Gregory Ward Northwestern University Universidade de Santiago de Compostela Departamento de...

Gregory Ward

Northwestern University

Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa

16 Xuño 2008

Seminar on Information Structure and Word Order Variation

Introduction

Information Structure

• Given (old, familiar) vs. new information– “new” in what sense?– “given” in what sense?

• Sentences with all new information are informative, but rare:

– This guy sent a letter to a friend in a big city about a controversial topic.

• Sentences with all given information are common, but uninformative:

– He did it.


• Most sentences contain a mixture of given and new information:

– My friend John sent one of his friends in Santiago a letter about the serious depression he’s been suffering from.

– My friend John sent one of his friends in Santiago a letter about the serious depression he’s been suffering from.


Many aspects of information structure:

• Reference (choice of referring expression)• Cohesion (coherence relations)• Topic (discourse topic vs. sentence topic)• Focus (focus/presupposition, common ground,

question under discussion (QUD))• Intonation/prosody


• Word order variation (“functions of syntax”)

• Each language provides its speakers with a range of truth-conditionally-equivalent syntactic options (or “constructions”).

• Differences among them are entirely in terms of information structure.

• Truth-conditional equivalence: the gold standard of word order variation.

Word Order Variation

ExamplePreposing (or “topicalization”) in English: the (optional) sentence-initial placement of a subcategorized (obligatory) argument of a transitive verb.

• That I didn’t know .• The first part I finished last week.• People that like I have no respect for .

Word Order Variation:Preposing

• Basic (or canonical) word order

I didn’t know that.

• Marked (or noncanonical) word order

That I didn’t know .

The two forms are true under precisely the same conditions: i.e, they are semantically, or truth-conditionally, equivalent.

Word Order Variation: Some Important Questions

• Are all marked word orders optional?

• Do all speakers use all word orders?

• When do children acquire marked word orders?

• What is the alternative to using a marked word order (the “envelope of variation”)?

Examples of Word Order Variation in English

Canonical transitive sentences (subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, unmarked)

• Pat ate that banana.

English Noncanonical Constructions

A. Preposing constructions

1. Topicalization• That banana Pat ate. (This one she gave

away.)

2. Focus Preposing• A: Did Pat eat this banana?

B: No. That banana Pat ate.

English NoncanonicalConstructions: Preposing, cont.

3. Proposition Assessment

a) Proposition Affirmation• They said Pat would eat that banana, and eat that banana he did!

• And what a banana it was, too!

• A: Pat’s amazing. B: That she is!

• A: Soup or salad? B: Soup. A: Soup it is!

English Noncanonical Constructions: Preposing, cont.

3. Proposition Assessment (cont.)

b) Proposition Suspension• I’m upset that Pat ate a banana, if eat a banana

he did.

c) Proposition Denial (“Epitomization”)• Chomsky, you’re not.• Stupid, she’s not.

B. Passive (get and be)

1. Passive with by-phrase• That banana was eaten by Pat.• That banana got eaten by Pat.

2. Passive without by-phrase• That banana was eaten.• That banana got eaten.


C. Cleft constructions1. it-clefts (“clefts”)

• It was that banana (that) Pat ate.• It was Pat who ate that banana.

2. wh-clefts (“pseudo-clefts”)• What Pat ate was that banana.• (The one) who ate that banana was Pat.• What Pat did was eat that banana.

3. reverse wh-cleftsC.That banana is what Pat ate.D.Pat is (the one) who ate that banana.

4. th-clefts• That’s a banana (that) Pat ate.• That’s Pat who ate that banana.


D. Inversion

• Eating that banana is Pat.


E. Gapping

• Chris ate the orange and Pat, that banana.


F. Right Node Raising

• Pat bought - and Chris ate - a banana.


G. Left-Dislocation

• That banana, Pat ate it.• Pat, she ate that banana.


H. Right-Dislocation• He ate that banana, Pat.• Pat ate it, that banana.

1. Right-Dislocation with concomitant copula deletion• Tasty piece of fruit, that banana.


I. Heavy NP Shift

• Pat gave to Chris that huge overripe banana from Brazil.


J. Dative Alternation (“double object construction”)• Pat gave Chris that banana.• Pat gave that banana to Chris.


K. Particle Movement

• Pat ate that banana up.• Pat ate up that banana.


Combinations

1.Cleft + passive with by-phrase• It was that banana that was eaten by Pat.• What was eaten by Pat was that banana.

2. Inversion + passive with by-phrase• Being eaten by Pat is a banana.

3.Reverse wh-cleft + RD• That’s what I want, that banana.


Combinations (cont.)4. Reverse wh-cleft + LD + passive

• That banana, that’s what was eaten.

5. Cleft + gapping• It was Chris who ate the orange and Pat, that

banana.

6. Gapping + inversion + passive with by-phrase + proposition suspension• Being eaten in a frenzy by Chris was that orange,

and by Pat, that banana, if eaten they were.



Canonical intransitive sentences:

• A lovely fountain is in the garden• A lovely fountain stands in the garden.

A. Inversion1. Locative

• In the garden is a lovely fountain.• In the garden stands a lovely fountain.

2. Non-locative• Also lovely is the fountain in the garden.



B. Existential there-Sentences

• There’s a lovely fountain in the garden.


C. Presentational there-Sentences

• There stands a lovely fountain in the garden.


Combinations

1.Existential there + Preposing• In the garden, there’s a lovely fountain.

2.Presentational there + Heavy NP Shift• There stands in the garden a lovely fountain.

3.Inversion + Cleft• It is in the garden that stands a lovely fountain.

Investigating Noncanonical Constructions Empirically

Three prevailing methodologies:

• Intuitions• Psycholinguistic experiments • Corpus-based investigations

Each has its strengths* and weaknesses!

*note CCCvCCC phonology!

The Three Methodologies: Pros and Cons

Intuitions• Pros• Useful in guiding initial stages of

hypothesis formation.• Gaps: often the relevant corpus data do not

exist (which does not mean that the construction or form is ungrammatical!).• Example: recursive preposing

Recursive Preposing?

I find it difficult to accept the fact that I have no control over some aspects of my life.

The fact that I have no control over some aspects of my life I find it difficult to accept .

Recursive Preposing?

The fact that I have no control over some aspects of my life I find it difficult to accept .

The fact that some aspects of my live I have no control over I find it difficult to accept .


Intuitions• Cons

• Meta-linguistic (“acceptability”) judgements are notoriously variable and unstable.

• Judgements of unacceptability do not come labeled with the source of the unacceptability (e.g. syntax, semantic, pragmatics).

• Felicity or appropriateness depends crucially on context of utterance — often difficulty to imagine.


Experiments• Pros

• Extremely controlled environment; can zero in on very specific features on the discourse context

• Replicability


Experiments• Cons

• Labor-intensive; costly• Requires extensive preparation/permissions• Ecological validity: To what degree does a

subject’s performance in a laboratory reflect what s/he does in a natural setting?

• We’re never quite sure what subjects are doing while performing an artificial task.


Corpus-based studies• Pros

• Practical considerations: easy to obtain huge amounts of naturally-occurring data (NOD)

• Gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, yottabytes…

• NOD abstracts away from individual variation.• For historical periods/extinct languages, NOD is

often the only available source.• NOD often provides context of utterance.


Corpus-based studies•Cons

• Not everything in a corpus — especially on the internet — is grammatical!• Non-native speakers, errors, language play,

machine-generated language, etc.

• Data requires theory!• Example: The problem is is that… (100,000+ hits

on google)

Solution: multiple sources of data!

The Corpus

• Analyses of noncanonical constructions are based on a corpus of Standard American English (SAE), consisting of several thousand tokens of NOD.

• Written sources include newspapers, magazines, novels, nonfiction books, academic prose, and portions of the Brown Corpus.

The Corpus

• ‘Oral’ sources include personal conversations, TV shows, films, interviews from Studs Terkel (Terkel 1974), and transcripts of the 1986 Challenger Commission meetings. (Are screenplays “oral”?)

• Style: formal vs. informal; planned vs. unplanned

• Data not collected randomly (sampling problems), so there is no systematic data on frequency.

• However, I do have some data on the frequency of one noncanonical construction!

The Preponderance of Preposing

• Is preposing more common in writing or in speech? In formal or in informal contexts?

• Issues to consider:– The relationship between writing and speech

• Does a noncanonical word order ‘compensate’ for the absence of prosody?

• Does a canonical word order ‘amnesty’ phonological dispreferences?

– As a complex syntactic construction, would a noncanonical word order be more like to occur in written (i.e. planned) language?

The Preponderance of Preposing

• My valiant attempt to compare the written and spoken language of a single speaker (Richard M. Nixon) was somewhat inconclusive.

• In his book Six Crises, there were a total of 9,719 sentences and 69 preposings, for a ratio of 140:1. How does this compare with other constructions?

• Problems in counting (especially by machine):

Nixon: That you don’t want to answer, huh? Dean: The more we work on it, the more questions we

see—Nixon: —That you don’t want to answer, huh?[The Presidential Transcripts. 1974:95]

Gregory Ward Northwestern University Universidade de Santiago de Compostela Departamento de...

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