LSA%20Summer%20Institute%202007%20Stanford%20University%20%20Information%20Structure%20and%20Word%20Order%20Variation%20%20%20LSA.323

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Seminar on Information Structure and Word Order
Variation Introduction
Gregory Ward Northwestern University Universidade
de Santiago de Compostela Departamento de
Filoloxía Inglesa 16 Xuño 2008
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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.

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Information 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.

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Information 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

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Information 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.

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Word 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 ?.

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Word 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.
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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)?

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Examples of Word Order Variation in English

• Canonical transitive sentences
  (subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, unmarked)
• Pat ate that banana.

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English 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.

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English 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!

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English 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.

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English 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.

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English 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.

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English Noncanonical Constructions

• Inversion
• Eating that banana is Pat.

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English Noncanonical Constructions

• Gapping
• Chris ate the orange and Pat, that banana.

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English Noncanonical Constructions

• Right Node Raising
• Pat bought - and Chris ate - a banana.

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English Noncanonical Constructions

• Left-Dislocation
• That banana, Pat ate it.
• Pat, she ate that banana.

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English 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.

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English Noncanonical Constructions

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

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English Noncanonical Constructions

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

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English Noncanonical Constructions

• Particle Movement
• Pat ate that banana up.
• Pat ate up that banana.

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English 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.

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English 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.

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English Noncanonical Constructions

• Canonical intransitive sentences
• A lovely fountain is in the garden
• A lovely fountain stands in the garden.

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English 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.

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English Noncanonical Constructions

• B. Existential there-Sentences
• Theres a lovely fountain in the garden.

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English Noncanonical Constructions

• C. Presentational there-Sentences
• There stands a lovely fountain in the garden.

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English 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.

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Investigating Noncanonical Constructions
Empirically

• Three prevailing methodologies
• Intuitions
• Psycholinguistic experiments
• Corpus-based investigations
• Each has its strengths and weaknesses!
• note CCCvCCC phonology!

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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

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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 ?.

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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 ?.

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The 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.

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The Three Methodologies Pros and Cons

• Experiments
• Pros
• Extremely controlled environment can zero in on
  very specific features on the discourse context
• Replicability

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The 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.

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The 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.

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The 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!

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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.

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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!

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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?

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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
  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