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.
Author: | Betty J. Birner |
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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): | Deutsches Urheberrecht |