Information structure and referential givenness/newness: How much belongs in the grammar?

Abstract

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 (alternatively information status), as they are related 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 discuss some examples of linguistic phenomena that pertain to each of these different senses and show that both are linguistically relevant and must be represented in the grammar. I also argue that phenomena related to both senses have 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.

Preverbal Subjects with a Partitive Article: A Comparison Between Aosta Valley Francoprovençal and French*

“…Different degrees of referential givenness/newness are possible if we are not dealing with a binary notion. That the concepts involved in referential givenness according to Gundel (2003), i.e. (in)definiteness, (non‐)specificity, etc., involve scales has been proposed in the literature: for instance, Farkas (2000) proposes the following scale, which combines the notions of (in)definiteness and (non‐)specificity (2000, her (4)):…”

“…What we have proposed is that there are more than two types of languages when it comes to the status of preverbal subjects: Francoprovenc ßal falls between the two types of languages postulated in Dobrovie-Sorin & Laca (2003) as it generally has topical subjects like Italian/Spanish but also allows some subjects that represent new information to occur preverbally. In contrast to French, however, this option is restricted to nominals that reach a certain degree of referential givenness (Gundel 2003), like plurals that are count, compared to mass nouns. Since the two contexts examined here are thetic (i.e., they do not involve a topic-comment articulation), DE-subjects are excluded from the preverbal position, except when they are sufficiently referentially given.…”

“…In Section 3, we will present the results of the fieldwork carried out in the Aosta Valley, focusing on the two contexts representing our puzzle, namely sentences with a stage‐level predicate and generic emphatic constructions. Our analysis is developed in Section 4: we first show that a binary notion like literacy/non‐literacy cannot explain our results for Francoprovençal, which is mainly oral; we then report Dobrovie‐Sorin & Laca’s (2003) typology of languages according to the status of their subjects, highlight the challenges Francoprovençal represents for this typology, and propose a more fine‐grained classification resorting to referential givenness (Gundel 2003) to account for the variation found in the Francoprovençal data. In addition, for the generic emphatic context, we show the importance of an explicit argumentative context for the corrective interpretation to obtain.…”

“…because preverbal subjects usually represent discourse-old information (Prince 1992), whereas indefinites introduce discourse-new referents (Brasoveanu & Farkas 2016; on PA subjects see Carlier 2000, Vogeleer & Tasmowski 2005. To do so, we will use the notion of referential givenness (Gundel 2003), which involves concepts like familiarity for definite description (Heim 1982), specificity (Enc ß 1991), referentiality (Fodor & Sag 1982), and the hearer-old/new and discourse old/new statuses of Prince (1992). Importantly, referential givenness/newness is logically independent from relational givenness/newness, that is, the relation between topics/themes and comments/rhemes mentioned in Section 4.2.1, although there may be a connection between the two types of givenness/newness (e.g., 'definiteness/ presupposition' effect of topics in Japanese and Korean, Kuno 1972, Kuroda 1965, mentioned in Gundel & Fretheim 2004.…”

“…Different degrees of referential givenness/newness are possible if we are not dealing with a binary notion. That the concepts involved in referential givenness according to Gundel (2003), i.e. (in)definiteness, (non-)specificity, etc., involve scales has been proposed in the literature: for instance, Farkas (2000) proposes the following scale, which combines the notions of (in)definiteness and (non-)specificity (2000, her (4)): Crucially, Farkas observes that this scale is not exhaustive and that various noun phrase types are missing: on the indefinite side, which is the relevant part of the scale to us, she mentions bare nouns, which should be outranked by indefinites with determiners (Farkas 2000:2).…”