 and activation state, 95-99
in bi-clausal presentational construction, phrasal, 246ff.; see also General Phrasal
180 Accent Principle
restrictive, 23, 51-56, 274 position
and topic, 130, 350 n. 10 fixed vs. flexible, 25, 240, 320
see also presuppositional structure determined within system of contrasts,
relative pronouns as topic expressions, 129, 255-257, 319, 339
130, 186, 234, 350 n. 11 determined grammatically, 243-248
relevance, 44, 119 determined iconically, 241-242
relevance presupposition, see on verb phrase, 296, 304
presupposition on predicates (verbs) vs. arguments
representations, mental, 37, 43 (nouns), 264-269, 278
of referents, 37, 38, 49, 74-116 relational nature, 240, 325
of the world, 44-45 secondary, 234
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386 Index
sentence accent (prosodic accent) (continued) role in linguistic theory, 189-191
and semantic weight, 266 and formal marking of theticity,
two-accent sentences, 124, 291-294, 309, 141-142, 144
326-333; see also accented/ non-referential, 173-174
unaccented constituent, activation, non-topical, 122-127, 133, 137-146,
focus, iconicity, intonation, stress, 168-169
topic and "old information", 47
Sentence-Accent-Assignment Rule pragmatic, 231-232, 358 n. 38; see also
(Gussenhoven), 316 predicate, pragmatic
sentence focus, see focus structure semantic, 231-232
sentence-initial position, 31, 117, 199, 200, term, 12, 50, 128
201 as unmarked topic, 131-136, 198
sentence types, 32-35 see also topic
si, French, 72 subject-accented sentences, 138, 297, 298,
Silva-Corvalan, C , 288 304, 322
since, see because subject-final languages, 205, 354 n. 58
situationally accessible referents, 100, 109 subject-predicate relation, 121, 232, 349 n. 3
Slavic languages, 138, 201 subject-predicate sentences, 30, 121
clitic position, 353 n. S3 expressing thetic proposition, 141
non-thematic constituents in initial subject-prominent languages, 12, 24
position, 201 surface anaphora, see ellipsis
Spanish, 133, 138, 288, 342 n. 14 SVO order, 190
specific vs. non-specific referents, 80-82 as the "ideal" order in universal grammar,
grammatical coding 199
via indicative vs. subjunctive in French pragmatically unmarked in English, 17,
relative clauses, 82 19-20, 132
via word order in German relative switch reference, 325
clauses, 82 syntagmatic relations, xiii
via anaphoric pronouns, 80
and modality, 81
specific unidentifiable referents as future
topics, 83 tail, 118,203
speech acts, 4, 5, 55, 239 tense morphemes, anaphoric function, 347
spoken language; primacy, 36, 196 n.2
Stalnaker, R., 60, 64, 66, 345 n. 12 tensed vs. non-tensed clauses, 75-76
Stempel, W. D., 31 text-internal and text-external discourse
Strawson, P., 46, 119, 125, 157 world, 36-43, 178, 179
stress text-internal world as frame, 347 n. 13
lexical, 240, 247 overlapping of the two worlds, 39, 176
regular, 247 textually accessible referents, 100, 109
normal, 255 thank you, presuppositional structure, 346
structuralist approach to focus structure n.26
interpretation, 257, 322 Thematic Constraint on Relative Clauses
subject (Kuno), 130
constraint against co-mapping of subject theme
and focus in spoken French, 22 pragmatic, 2, 118, 342 n. 11
as contrastive focus, 343 n. 21 semantic, 15, 231
correlation with activeness, 262 see also topic
correlation with topic function, 131-136, there, deictic vs. existential, 174, 179
198; see also topic f*m>-construction, 39, 143, 156, 169-170,
vs. distinguished argument, 350 n. 14 174, 178, 179
grammatical vs. psychological, 2, 122, 199 listing interpretation, 344 n. 7
incorporated, 138 see also Aere-construction
indefinite in initial position, 168-169, 178 thetic, 30, 60, 137-146
lexical judgment, or simple judgment, 139, 154,
relative functional anomaly, 192 234
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Index 387
sentence and indefiniteness, 166-167
constraint on cooccurring object, 170, in Japanese, 126, 130, 292-293
181 and mental representations of referents,
event-central vs. entity-central, 144 160-191
in Czech, 145 multiple-topic sentences, 147-150
in German, 256 and negation scope, 153-155, 291
and indefinite subject, 168 new, 183, 353 n.40
in Japanese, 140 and "old information", 165
types of predicates, 140, 141, 143, 314, and omissibility, 223, 260, 223
351 n. 21; see also predicate, vs. participant, 117
presentational as point of departure, 162
presentational nature, 143-144, 177 and presupposition, 122, 150-160
prosodic marking, 245, 256, 307-322 primary vs. secondary, 147
role of lexical subjects for formal promotion, see Topic Acceptability Scale
marking, 141-142, 144 and quantifiers, 156
see also categorical, presentational referents
sentences, sentence-focus structure activation state, 151, 160-168, 196
this, "indefinite", 83, 352 n. 30 vs. expressions, 127
TOP constituents, 128, 188 promotion on Acceptability Scale,
topic, 6, 15, 117-205, 342 n. 11 176-184
and aboutness, 117-127 relation, 115, 160, 258, 276-277, 354 n. 56
accent, 275, 325, 331; see also focus accent vs. activation state, 151, 160-165
and accommodation, 195-199 predictable/recoverable nature, 6, 218,
advancement construction, 357 n. 27 223
and agent, 132, 133
relational nature, 160
and anaphora, 135-136
and relative clauses, 56, 130
announcing, 188, 201, 202
scene-setting, 118, 125, 126, 219, 294
in Chinese, 118
and semantic interpretation, 152-160
continuity across sentences, 132, 328
sentence topic, 117, 130
contrastive topic, see contrastive
shift, 184, 202, 325, 328
dative pronoun as topic, 21
and subject, 118, 131-150
definition, 131
syntactic domain, 130
determiners as topics, 19, 217, 228, 249,
vs. theme, 118
251
unlinked, 131, 193
discontinuity, 208, 325
vagueness of concept, 119-120
discourse topic, 117, 184, 186, 353 n.42
within presupposed proposition, 125,
and ellipsis, 112, 135-136
embedded topics, 125-126, 130 218-219
established, 19,40, 158-159, 201, 204, 324 and word order, 86-87, 177, 199-205
and existential presupposition, 157-158 see also detachment, relative clauses
expectedness, 103, 151 Topic Acceptability Scale, 165-171, 178,262
expression, 128 violations, 196-197
accented, 202, 227, 259, 275, 284 topic-comment
definition, 131 articulation, 20, 222, 350 n. 8
lexical vs. pronominal, 128, 184ff., 201 unmarked character, 122,126,132,136,
locative, in thetic sentences, 146, 174 141, 228, 279-280, 350 n.15
position in the sentence, 199-205 relation vs. equational relation, 232
preferred, 165, 172-176, 186, 226, 324 sentence, 121, 126, 137, 222, 267
pronominal, in thetic sentences, 145 topic-establishment, 183, 284, 353 n.40; see
unaccented, preceding or following also left-detachment
focus accent, 250ff., 300, 301 topic-first principle, 21, 200, 201, 202, 203
within focus constituent, 130, 217, 249, non-universality, 200
250, 251, 272, 275, 331 see also topic and word order, sentence-
future topics, 83 initial position
general characterization, 117-131 topic-focus indeterminacy in English, 135,
and identifiability, 165ff. 279-280
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388 Index
topicality of referents, 54, 204 unmarked, see canonical, markedness
degrees, 119 unpredictable/non-recoverable relation, see
expressed via indefinite this, 83 focus relation
expressed via numerals or classifiers, 83 unus, Latin, 84
topicalization, 31, 147, 200, 201, 295, 332 unused referents, 107, 109
activation state of referent of topicalized as topics, 166
NP. 160-162, 163 see also activation state, inactive referents
and contrastiveness, 295
vs. focus movement, 31, 295 vagueness vs. ambiguity in focus structure,
vs. left-detachment, 194-195, 353 n.48 305-306, 321
in German, 154, 194-195, 279, 281 Vallduvi, 2, 351 n.26
presuppositional structure, 162 Van Valin, 13, 175, 191, 341 n. 1, 359 n.48
topichood, tests for, 149, 151-152 Vattuone, B., 138
topicless sentence, 141 Vennemann, T., 354 n. 55
tonic vs. atonic, see accented vs. unaccented voild, French, 352 n. 36
truth conditions, 45, 159, 341 n.4 voir, French, as presentational predicate,
truth gap debate, 157 352 n. 37
Turkish, 83, 85, 182, 192, 202 VOS/VSO languages, 200, 205
Vossler, K., 349 n. 5
Ulrich, M , 139, 352 n. 31 VP-accented sentences, 296, 298, 304-305
unaccented argument constituents VP-conjunction, pragmatic constraints on,
marked for activation, 96, 97, 98, 106, 350 n.13
227, 251, 263, 266-269
marked for feature "established topic",
324 wa, topic-marker in Japanese, 126, 137-138,
140, 226, 292-293, 319
discourse condition on, 324
Wandruszka, U., 138, 169, 342 n. 17, 354
unaccented predicate constituents,
n.4
unmarked for activation, 266
unaccented pronominals, 172-176, 182, 228, Ward, G., 295, 343 n.26, n.27
273 Warlpiri, 194
dual function, 174ff. Wartburg,W., 353 n. 45
as agreement markers, 175-176, 192 was NP anbetrifft, German, 182
as default morphemes, 174 Walters, J. R., 225
as a natural class, 172 Waugh, L., 18
non-referential uses, 173, 174, 176 Wehr, B., 138, 169
position, 201, 202, 353 n. 53 Welsh, 138
as preferred subjects, 132 WH-cleft construction, 123
as preferred topic expressions, 165, 172— WH-questions
176, 299, 324 in French, 244, 284-286
as unmarked topic-expressions, 176 multiple and clefts, 329-330
and the two discourse worlds, 176 presuppositional structure, 244-245,
unaccusative 282-286, 299
hypothesis, 320 Woodbury, A., 28
predicates, 17, 21, 310 word order
unanchored referents, see anchoring, brand- basic, 200
new referents, identifiability change, 192, 203
und zwar, German, 356 n. 14 free-word-order languages, 199, 200, 240
underspecification, functional grammatically controlled, 24-25
of prosodic structure, 306, 326 and logic, 199
of syntactic structure, 29-32 pragmatically controlled, 25
see also vagueness, focus see also inversion, preverbal/postverbal
unidentifiable referents, see identifiability, position, canonical, focus, topic
brand-new
universe of discourse, 36-43 >', French, in presentational sentences, 179
bipartite model, 38 you, Chinese presentational predicate, 180
see also text-internal vs. text-external
world Zimmer, K., 182
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