Seminar on Information Structure and Word Order Variation Preposing

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Seminar on Information Structure and Word Order
Variation Preposing

• Gregory Ward
• Northwestern University
• Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
• Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa
• 18 Xuño 2008

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Preposing

• Preposing is a class of constructions sharing a
  common syntactic structure
• The occurrence of a lexically-governed postverbal
  phrasal constituent occurring in preverbal
  position.
• Under this definition, subcategorized NPs, APs,
  VPs, and PPs are included various adverbials and
  adjuncts are not.

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NP (most common)

• Colonel Bykov had delivered to Chambers in
  Washington six Bokhara rugs which he directed
  Chambers to present as gifts from him and the
  Soviet Government to the members of the ring who
  had been most co-operative. One of these rugs
  Chambers delivered Ø to Harry Dexter White.
  Another he gave Ø to Hiss but not as a routine
  payment on rent. In the classic tradition of
  espionage operations, Hiss had parked his car on
  a street corner, and Chambers had driven to a
  point nearby.
• Nixon, R. Six Crisis. 196258

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PP

• To back up Wattenbergs contention that American
  women are getting what they wanted with or
  without the ERA, there are statistics offered,
  statistics about how many married women are now
  in the labor force, statistics about the number
  of women in good jobs. With better jobs and
  more education, he writes, women are also
  moving forward on the dollar front. For that
  last bold assertion there are no statistics Ø.
  Thats because they wouldn't back up the
  argument, not even a little.
• Philadelphia Inquirer

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VP

• And the end of the term I took my first schools
  it was necessary to pass, if I was to stay at
  Oxford, and pass I did Ø, after a week in which I
  forbade Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late
  hour, with iced black coffee and charcoal
  biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected
  texts. I remember no syllable of them now, but
  the other, more ancient, lore which I acquired
  that term will be with me in one shape or another
  to my last hour.
• Waugh E. Brideshead Revisited. 194545

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AP (least common)

• The plan is to purchase the quaint fishing
  village of Ferness and replace it with a giant
  new refinery. The villagers whove been
  farming, fishing, raising families and pub
  crawling in splendid isolation for generations
  offer amazingly little resistance. Humble they
  may be Ø. But daft they aint Ø. If the Americans
  are all that eager to turn a few industrious
  Scotsmen into instant millionaires, they should
  not be denied the privilege.
• Philadelphia Inquirer movie review

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Preposing General Constraints

• All felicitous preposings require
• a salient set relation between the trigger in the
  prior context and the link of the proposing
• a salient open proposition whose instantiation
  represents the focus of the utterance.
• Together, these constitute necessary and
  sufficient conditions for felicitous preposing.
  Other factors affect the observed distribution.

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Subcategorized PPs vs. Adjunct PPs

• Subcategorized PP
• Discourse-initially
• In a basket, I put your clothes Ø.
• cf. I put your clothes in a basket.
• Adjunct PP
• In New York, theres always something to do.
• cf. Theres always something to do in NY.

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Preposing and Information Structure The Link

• The discourse entity corresponding to the
  preposed constituent (or a subconstituent within
  the preposed constituent) must be anaphorically
  linked to the trigger of the preceding discourse
  via a salient set relation this set is called
  the anchoring set.
• Although there need be no link in a
  canonical-word-order (CWO) utterance, preposing
  necessarily marks the preverbal constituent as a
  link to the prior discourse.

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Preposing and Information Structure The
Anchoring Set

• The notion of anchoring set subsumes both
  explicitly evoked and inferentially related
  links.
• Customer Can I get a bagel?
• Server No, sorry. Were out of bagels.
• A bran muffin I can give you Ø.
• service encounter, Philadelphia diner
• Here, the link (a bran muffin) and the trigger
  (bagels) stand in a salient set relation as
  alternate members of the inferred anchoring set
  breakfast baked goods.

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Preposing and Information Structure The
Anchoring Set

• The link itself can also be explicitly evoked in
  the prior discourse
• A Can I get a bagel?
• B Sorry all out.
• A How about a bran muffin?
• B A bran muffin I can give you Ø.
• Here, the link (a bran muffin) is coreferential
  with one of the triggers explicitly mentioned by
  A.

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Preposing and Information Structure The
Anchoring Set

• Facts about the world thus come in twice on the
  road from meaning to truth once to determine the
  interpretation, given the meaning, and then again
  to determine the truth value, given the
  interpretation. This insight we owe Ø to David
  Kaplans important work on indexicals and
  demonstratives, and we believe it is absolutely
  crucial to semantics.
• Barwise Perry 198311
• Here, the link exhausts the anchoring set,
  consisting of a singleton member note the
  absence of any sense of contrast here.

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Preposing and Information Structure The
Anchoring Set

• Another example of a link to an anchoring set
  with a single member is Proposition Affirmation
• The other half of the double bill is Sister Mary
  Ignatius. Whereas Lohrmann has to overcome a
  poor script to be bright, Durang has handed Ginny
  Brown Graham, via Sister Mary Ignatius, a
  fantastic script, and all she has to do is shine.
  And shine she does Ø. Au Courant, 4/1/85
• Here, the link shine is explicitly mentioned in
  the preceding sentence.
• The anchoring set consists of a singleton member,
  evoked by the trigger and referenced in the link.

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Preposing and Information Structure The Form of
the Link

• However, the link of Proposition Affirmation is
  sensitive to the linguistic form of the trigger
• The other half of the double bill is Sister Mary
  Ignatius. Whereas Lohrmann has to overcome a
  poor script to be bright, Durang has handed Ginny
  Brown Graham, via Sister Mary Ignatius, a
  fantastic script, and all she has to do is glow.
  And shine she does.
• Here, although shine and glow could be seen as
  standing in a relation of semantic identity,
  infelicity results because the salient relation
  between the link and trigger is not one of
  morphological identity.
• Thus, the relation between the link and trigger
  in proposition affirmation is more constrained
  than in other types of preposing.

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Preposing and Information Structure The OP

• The second constraint on preposings is that they
  require a salient or inferable open proposition
  (OP) in the discourse.
• An OP is a sentence that contains one or more
  variables in a felicitous preposing, this OP
  represents what is assumed by the speaker to be
  salient or inferrable at the time of the
  utterance.
• The variable in the OP is instantiated with the
  focus, which constitutes the new information of
  the utterance, and is constrained to be a member
  of a contextually licensed set. Prosodically,
  the focus is realized with a nuclear pitch accent.

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Preposing and Information Structure Two Major
Types

• Our examination of NOD reveals that preposings
  can be classified into two major types based on
  their intonation and information structure
  (Prince 1981, Ward 1988)
• Focus Preposing
• Topicalization
• The preposed constituent of focus preposing
  contains the focus of the utterance, and bears
  nuclear accent the rest of the clause is
  typically deaccented.
• Topicalization, on the other hand, involves a
  preposed constituent other than the focus and
  bears multiple pitch accents at least one on the
  preposed constituent and at least one on the
  (non-preposed) focus.
• Nonetheless, both types of preposing require a
  salient or inferable OP at the time of utterance
  for felicity.

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Focus Preposing

• I made a lot of sweetbreads. A couple of pounds I
  think I made for her.
• C. Ward in conversation
• sweetbreads mollejas/lechecillas
• A Where can I get the reading packet?
• B In Steinberg. Gives directions Six
  dollars it costs.
• two students in conversation
• FP marks the utterance as a focus-presupposition
  construction,with the preposed constituent, six
  dollars, containing the nuclear accent,
  representing the focus of the utterance.

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Focus Preposing

• To construct the relevant OP, the preposed
  constituent containing the focus is first
  returned to its canonical argument position. The
  focus is then replaced with a variable, which is
  restricted to be a member of some contextually
  licensed set. The focus instantiates the variable
  in the OP and represents a member of that set.
• OP It costs X, where X is a member of the set
  prices.
• It costs some amount of money.
• Focus six dollars

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Focus Preposing

• Here, six dollars serves as the link to the
  preceding discourse
• Its referent is a member of the set prices,
  which is part of the inferrable OP. In this
  example, the OP can be inferred on the basis of
  the prior context from mention of a reading
  packet, one is licensed to infer that the packet
  costs some amount of money.
• While the anchoring set prices is
  discourse-old, the preposed constituent itself
  represents information that has not itself been
  explicitly evoked in the prior discourse.

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Topicalization

• The focus in a topicalization, on the other hand,
  is not contained in the preposed constituent but
  occurs elsewhere in the utterance.
• Intonationally, preposings of this type contain
  multiple (2) accented syllables
• one occurs within the constituent that contains
  the focus
• one occurs within the preposed constituent, which
  typically occurs in a separate intonational
  phrase
• G Do you watch football?
• E Yeah. Baseball I like a lot better.
• G. McKenna to E. Perkins in
  conversation

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Topicalization

• Here, the preposed constituent is not the focus
  better is. The preposed constituent baseball
  serves as the link to the inferred set sports.
• This anchoring set can be inferred on the basis
  of the link (baseball) and the trigger
  (football), explicitly evoked by G in the prior
  utterance.
• Note that baseball is accented not because it is
  the focus but because it occurs in a separate
  intonational phrase in sentence-initial position.
  
• While all foci are accented, not all accented
  items are foci typically a single utterance
  contains a variety of pitch accents, each making
  a distinct contribution to utterance
  interpretation.

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Topicalization

• The OP of Topicalization is formed in much the
  same way as in the case of focus preposing,
  except that the anchoring set member represented
  by the preposed constituent is replaced in the OP
  by the anchoring set itself.
• OP I like-to-X-degree sports, where X is a
  member of the set degrees.
• I like sports to some degree.
• Focus better

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Topicalization

• Here, the OP includes the variable corresponding
  to the focus, but note that the link baseball has
  been replaced by its anchoring set sports, i.e.
  the set that includes both the trigger and the
  link.
• The OP that is salient here is not that the
  speaker likes baseball per se, but rather that he
  likes sports to some degree. This OP is salient
  given the prior context in which E is asked if he
  watches football, from which it can be inferred
  that G is asking more generally about Es
  interest in sports.

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Evidence for the Notion Link

• Someone broke into the garage last night. My
  father I need to talk to.
• Im really tired tonight. Maybe a movie Ill
  rent.
• Here, there is no plausible set relation between
  the preposed constituent and anything evoked in
  the prior context.
• Indeed, an examination of 747 tokens reveals that
  in all cases there is a salient set relation
  between the link of the preposed constituent and
  something in the prior discourse.

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Left-Dislocation

• What distinguishes left-dislocation (LD) from
  preposing is the presence of a referential
  pronoun in the initial constituents canonical
  position.
• This guy I met on the train, I talked to him for
  over an hour.
• Here, the direct object pronoun him is
  coreferential with the dislocated NP this guy I
  met on the train.

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Left-Dislocation

• Moreover, LD is not only syntactically distinct
  from preposing, but is functionally distinct as
  well.
• The preposed constituent of preposing
  consistently represents information standing in a
  contextually licensed set relationship with
  information evoked in or inferrable from the
  prior context.

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Left-Dislocation

• No such requirement holds for LD. Thus, the
  formal distinction between the two types of
  construction corresponds to a functional
  distinction, while the formal similarity within
  the class of preposing constructions corresponds
  to a functional similarity.

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Left-Dislocation

• Prince (1997) argues that there are in fact three
  types of LD, distinguishable on functional
  grounds. Of relevance here is the type of LD
  that Prince calls simplifying LDs
• A simplifying LD serves to simplify the
  discourse processing of discourse-new entities by
  removing them from a syntactic position
  disfavored for discourse-new entities and
  creating a separate processing unit for them.
  Once that unit is processed and they have become
  discourse-old, they may comfortably occur in
  their positions within the clause as pronouns
  (1997124).

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Left-Dislocation

• That is, LDs of this type are reserved for
  entities that are new to the discourse and that
  are being introduced in a dispreferred (i.e.
  subject) position.
• This stands in stark contrast to true preposing
  constructions, in which the preposed constituent
  must represent a discourse-old link to the prior
  discourse.

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Summary

• Thus far, we have examined a range of
  sentence-types in which a subcategorized phrasal
  constituent appears in a marked preverbal
  position.
• Our corpus-based study has revealed that such
  preposing, like other marked syntactic
  constructions, serves an information-structuring
  function.

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Summary

• First, preposing effects the instantiation of a
  salient or inferable open proposition second,
  the preposed constituent represents a
  discourse-old link that serves to situate the
  information presented in the current utterance
  with respect to the prior context.
• Such links are related to previously evoked
  information via a salient set relationship.

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Summary

• In addition, we have identified and analyzed two
  major types of preposing in English
• Focus preposing
• Topicalization
• These are distinguishable on the basis of whether
  or not the focused constituent appears in
  preposed position.
• In the case of focus preposing, the preposed
  focus constitutes the link to the prior
  discourse, while in the case of topicalization
  the focus remains in canonical position, with the
  (non-focused) preposed constituent providing the
  link.

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Summary

• On the other hand, these properties do not hold
  for left-dislocation, in which a pronoun that is
  coreferential with the marked constituent appears
  in that constituents canonical position.
• This formal difference was shown to correspond to
  a functional difference, while the formal
  similarity found within the class of preposing
  constructions was shown to correspond to a
  functional similarity.