Elke Kasimir´s paper (in this volume) argues against employing the notion of Givenness in the explanation of accent assignment. I will claim that the arguments against Givenness put forward by Kasimir are inconclusive because they beg the question of the role of Givenness. It is concluded that, more generally, arguments against Givenness as a diagnostic for information structural partitions should not be accepted offhand, since the notion of Givenness of discourse referents is (a) theoretically simple, (b) readily observable and quantifiable, and (c) bears cognitive significance

Weskott, Thomas

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Stop Bashing Givenness!A Note on Elke Kasimir’s “Questions-Answers Test andGivenness”∗Thomas WeskottUniversit¨ at PotsdamElke Kasimir’s paper (in this volume) argues against employing the no-tion of Givenness in the explanation of accent assignment. I will claimthat the arguments against Givenness put forward by Kasimir are in-conclusive because they beg the question of the role of Givenness. Itis concluded that, more generally, arguments against Givenness as adiagnostic for information structural partitions should not be acceptedoffhand, since the notion of Givenness of discourse referents is (a) the-oretically simple, (b) readily observable and quantiﬁable, and (c) bearscognitive signiﬁcance.Keywords: GivennessIn her paper “Questions-Answers Test and Givenness: Some Question Marks”(thisvolume),ElkeKasimirarguesagainstthequestion-answertestforfocussedconstituents on the ground that it involves the assumption of “(...) unneces-sarily complex focus projection rules and focus interpretation rules” (Kasimir,2005, p. 13)1). In addition to their allegedly unnecessary comlexity, these rulesare incriminated for the fact that they “(...)need additional pragmatic input inform of a givenness property (...)”(pp.15, 18f.; Kasimir’s emphasis), the addi-tion of which the author claims to be too high a price to pay (ibd.). Furthermore,Kasimir claims that an alternative analysis which abandons Givenness as an in-gredient in the explanation of accent placement makes better predictions for a∗ Thanks to Elke Kasimir for letting me comment on her paper, as well as for clarifying dis-cussion. The usual disclaimer holds.1 Henceforth, all quotes refer to that paper unless indicated otherwise.Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 03 (2005): 53–62Ishihara, S., M. Schmitz, and A. Schwarz (eds.):c  2005 Thomas Weskott54 Thomas Weskottcertain class of examples.While I do not intend to comment on the last claim, and lacking a commonlyagreed upon metric for the complexity of focus projection and/or interpretationrules that would put me in a position to grapple with the ﬁrst claim, I will onlydeal with the second, the argument against the usefulness of Givenness in deter-mining accent assignment. But before doing so, a disclaimer might be in place. IassumethatwhatIhavetosayisneutralwithrespecttoKasimir’sﬁrstclaim,i.e.I assume that my stance on the theoretical and empirical usefulness of the notionof Givenness is independent of that of the question-answer test. Furthermore, Itake it that none of the following takes sides as regards the issue of which theoryof focus interpretation is to be preferred (e.g., localist vs. globalist accounts, cf.J¨ ager (2004)). And ﬁnally, I will not try to propose a ﬂeshed-out Givenness-based account of accent assignment or focus interpretation; for the latter, thereader is referred to Sauerland (2004), for the former, to Wagner (2005).Kasimir argues that in order to make use of the question-answer test as adiagnostic for accent placement, one has to assume focus projection rules andfocus interpretation rules which are said to be unnecessarily complex . As afurther and apparently even more severe drawback, she claims that these rulesneed additional pragmatic input from a Givenness property, and that to assumesuch additional input is too high a price to pay.My argument against this position is going to run down the following line:Firstly, I will show that Kasimir’s critical example holds Givenness in store ata relatively low price—in fact, that Givenness is for free in this case. Secondly,I will argue that it is unclear exactly how Kasimir’s alternative strategy, i.e.to account for the accent placement in this example by recourse to alternativesets plus a pragmatic rule that restricts the answer set, should work withoutappealing to Givenness, and that it indeed necessitates appeal to Givenness justComment on Kasimir 55as much as the analysis it purports to supersede. I conclude that the argument forthe alternative account and the argument against the Givenness-based accountare equally inconclusive.My second point will be more general and is concerned with the theoreticalstatus of the notion of Givenness of discourse referents in determining informa-tion structural partitions. I will point out that, its shortcomings already revealedby Reinhart (1981) notwithstanding, it is indispensable as a heuristic for detect-ing focus-background and topic-comment structures, and that its theoretical aswell as its empirical value lie in its fruitfulness for a cognitive understanding ofthe role information structure plays in natural language.The pair of examples playing the central role in Kasimir’s argument againsta Givenness-based account of accent placement are the following (I stick toKasimir’s numbering for convenience): 2(28) Q. Who owns a bicycle?A. [This STUdent ]FOC owns a bicycle.As regards (28), Kasimir notes that the question-answer test (in its context-sensitive variant) correctly predicts the focus of the answer to be this student,which ultimately yields the correct accent assignment . This example is con-trasted with the following:(29) Q. As for the students: who owns a bicycle?A. THIS student owns a bicycle.2 For what follows, I will assume for the sake of argument that Kasimir’s deﬁnitions for accentplacement and the question-answer test as given in the ﬁrst three sections of her paper arecorrect—by which statement I do not mean to imply that they are not, but rather that I willtake them for granted.56 Thomas WeskottThe issue Kasimir points to is “(...) that (28.Q) asks for arbitrary bicycle-owners, whereas (29.Q) is contextually understood to speciﬁcally ask for a DPwhich selects from students.“ (p.16). The question is, then, how this differencecan be linked to the differences in requirements on pitch accent placement.Kasimir offers two logical possibilities: one can either try to account for the dif-ferences between (28.A) and (29.A) by adjusting the rules for focus projection,or, and that is Kasimir’s choice, by sticking to the projection rules assumed sofar and ﬁx the problem instead by assuming a different interpretive mechanism(alternative sets plus a restriction on the set of contextually salient answers).The relevant sets and the respective focus-background structures of the answerslook like this:(35) a. contextually appropriate answers to (28.Q):{ x owns a bicycle | x an individual }b. contextually appropriate answers to (29.Q):{ x is one of the students and owns a bicycle | x an individual }c. [This STUdent]FOC owns a bicycle FOC{ x owns a bicycle | x an individual }d.  THISFOC student owns a bicycle FOC{ x is a student and owns a bicycle | x an individual }Let us ﬁrst consider the ﬁrst alternative, which Kasimir rejects. The reasonfor this rejection is that it involves the adjustment of focus projection rules soas to respect the property of Givenness (cf. her rule (31), p.17), which is said to“(...) involve reference to additional pragmatic input (...)” (p.18).Let me comment on that last point ﬁrst. No matter whether one assumes adynamic or a classical interpretation procedure, I take it that establishing theComment on Kasimir 57relation between the wh-pronoun restricted by the as for-phrase and the subjectof the answer involves no additional input whatsoever, be it semantic or prag-matic, since the anaphoric relation between the two sets of discourse referentsis just there. So Givenness has not to be stipulated or derived for any price, itcan be had for free. This point can be made even stronger if the question is para-phrased by the following variant featuring a d-linked wh-pronoun, which doesthe same (at least for the issue at hand) as the as for-phrase, viz. to restrict thedomain of the wh-element to the extension of the noun:(29’) Q. Which student owns a bicycle?A. THIS student owns a bicycle.The next question is how the focus projection rules can be made sensitiveto Givenness or the alternative property proposed by Kasimir. According to her,this alternative works as follows: ﬁrstly, the set of contextually appropriate an-swers are computed, and so are the alternative sets generated by the respectiveanswers; the minimal set matching both restrictions then decides which is thecorrect focus-background structure, which in turn yields the correct accent as-signment for the answer. On the Givenness account, the projection rules haveto be made sensitive to the fact that the restrictor of the complex demonstrativethis student is mentioned, presupposed, or inferable from context (cf. p.18).My worry here is the following: it is crucial to Kasimir’s argument that theway in which the complex demonstrative this N contributes to the computationof the alternative sets containing it does not depend on any kind of Givenness(on pain of begging the question). So obviously it is not sufﬁcient to determinethe meaning and the semantic type of a demonstrative of the form this N (asKasimir does on p.24), but one also has to pin down the information structuralproperties of such phrases, more speciﬁcally: whether a phrase of the form thisN carries the presupposition that there exists an N. Whatever the theoretical58 Thomas Weskottstance on this question (s. Lepore & Ludwig (2000) for a discussion), I thinkthat either answer will ﬁt uncomfortably with Kasimir’s alternative proposal.That is because if we assume that a complex demonstrative of the form this Nhas roughly the logical form[t h ex:xi sthis and x is N ]and further assume that the quantiﬁer the x carries an existential and auniqueness presupposition which enters into the computation of the alternativeset of an utterance containing it, Kasimir’s alternative proposal will become cor-rupt because it begs the question of the role of Givenness. On the other hand,if we assume that no such presupposition is present in the computation of thealternative sets, the question arises where these sets come from in the ﬁrst place.If I understand her correctly, Kasimir argues that in order to arrive at the rightkind of alternative sets, she makes use of a notion of Givenness she consid-ers uncontroversial, namely one that characterizes as given something which is“(...) corresponding to those parts of a sentence which are not focused, and arethus common to all focus alternatives.” (p. 34, fn.14).Now it seems obvious to me that this way of reasoning simply reverses theorder of explanation (a focus-background structure is taken for granted in theconstruction of the alternative sets, instead of derived at by taking the latter andthe context into consideration), and hence puts the argument for Kasimir’s al-ternative account in jeopardy of becoming circular.Eitherway,IfailtoseeinwhichwayKasimir’salternativeaccountcanmakesense of the minimization of the superset of the set of contextually appropriateanswers and the alternative sets without relying on some notion of Givenness,be it one that comes from the presupposition of the question, or one stemmingfrom the presupposition of the complex demonstrative, or both. Her way of de-riving at the alternative sets by taking a focus-background structure for grantedComment on Kasimir 59is at best inconclusive, at worst circular. Moreover, given the straightforwardanaphoric relation between the set denoted by the question and the set denotedby the focussed part of the answer, I do not see a reason for her reluctance toemploy a notion of Givenness in the derivation of accent placement, its pricenot being, as I have argued, high at all.The reason for discussing Kasimir’s claims with respect to the notion ofGivenness—apart from the formal details criticised above—is as more gen-eral one: critical evaluations of that notion which are similar in spirit to thatof Kasimir’s (e.g. in Reinhart, 1981, and, more recently, Krifka, 2004, a.o.)have shown it to be neither sufﬁcient, nor even necessary for the determinationof focus-background and topic-comment structures and, accordingly, accent as-signment, in various cases. While I certainly do not intend to question theseﬁndings, I want to raise the issue whether they countervail against the use of thatnotion in information structure research in general. My answer to that questionis in the negative, and it is for the following three reasons.Firstly, I consider the notion of Givenness, for all its shortcomings in somespecial cases, to be the simplest observable information structural property ofdiscoursereferents.Althoughthenotionofanaphoricityisnotunproblematicei-ther, having an explicit antecedent in context (i.e., being mentioned) is a featureof natural language expressions that can be detected even by non-linguists. Thatalone would, of course, not make it theoretically interesting.3 But, secondly,properties such as the systematicity of distance of antecedent and anaphoricelement on the one hand, and form of expression (s. e.g. Ariel, 1990) on theother, as well as the systematic recurrence of given elements in referential (ortopic) chains illustrate the explanatory potential of the notion of Givenness in3 Although it certainly is a virtue in e.g. instructing naive annotators how to detect informationstructural properties of parts of speech in corpora, which would be even more troublesomean endeavour if one were solely to rely on notions like Relevance, Contrast, Aboutness, etc.60 Thomas Weskottan exemplary fashion, since both of these properties are quantiﬁable and hencecan be put to empirical test. This brings me to the third point: not only can thesystematicities of Givenness explain certain properties of texts, they moreoverhave been shown to be highly effective in the actual production and percep-tion of natural language (s. Garrod & Sanford, 1994, for an overview). To givebut one recent example: the notion of Givenness has been shown to be crucialin explaining the data pattern in a series of experiments on the comprehensionof locative inversion constructions, since both effects on reading times foundin these experiments (Relatum=Given, and the well-established Given-before-New effect) make reference to it (cf. H¨ ornig et al., 2005, and H¨ ornig et al., toappear; but s.also Clifton & Frazier (2004) for a slightly different view on therole of Givenness in comprehension).It is on these grounds that I think arguments against the role of Givenness inthe explanation of information structural partitions should be put under closescrutiny, and even if Givenness-based explanations of information structuralphenomena were only to be had at a certain price, they may eventually justbe worth it.Comment on Kasimir 61BibliographyClifton, Charles, & Lyn Frazier (2004). Should given information come beforenew? Yes and no. Memory and Cognition, 32(6):886–895.Garrod, Simon & Anthony J. Sanford (1994). Resolving Sentences in a Dis-course Context: How Discourse Representation Affects Language Under-standing. In Morton Ann Gernsbacher, editor, Handbook of Psycholinguis-tics, pages 675–698. Academic Press, New York.H¨ ornig, Robin, Klaus Oberauer & Andrea Weidenfeld (2005). Two principlesof premise integration in spatial reasoning. Memory & Cognition, 33(1):131–139.H¨ ornig, Robin, Thomas Weskott, Reinhold Kliegl & Gisbert Fanselow (to ap-pear). Word order variation in spatial descriptions with adverbs. Memory &Cognition.J¨ ager, Gerhard (2004). Alternatives or presuppositions? A comparison of theBackground-Presupposition Rule with Alternative Semantics. TheoreticalLinguistics, 30(1):111–122.Kasimir, Elke (2005). Questions-Answers Test and Givenness: Some QuestionMarks. In Ishihara, Shinichiro, Michaela Schmitz & Anne Schwarz, editors,ISIS, vol. 3, pages 1–52. Universit¨ atsverlag, Potsdam.Krifka, Manfred (2004). The Semantics of Questions and the Focusation ofAnswers. InLee, Chungmin,MatthewGordon&Daniel B¨ uring,editor,Topicand Focus: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Intonation and Meaning, pages139–151. Kluwer, Dordrecht.Lepore, Ernest & Kirk Ludwig (2000). The Semantics and Pragmatics of Com-plex Demonstratives. Mind, 109.434:199–240.62 Thomas WeskottReinhart, Tanya (1981). Pragmatics and Linguistics: An Analysis of SentenceTopics. Philosophica, 27 (1):53–94.Wagner, Michael (2005). Givenness and Locality. Handout for a talk held atUniversity of Potsdam, January 18, 2005.Thomas WeskottSFB 632, Project C1Universit¨ at PotsdamPostfach 60155314415 PotsdamGermanyweskott@uni-potsdam.dewww.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/homes/weskott/

Alternatives or presuppositions? A comparison of the Background-Presupposition Rule with Alternative Semantics.

Givenness and Locality. Handout for a talk held at

Questions-Answers Test and Givenness: Some Question Marks.

Resolving Sentences in a Discourse Context: How Discourse Representation Affects Language Understanding. In

Should given information come before new? Yes and no.

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Complex Demonstratives.

Two principles of premise integration in spatial reasoning.

Stop bashing givenness : a note on Elke Kasimir´s "questions-answers test and givenness"

Stop bashing givenness : a note on Elke Kasimir´s "questions-answers test and givenness"

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