Title: LSA%20Summer%20Institute%202007%20Stanford%20University%20%20Information%20Structure%20and%20Word%20Order%20Variation%20%20%20LSA.323
1Seminar on Information Structure and Word Order
Variation Introduction
Gregory Ward Northwestern University Universidade
de Santiago de Compostela Departamento de
Filoloxía Inglesa 16 Xuño 2008
2Information 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.
3Information Structure
- 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
hes been suffering from. - My friend John sent one of his friends in
Santiago a letter about the serious depression
hes been suffering from.
4Information Structure
- 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
5Information Structure
- 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.
6Word Order Variation
- Example
- Preposing (or topicalization) in English the
(optional) sentence-initial placement of a
subcategorized (obligatory) argument of a
transitive verb. - That I didnt know ?.
- The first part I finished ? last week.
- People that like I have no respect for ?.
7Word Order VariationPreposing
- Basic (or canonical) word order
- I didnt know that.
- Marked (or noncanonical) word order
- That I didnt know ?.
The two forms are true under precisely the same
conditions i.e, they are semantically, or
truth-conditionally, equivalent.
8Word 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)?
9Examples of Word Order Variation in English
- Canonical transitive sentences
(subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, unmarked) - Pat ate that banana.
10English Noncanonical Constructions
- Preposing constructions
- Topicalization
- That banana Pat ate. (This one she gave away.)
- Focus Preposing
- A Did Pat eat this banana?
- B No. That banana Pat ate.
11English NoncanonicalConstructions Preposing,
cont.
- Proposition Assessment
- Proposition Affirmation
- They said Pat would eat that banana, and eat that
banana he did! - And what a banana it was, too!
- A Pats amazing.
- B That she is!
- A Soup or salad?
- B Soup.
- A Soup it is!
12English Noncanonical Constructions Preposing,
cont.
- Proposition Assessment (cont.)
- Proposition Suspension
- Im upset that Pat ate a banana, if eat a banana
he did. - Proposition Denial (Epitomization)
- Chomsky, youre not.
- Stupid, shes not.
13English Noncanonical Constructions
- Passive (get and be)
- Passive with by-phrase
- That banana was eaten by Pat.
- That banana got eaten by Pat.
- Passive without by-phrase
- That banana was eaten.
- That banana got eaten.
14English Noncanonical Constructions
- Cleft constructions
- it-clefts (clefts)
- It was that banana (that) Pat ate.
- It was Pat who ate that banana.
- 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.
- reverse wh-clefts
- That banana is what Pat ate.
- Pat is (the one) who ate that banana.
- th-clefts
- Thats a banana (that) Pat ate.
- Thats Pat who ate that banana.
15English Noncanonical Constructions
- Inversion
- Eating that banana is Pat.
16English Noncanonical Constructions
- Gapping
- Chris ate the orange and Pat, that banana.
17English Noncanonical Constructions
- Right Node Raising
- Pat bought - and Chris ate - a banana.
18English Noncanonical Constructions
- Left-Dislocation
- That banana, Pat ate it.
- Pat, she ate that banana.
19English Noncanonical Constructions
- Right-Dislocation
- He ate that banana, Pat.
- Pat ate it, that banana.
- Right-Dislocation with concomitant copula
deletion - Tasty piece of fruit, that banana.
20English Noncanonical Constructions
- Heavy NP Shift
- Pat gave to Chris that huge overripe banana from
Brazil.
21English Noncanonical Constructions
- Dative Alternation (double object
construction) - Pat gave Chris that banana.
- Pat gave that banana to Chris.
22English Noncanonical Constructions
- Particle Movement
- Pat ate that banana up.
- Pat ate up that banana.
23English Noncanonical Constructions
- Combinations
- Cleft passive with by-phrase
- It was that banana that was eaten by Pat.
- What was eaten by Pat was that banana.
- Inversion passive with by-phrase
- Being eaten by Pat is a banana.
- Reverse wh-cleft RD
- Thats what I want, that banana.
24English Noncanonical Constructions
- Combinations (cont.)
- Reverse wh-cleft LD passive
- That banana, thats what was eaten.
- Cleft gapping
- It was Chris who ate the orange and Pat, that
banana. - 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.
25English Noncanonical Constructions
- Canonical intransitive sentences
- A lovely fountain is in the garden
- A lovely fountain stands in the garden.
26English Noncanonical Constructions
- Inversion
- Locative
- In the garden is a lovely fountain.
- In the garden stands a lovely fountain.
- Non-locative
- Also lovely is the fountain in the garden.
27English Noncanonical Constructions
- B. Existential there-Sentences
- Theres a lovely fountain in the garden.
28English Noncanonical Constructions
- C. Presentational there-Sentences
- There stands a lovely fountain in the garden.
29English Noncanonical Constructions
- Combinations
- Existential there Preposing
- In the garden, theres a lovely fountain.
- Presentational there Heavy NP Shift
- There stands in the garden a lovely fountain.
- Inversion Cleft
- It is in the garden that stands a lovely
fountain.
30Investigating Noncanonical Constructions
Empirically
- Three prevailing methodologies
- Intuitions
- Psycholinguistic experiments
- Corpus-based investigations
- Each has its strengths and weaknesses!
- note CCCvCCC phonology!
31The 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
32Recursive 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 ?.
33Recursive 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 ?.
34The Three Methodologies Pros and Cons
- 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.
35The Three Methodologies Pros and Cons
- Experiments
- Pros
- Extremely controlled environment can zero in on
very specific features on the discourse context - Replicability
36The Three Methodologies Pros and Cons
- Experiments
- Cons
- Labor-intensive costly
- Requires extensive preparation/permissions
- Ecological validity To what degree does a
subjects performance in a laboratory reflect
what s/he does in a natural setting? - Were never quite sure what subjects are doing
while performing an artificial task.
37The Three Methodologies Pros and Cons
- 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.
38The Three Methodologies Pros and Cons
- 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!
39The 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.
40The 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!
41The 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?
42The 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
1401. How does this compare with other
constructions? - Problems in counting (especially by machine)
- Nixon That you dont want to answer, huh?
- Dean The more we work on it, the more questions
we see - Nixon That you dont want to answer, huh?
- The Presidential Transcripts. 197495