A Unified Account of English Fronting Constructions

Recent work in discourse has uncovered a variety of discourse functions served by a speaker's use of some marked or non-canonical syntactic construction in a particular context. However, much less attention has been devoted to the question of generalizations that may apply across constructions- in particular, how a given functional principle may be variousl

English inversions as constructional alloforms

This paper analyzes English inversion as an 'alloform' (Birner 2013) of both preposing and postposing. Birner 1996b analyzes inversion as subject to a negative constraint, disallowing new before old information. The need for this constraint vanishes, however, if inversion is viewed as being an alloform of preposing in cases where the preposed information is discourse-old, and an alloform of postposing in cases where the postposed information is discourse-new. Cases that satisfy both constraints are ambiguous between preposing and postposing, the infelicity of cases that satisfy neither constraint falls out automatically, and additional properties of inversion are readily explained

Uniqueness, Familiarity, and the Definite Article in English

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore (1994

There-Sentences and Inversion as Distinct Constructions: A Functional Account

Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Semantic Typology and Semantic Universals (1993

Contextual conditioning and information structure

Contextual conditioning and information structur

Discourse Functions at the Periphery : Noncanonical Word Order in English

Speakers have a wide range of noncanonical syntactic options that allow them to mark the information status of the various elements within a proposition. The correlation between a construction and constraints on information status, however, is not arbitrary; there are broad, consistent, and predictive generalizations that can be made about the information-packaging functions served by preposing, postposing, and argument-reversing constructions. Specifically, preposed constituents are constrained to represent discourse-old information, postposed constituents are constrained to represent information that is either discourse-new or hearer-new, and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preposed constituent be at least as familiar as that represented by the postposed constituent (Birner & Ward 1998). The status of inferable information (Clark 1977; Prince 1981), however, is problematic; a study of corpus data shows that such information can be preposed in an inversion or a preposing (hence must be discourse-old), yet can also be postposed in constructions requiring hearer-new information (hence must be hearer-new). This information status – discourse-old yet hearer-new – is assumed by Prince (1992) to be non-occurring on the grounds that what has been evoked in the discourse should be known to the hearer. I resolve this difficulty by arguing for a reinterpretation of the term 'discourse-old' as applying not only to information that has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse, but rather to any information that provides a salient inferential link to the prior discourse. Extending Prince’s notion in this manner allows us to account for the distribution of noncanonically positioned peripheral constituents in a principled and unified way

Discourse and information structure

In addition to deciding what to say, speakers must decide how tosay it. The central premise of studies on the relationship between syntax and discourse function is that a speaker's use of a particular structural option is constrained by specific aspects of the context of utterance. Work in discourse has uncovered a variety of specific discourse functions served by individual syntactic constructions. More recently, in Birner & Ward 1998 we examine generalizations that apply across constructions, identifying ways in which a given functional principle is variously realized in similar but distinct constructions

User Reviews and Language

The number of user reviews of tourist attractions, restaurants, mobile apps, etc. is increasing for all languages; yet, research is lacking on how reviews in multiple languages should be aggregated and displayed. Speakers of different languages may have consistently different experiences, e.g., different information available in different languages at tourist attractions or different user experiences with software due to internationalization/localization choices. This paper assesses the similarity in the ratings given by speakers of different languages to London tourist attractions on TripAdvisor. The correlations between different languages are generally high, but some language pairs are more correlated than others. The results question the common practice of computing average ratings from reviews in many languages

User Reviews and Language: How Language Influences Ratings

The number of user reviews of tourist attractions, restaurants, mobile apps, etc. is increasing for all languages; yet, research is lacking on how reviews in multiple languages should be aggregated and displayed. Speakers of different languages may have consistently different experiences, e.g., different information available in different languages at tourist attractions or different user experiences with software due to internationalization/localization choices. This paper assesses the similarity in the ratings given by speakers of different languages to London tourist attractions on TripAdvisor. The correlations between different languages are generally high, but some language pairs are more correlated than others. The results question the common practice of computing average ratings from reviews in many languages