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.

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Metadaten
Author:Betty J. Birner
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-308947
URL:http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/193.html?&L=0%20order%20by%201000%20--
ISSN:1435-9588
ISSN:0947-7055
Parent Title (English):Proceedings of the Dislocated Elements Workshop : ZAS Berlin, November 2003 / Ed.: Benjamin Shaer ... , Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, Berlin, 2004; ZAS papers in linguistics Vol. 35
Publisher:Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung
Place of publication:Berlin
Document Type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2013/11/14
Year of first Publication:2004
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Contributing Corporation:Dislocated Elements Workshop
Release Date:2013/11/14
GND Keyword:Pragmatik; Syntax; Wortstellung; Englisch
Volume:35
Page Number:22
First Page:41
Last Page:62
HeBIS-PPN:381234134
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Linguistik-Klassifikation:Linguistik-Klassifikation: Syntax
Linguistik-Klassifikation: Pragmalinguistik/Kommunikationsforschung / Pragmalinguistics/Communication research
Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte:ZAS papers in linguistics : ZASPiL / ZASPiL 35 = Proceedings of the Dislocated Elements Workshop : ZAS Berlin, November 2003
:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-306765
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht