TY  - CHAP
A1  - Birner, Betty J.
T1  - Discourse Functions at the Periphery : Noncanonical Word Order in English
T2  - 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
N2  - 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.
KW  - Pragmatik
KW  - Syntax
KW  - Wortstellung
KW  - Englisch
Y1  - 2004
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/30894
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-308947
UR  - http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/193.html?&L=0%20order%20by%201000%20--
SN  - 1435-9588
SN  - 0947-7055
VL  - 35
SP  - 41
EP  - 62
PB  - Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung
CY  - Berlin
ER  -