Information structure and the accessibility of clausally introduced referents

This paper will examine the role of various factors in affecting the salience, and hence the accessibility to pronominal reference, of entities introduced into a discourse by a full clause. We begin with the premise that the possibility of pronominal reference with it versus that depends on the cognitive status of the referent, in the sense of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993). This formulation of the problem provides grounds for an explanation of the data presented above, and provides a framework within which we examine the role of various other factors in promoting the salience of a clausally introduced entity, including the information structure of the utterance in which the entity is introduced. For entities introduced by clausal complements to bridge verbs, we show that the information structure of the utterance introducing the entity has a partial, or one-sided, effect on the salience of the entity. When the complement clause is focal, the salience of the entity depends only on its referential givenness-newness (in the sense of Gundel 1988, 1999b), as we would expect. But when the complement clause is ground material, the salience of an entity introduced by the clause is enhanced. Other factors, including the presuppositionality of factive and interrogative complements, also serve to enhance the salience of entities introduced by complement clauses

Givenness, Implicature, and the Form of Referring Expressions

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 442-45

Towards a Fine-Grained Theory of Focus

This paper investigates the roles of focus, arguing that such a notion is too wide and can be applied to several phenomena. I show that focus needs to be further specified for (at least) another feature and is therefore made of smaller primitive traits. These can combine to create bundles of features, which give rise to the several types of foci we know. Moreover, these features are subject to parametrization and can thus account for cross-linguistic differences

Information Structure and Referential Givenness/Newness: How Much Belongs in the Grammar

This paper is concerned with such concepts as `topic`, `focus ` and `cognitive status of discourse referents’, which have been included under the label ‘information structure’, as they relate in some sense to the distribution of given and new information. It addresses the question of which information structural properties are best accounted for by grammatical constraints and which can be attributed to non-linguistic constraints on the way information is processed and communicated. Two logically independent senses of given-new information are distinguished, one referential and the other relational. I argue that some phenomena pertaining to each of these senses must be accounted for in the grammar, while others are pragmatic effects that do not have to be represented in the grammar, since they result from interaction of the language system with general pragmatic principles that constrain inferential processes involved in language production and understanding. 1

Topic, focus, and the grammar-pragmatics interface

“Although the subject matter of pragmatic theory is ostensibly linguistic communication, much of it deals, in fact, with the more general problem of human interaction, which is independent of linguistic considerations and of which linguistic communication is just a particular manifestation. Thus, as Grice points out, his principle of cooperation holds equally for rational conversation and for baking a cake. Sentence topics, by contrast, are a pragmatic phenomenon which is specifically linguistic.” I agree with Reinhart that sentence topic is a specifically linguistic phenomenon. But I will propose in this paper that it is not primarily a pragmatic or discourse phenomenon as Reinhart and others have assumed. It is an integral part of the semantic/conceptual representation of natural language sentences, which is encoded (though not always unambiguously) by their morpho-syntactic and/or phonological form. The fact that topiccomment structure contributes to the way sentences are processed and interpreted in context, and thus constrains the appropriate contexts for a given sentence, doesn’t necessarily distinguish this notion from other aspects of the meaning of sentences. The important question then isn’t whether some particular linguistic phenomenon has pragmatic effects or not, but which of its properties are determined by the grammar and which can be derived from more general cognitive and communicative principles. Much of what I will have to say in this paper isn’t new, but I hope that reformulating the question in this way will shed new light on some old controversies, if not resolve them. 2 Some History This paper is an expanded version of an essay submitted to the Chomsky birthday celebration websit