In this series
S3
54
36
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57
MICHAEL S. ROCHEMONT and PETER W. CULICOVER: English focus
opnrtrurtionr and the theory of grammar
PHILIP CARR: Linguistic realities: an autonomist metatheory for the generative
enterprise
EVE SiWEETSER: From etymology to pragmatics: metaphorical and cultural
aspects of semantic structure
REGINA BLASS: Relevance relations in discourse: a study with special reference
to Simla
ANDREW CHESTERMAN: On definiteness: a study with special reference to
English and Finnish
ALESSANDRA GIORGI and GIUSEPPE LONGOBARDI: The syntax of
noun phrases: configuration, parameters and empty categories
MONIK CHARETTE: Conditions on phonological government
M. H. KLA1MAN: Grammatical voice
SARAH M. B. FAGAN: The syntax and semantics of middle constructions: a
study with special reference to German
ANJUM P- SALEEM1: Universal Grammar and language learnability
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON: A-Morphous Morphology
LESLEY STIRLING: Switch reference and discourse representation.
HENK J. VERKUYL; A theory of aspectualily: the interaction between
temporal and aiempora) structure
EVE V. CLARK: The lexicon in acquisition
ANTHONY R. WARNER: English auxiliaries: structure and history
P. H. MATl HEWS: Grammatical theory in the United States from Bloomfield
to Chomsky
LJILIANA PROGOVAC: Negative and positive polarity: a binding approach
R. M. W. DIXON: Ergativity
YAN HUANG: The syntax and pragmatics of anaphora
71
KNUD LAMBRECHT. Information structure and sentence form: topic, focus,
and the mental representations of discourse referents
Supplementary volumes
RUDOLF P. BOTHA: Form and meaning in word formation: a study of
Afrikaans reduplication
AYHAN AKSU-KOC The acquisition of aspect and modality: the case of past
reference in Turkish
MICHAEL O SLADHA1L: Modem Irish: grammatical structure and dialectal
variation
ANNICK DE HOUWER: The acquisition of two languages from birth: a case
study
LILIANE HAEGEMAN: Theory and description in generative syntax: a case
study in West Flemish
INFORMA A LOIN diftUvuuiKL
AND SENTENCE FORM
Topic, focus, and the mental representations of
discourse referents
KNUD LAMBRECHT
Department of French and Italian
University cf Texas al Austin
gg Cambridge
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate Of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP
40 West 20th Street, New York. NY 10011-4211 USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
© Cambridge University Press 1994
First published 1994
Reprinted 1995
Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear
,4 catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
Lambrecht, Knud.
Information structure and sentence form, topic, focus, and the
menial representations of discourse referents / Knud Lambrecht,
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 38056 I
1. Grammar. Contparattve and general - Sentences. 2. Grammar,
Comparative and general - Syntax. 3. Discourse analysis.
4. Pragmatics. L Title.
P295.L36 1994
415-dc20 93-30380 CIP
ISBN 0 521 38056 I hardback
TS
This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents:
Annie and Hans Lambrecht
I.
Contents
Preface
1
Introduction
LI What is information structure?
1.2 The place of information structure in grammar
1.3 Information structure and sentence form: asample
analysis
1.3.1 Three examples
1.3.2 A note on markedness in information structure
1.3.3 Analysis
1.3.4 Summary
1.4 Information structure and syntax
1.4.1 Autonomy versus motivation in grammar
1.4.2 The functional underspecification of syntactic
structures
1.4.3 Sentence types and the notion of grammatical
construction
2
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
Information
The universe of discourse
Information
Presupposition and assertion
The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional
structure
3
The mental representations of discourse referents
3.1 Discourse referents
3.2 Identifiability
3.2.1 Identifiability and presupposition
3.2.2 Identifiability and definiteness
xiii
1
1
6
13
13
15
19
24
25
26
29
32
36
36
43
51
65
74
74
77
77
79
Contents
X
3,2.3 The establishment of identifiability in discourse
Activation
3,3.1 The activation stales of referents
3.3.2 Principles of pragmatic construal
3.4 Summary and illustration
3.5 Identifiability, activation, and the topic-focus parameter
87
93
93
101
105
113
4
4.1
117
117
117
127
131
131
3.3
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
4.7
5
5.1
Pragmatic relations: topic
Definition of topic
4.1.1 Topic and aboutness
4.1.2 Topic referents and topic expressions
Topic and subject
4.2.1 Subjects as unmarked topics
4.2.2 Non-topical subjects and the thetic-categorical
distinction
137
4.2.3 Topical non-subjects and multiple-topic sentences
Topic, presupposition, and semantic interpretation
Topic and the mental representations of referents
4.4.1 Topic relation and activation state
4.4.2 The Topic Acceptability Scale
4.4.3 Unaccented pronominals as preferred topic
expressions
172
4.4.4 Topic promotion
4.4.4.1 Presentational constructions
4.4.4.2 Detachment constructions
Implications for syntactic theory
4.5.1 The Principle of the Separation of Reference
and Role
184
4.5.2 The PSRR and the canonical sentence model
4.5.3 The syntactic status of detached constituents
Topic and pragmatic accommodation
Topic andword order
Pragmatic relations: focus
Definition of focus
5.1.1 Focus, presupposition, and assertion
5.1.2 Focus and sentence accents
5.2 Focus structure and focus marking
5.2.1 Types of focus structure
146
150
160
160
165
176
177
181
184
189
192
195
199
206
206
206
218
221
221
Contents
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6
5.7
6
xi
5.2.2 Predicate-focus structure
5.2.3 Argument-focus structure
5.2.4 Sentence-focus structure
5.2.5 Summary
Prosodic accents: ¡conicity, rule, default
5.3.1 Accent, intonation, stress
5.3.2 Iconic motivation versus grammatical rule
5.3.3 Default accentuation
Focus and the mental representations of referents
5.4.1 Focus relation and activation state
5.4.2 Predicates versus arguments
5.4.3 Focus relation, activation, and presupposition
5.4.3.1 Complete presupposed propositions
5.4.3.2 Open presupposed propositions
5.4.4 Focus and information questions
Contrastiveness
5.5.1 Contrastive foci
5.5.2 Contrastive topics
Marked and unmarked focus structure
5.6.1 Predicate focus and argument focus
5.6.2 Sentence focus
5.6.2.1 The theoretical issue
5.6.2.2 Previous approaches
5.6.2.3 Prosodic inversion
A unified functional account of sentenceaccentuation
5.7.1 Activation prosody revisited
5.7.2 Topic accents and focus accents:some examples
226
228
233
235
238
238
241
248
257
257
264
269
270
277
282
286
286
291
296
297
307
307
311
318
322
323
326
Summary and conclusion
334
Notes
References
Index
341
362
376
Preface
This book proposes a theory of the relationship between the structure of
sentences and the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts in which
sentences are used as units of propositional information. It is concerned
with the system of options which grammars offer speakers for expressing
given propositional contents in different grammatical forms under
varying discourse circumstances. The research presented here is based
on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects in systematic
and theoretically interesting ways a speaker's assumptions about the
hearer’s state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of an utterance.
This relationship between speaker assumptions and the formal structure
of the sentence is taken to be governed by rules and conventions of
sentence grammar, in a grammatical component which I call informa­
tion structure, using a term introduced by Halliday (1967). In the
information-structure component of language, propositions as concep­
tual representations of states of affairs undergo pragmatic structuring
according to the utterance contexts in which these states of affairs are to
be communicated. Such pragmatically structured propositions are
then expressed as formal objects with morphosyntactic and prosodic
structure.
My account of the information-structure component involves an
analysis of four independent but interrelated sets of categories. The first
is that of propositional information with its two components pragmatic
presupposition and pragmatic assertion. These have to do with the
speaker’s assumptions about the hearer’s state of knowledge and
awareness at the time of an utterance (Chapter 2). The second set of
categories is that of identifiability and activation, which have to do
with the speaker's assumptions about the nature of the representations of
the referents of linguistic expressions in the hearer’s mind at the time of
an utterance and with the constant changes which these representations
undergo in the course of a conversation (Chapter 3). The third category is
xiv
Preface
that of topic, which has to do with the pragmatic relation of aboutness
between discourse referents and propositions in given discourse contexts
(Chapter 4). The fourth category is that of focus, which is that element in
a pragmatically structured proposition whereby the assertion differs from
the presupposition and which makes the utterance of a sentence
informative (Chapter 5). Each of these categories or sets of categories
is shown to correlate directly with structural properties of the sentence.
The theoretical orientation of this study is generative, if “generative” is
understood as referring to linguistic analyses which do not merely
describe observed structures but which also attempt to explain why
certain structures do not occur in a grammar. However, in analyzing the
facts of information structure 1 was often led to an alternative, nongenerative, approach to grammatical analysis, in which the function of a
given lexicogrammatical structure is not interpreted compositionally, in
terms of the meanings of its parts, but globally, in terms of the formal
contrast between the entire structure and semantically equivalent
alternative structures provided by the grammar. In terms of Saussure's
fundamental dichotomy, the study of information structure requires an
analysis not only of the syntagmatic relations between the elements of a
sentence but also, and importantly, of the associative relations between
different sentence structures as they are stored in the memory of speakers
and hearers. Methodologically, this study is an attempt to combine
insights from formal and from functional approaches to grammatical
analysis.
My ambition in the present work was not to define the informationstructure component in such a way that it would fit one or another of the
established generative or functionalist frameworks but rather to lay the
theoretical groundwork which will make such integration possible and
meaningful. (Such integration will no doubt be easier with frameworks
which do not postulate a hierarchical ordering and strict separation of the
different components of grammar.) Throughout the book, the emphasis
is on the notional foundations of the theory of information structure in
natural language. Special importance has therefore been attributed to
elaborating the basic concepts and terms needed to describe and define
this underexplored part of grammar. In particular, I have tried to provide
definitions of, and alternative labels lor, lhe concepts of "new
information” and "old information'' winch will help prevent some of
the confusion that tends to creep into analyses w hich make use ot these
Preface
xv
concepts. My definitions of the notions of “topic" and “focus” serve a
similar goal
The book contains relatively few analyses of linguistic data, and most
of these data are from English. However, the principles discussed have
wide crosslinguistic applicability. The volume also contains little by way
of formalism. I believe, however, that the presented theory is explicit
enough to be amenable to formalization. I hope my attempt will
encourage other researchers to pursue the task and to correct whatever is
wrong or misguided in my approach.
The present volume was originally planned as an introduction to a
book dealing with the relationship between syntax and discourse in
spoken French. It was to provide the theoretical foundation for the
analysis of a number of pragmatically motivated French construction
types. As my work on that introduction progressed it became clear that
the theory was too complex to be dealt with in the same volume as its
application to a particular language. At the same time, in working on the
analysis of spoken French data, I realized that more space was needed to
present a coherent picture of the manifestation of information structure
in that language. The analysis of spoken French will therefore appear as a
separate volume (Lambrecht, in preparation).
The present book is a continuation of research presented in my Ph.D.
dissertation, which was completed in 1986 in the Department-.of
Linguistics of the University of California at Berkeley, under the title
“Topic, focus, and the grammar of spoken French." I would like to
thank again the members of my Ph D. committee, Charles Fillmore,
Suzanne Fleischman, Paul Kay, Johanna Nichols, and Karl Zimmer for
their help and encouragement. Among them, I would like to single out
my thesis director Charles Fillmore, who more than anyone has shaped
my ideas about language and linguistics. His influence is manifested in
many aspects of the present book. I am also grateful to Wallace Chafe,
who allowed me to pursue my research while I was his research assistant
at the Institute of Cognitive Studies at Berkeley. Much of the material in
Chapter 3 of the present volume was conceived in relation and reaction to
his ideas. And I would like to thank my former fellow graduate students
Farrell Ackerman, Claudia Brugmann, Giulia Centineo, Amy Dahlstrom, Pamela Downing, Mark Gawron, Tom Larsen, Yoshiko
Matsumoto. Shigeko Okamoto, David Solnit, and especially Cathy
O’Connor for many stimulating discussions concerning my work and
theirs. Thanks are due also to Ruth Berman, Martin Harris, Peter Pause,
dPtori Postal. Annin Schwerer, and Sandy Thompson for their comments
on various parts of my dissertation, and to my friend Lenny Moss for
«naking me aware of connections between my work and research in other
Scientific disciplines.
The present book has greatly benefitted from discussions with Lee
Baker, Charles Fillmore, Suzanne Fleishmann, Danielle Forget, Mirjam
-Fried, Paul Kay, Manfred Krifka, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Dale Koike,
Francois Lagarde, Ellen Prince, Carlota Smith, and Tony Woodbury. I
am particularly grateful to Robert Van Valin for his interest in my work
and his encouragement in difficult times, and to Laura Michaelis for her
loving help and her faith in the value of this enterprise. Special thanks are
due also to Matthew Dryer for his penetrating criticism of certain
sections of the book, and to Randy LaPoIla, who provided much help
with a careful reading of the manuscript. I am also grateful to a nolonger-anonymous reviewer for Cambridge University Press (Nigel
Vincent) for his comments on parts of the manuscript. But above al] I
want to thank Sue Schmerling for her detailed comments on various
versions of the manuscript, for her gentle yet inexorable criticism, and for
many hours of stimulating discussions in the cafés of Austin. And last,
but certainly not least, I would like to thank my friend Robby Aronowitz,
linguist turned MD, for his love and support over the years. Finally, 1
thank the University of Texas at Austin for a Research Grant which
facilitated work on this book during one air-conditioned summer.
F
1
Introduction
1.1
What is information structure?
There has been and still is disagreement and confusion in linguistic theory
about the nature of the component of language referred to in this book as
information structure and about the status of this component in the
overall system of grammar. The difficulties encountered in the study of
information structure are in part due to the fact that grammatical
analysis at this level is concerned with the relationship between linguistic
form and the mental states of speakers and hearers and that the linguist
dealing with information structure must deal simultaneously with formal
and communicative aspects of language. Information-structure research
neither offers the comfort which many syntacticians find in the idea of
studying an autonomous formal object nor provides the possibility
enjoyed by sociolinguists of pulling aside issues of formal structure for
the sake of capturing the function of language in social interaction.
Negative or defeatist views of information-structure research are
therefore not uncommon, even among linguists who emphasize the
importance of the study of linguistic pragmatics. The following quote
concerning the role of topic and focus in linguistic theory illustrates such
views: "Terminological profusion and confusion, and underlying
conceptual vagueness, plague the relevant literature to a point where
little may be salvageable” (Levinson I983:x). In his own book on
pragmatics, Levinson explicitly excludes the analysis of the relationship
between pragmatics and sentence form, in particular the analysis of
topic-comment structure. Yet interestingly, he contradicts his own
negative appraisal later on in his book with this comment:
Perhaps the most interesting [kinds of interaction between conversa-tional structure and syntax) lie in the area subsumed by the (rather
unclear) notion of topic, for many of the syntactic processes called
mmemeni ru/e.r seem to have the function of indicating how information
1
x
introduction
in the clause relates to what has been talked about before ... Perhaps the
great bulk of the derivational machinery in the syntax of natural
languages can be functionally explained by reference to the specialized
conversational jobs that many sentence structures seem to be designed
to perform. (1983:373)
It seems to me that any theoretical research that has even the slightest
chance of eventually explaining "the bulk of the syntactic processes called
'movement rules’ ” is worth pursuing, however discouraging the present
state of our knowledge may be. I hope this book will reduce some of the
“confusion and vagueness" which “plague the relevant literature" and
thereby help reduce the gap between "formal” and “functional”
approaches to the study of language.1
The difficulties encountered in the analysis of the informationstructure component of grammar are reflected in certain problems of
terminology. In the nineteenth century, some of the issues described here,
in particular the issue of word order and intonation, were discussed in the
context of the relationship between grammar and psychology, as
manifested in the difference between “psychological” and “gramma­
tical" subjects and predicates (see e.g. Paul 1909, especially Chapters 6
and 16). Among the labels which have been used by twentieth-century
linguists are functional sentence perspective, used by scholars of the
Prague School of linguistics, information structure or theme (Halliday
1967), information packaging (Chafe 1976), discourse pragmatics, and
and most recently informatics (Vallduvi 1990b). What unites linguistic
research done under one or another of these headings is the idea that
certain formal properties of sentences cannot be fully understood without
looking at the linguistic and extralinguistic contexts in which the
sentences having these properties are embedded. Since discourse involves
the use of sentences in communicative settings, such research is clearly
associated with the general area of pragmatics. The general domain of
inquiry into the relationship between grammar and discourse is therefore
often referred to as "discourse pragmatics." The reason I have adopted
Halliday’s term “information structure” is because in the present book
special emphasis is placed on the structural implications of discoursepragmatic analysis. Occasionally I will also use Chafe’s more vivid
“information packaging,” whose partially non-latinate character makes
it less appropriate for international use "
What then, is information structure or information packaging?
According to Prince (1981a). information packaging has to do with
|
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<
Whal is information Structure?
>3
the tailoring of an utterance by a sender to meet the particular assumed
needs of the intended receiver. That is, information packaging in natural
language reflects the sender’s hypotheses about the receiver’s assump­
tions and beliefs and strategies. (Prince 1981a:224)
As the word “tailoring” suggests, information structure is concerned with
the form of utterances in relation to assumed mental states of speakers
and hearers. An important part of the “hypotheses about the receivers
assumptions'* are hypotheses about the statuses of the mental
representations of the referents of linguistic expressions in the mind of
the receiver at the moment of utterance. About these statuses, Chafe
(1976) writes:
.
The statuses to be discussed here have more to do with how the content
is transmitted than with the content itself. Specifically, they all ha’vevto
do with the speaker's assessment of how the addressee is able to process
what he is saying against the background of a particular context. Not
only do people's minds contain a large store of knowledge, they.are also
at any one moment in certain temporary states with relation to that
knowledge ... Language functions effectively only if the speaker takes
account of such states in the mind of the person he is talking to. (Chafe
1976:27)
Crucial here is the observation that the study of information structure is
not concerned with lexical and propositional content in the abstract but
with the way such content is transmitted.
An important caveat is in order here. Even though information
structure is concerned with such psychological phenomena as the
speaker's hypotheses about the hearer's mental states, such phenomena
are relevant to the linguist only inasmuch as they are reflected in
grammatical structure (morphosyntax, prosody). The importance of
this caveat cannot be overemphasized. 1 take information structure to be
a component of grammar, more specifically of sentence grammar, i.e. I
take it to be a determining factor in the formal structuring of sentences.
Information structure is not concerned with psychological phenomena
which do not have correlates in grammatical form. This important
limitation imposed on information structure research is stressed by
Prince:
We may now word the basic problem as follows. From the point of view
of the speaker/writer, what kinds of assumptions about the hearer/
reader have a bearing on the form of the text being produced ... ? From
the point of view of the hearer/reader, whal inferences will s/he draw on
*
*
4
famxhtciion
the basil of the particular form chosen? We are, therefore, not
concerned with what one individual may know or hypothesize about
another individual's belief-state except insofar as that knowledge and
those hypotheses affect the forms and understanding of linguistic
productions. (Prince 198Ia:233)
This limitation makes it necessary to draw a theoretical distinction
between the domain of information structure (or discourse pragmatics) as
understood in this book and the general domain of pragmatics, which is
• often understood to be a subdomain of semantics? Indeed since the early
Seventies, when the work of such language philosophers as Austin and
Grice became integrated into mainstream American linguistics, the tenn
"pragmatics” has been intimately associated with the study of meaning.
More particularly, “pragmatics” has been used to refer to the study of
those aspects of the meaning of sentences which cannot be captured with
the tools of truth-conditional semantics? Pragmatics in this sense, or
“conversational pragmatics” (as one might call it in contradistinction to
"discourse pragmatics”), is not so much concerned with grammatical
structure as with the interpretation of sentences in relation to
conversational settings. It was in order to account for this relation
between interpretation and setting that Grice (1975) developed the
concept of conversational implicature.
- The concern with meaning in conversational pragmatics is predomi­
nant not only in the study of conversational implicatures but also in the
study of certain aspects of language use which have more traditionally
been referred to as “pragmatic" and which are clearly reflected in
-linguistic form. What I have in mind is the study of the pragmatic
structure of individual lexical items, which for the purpose of the present
idiscussion we may refer to as “lexical pragmatics." A good example is the
-Study of deixis, the domain par excellence in which language structure
land language use are inseparably intertwined. The study of the inherent
pragmatic properties of deictic expressions is essentially the study of the
Contributions which these expressions make to the meaning and
■ Interpretation rather than to the structure of the sentences containing
■them. Nevertheless lexical pragmatics differs from conversational
pragmatics - and in this respect is related to information structure-in
that the interpretation of sentences containing such expressions is not
determined by conversational inferences but by lexical form.
The student of information structure, on the other hand, is not
primarily concerned with the interpretation of words or sentences in
)
I
What is information structure?
5
given conversational contexts, but rather with the discourse circum­
stances under which given pieces of propositional information are
expressed via one rather than another possible morphosyntactic or
prosodic form. Oversimplifying a little, one could describe the difference
between conversational pragmatics and discourse pragmatics as follows:
while conversational pragmatics is concerned with the question of why
one and the same sentence form may express two or more meanings,
discourse pragmatics is concerned with the question of why one and the
same meaning may be expressed by two or more sentence forms. In the
former there is no necessary relationship between the particular contextdependent interpretation of a proposition and the morphosyntactic or
prosodic structure of the sentence expressing it; in the latter the
relationship between a given sentence form and the function of the
sentence in discourse is directly determined by grammatical conven­
tion.5
There is thus an important though by no means always clear-cut
difference between the two areas of pragmatics, the “conversational" and
the “discourse" area. In the former, as Grice has emphasized, the
inferences which a hearer draws on the basis of the relationship between
the form of a sentence and the particular conversational context in which
the sentence is uttered are determined by general principles of goalonented behavior, which are applicable to language as well as to other
domains of mental activity. In the latter, the pragmatic interpretation
triggered via a particular association between a sentence form and a
discourse context is determined by rules or principles of grammar, both
language-specific and universal If in this book references to conversa­
tional pragmatics are relatively scarce, it is not because I underestimate
the importance of Gricean principles of interpretation or the explanatory
power of speech-act theory but because I think that information structure
relates only indirectly to such principles.
I propose, then, the following definition of "information structure" as
understood in this book:
That component of sentence grammar in which
propositions as conceptual representations of states of affairs are paired
with lexicogrammatical structures in accordance with the mental states
of interlocutors who use and interpret these structures as units of
information in given discourse contexts.
inform ation structure :
The information structure of a sentence is the formal expression of the
pragmatic structuring of a proposition in a discourse. A proposition
6
Introduction
which has undergone pragmatic structuring will be called a pragmatl
PROPOSITION. The most important categories of
information structure are: (i) presupposition and assertion, which have
to do with the structuring of propositions into portions which a speaker
assumes an addressee already knows or does not yet know; (ii)
identifiability and ACTIVATION, which have to do with a speaker’s
assumptions about the statuses of the mental representations of discourse
referents in the addressee’s mind at the time of an utterance; and (iii)
topic and focus, which have to do with a speaker’s assessment of the
relative predictability vs. unpredictability of the relations between
propositions and their elements in given discourse situations.
Information structure is formally manifested in aspects of prosody, in
cally structured
special grammatical markers, in the form of syntactic (in particular
nominal) constituents, in the position and ordering of such constituents
in the sentence, in the form of complex grammatical constructions, and in
certain choices between related lexical items. Information structure thus
intervenes at all meaning-bearing levels of the grammatical system.
Information-structure analysis is centered on the comparison of
semantically equivalent but formally and pragmatically divergent
sentence pairs, such as active vs. passive, canonical vs. topicalized,
canonical vs. clefted or dislocated, subject-accented vs. predicateaccented sentences, etc. Using a term introduced by Danes (1966), 1
will refer to such sentence pairs as pairs of allosentences. Differences in
the information structure of sentences are always understood in terms of
contrasts between allosentences, i.e. against the background of available
but unused grammatical alternatives for expressing a given proposition.
1.2
The place of information structure in grammar
Linguists who have concerned themselves with information structure and
its status within the overall system of grammar have often described it as
one of three components (or levels) of grammar. For example, in a
paper summarizing the approach to grammar taken by linguists of the
Prague School (Mathesius, Firbas, Benes. Vachek, Danes, and others),
Frantisek Danes (1966) distinguishes the following three levels: (i) the
level of the grammatical structure of sentences, (ii) the level of the
semantic structure of sentences, and (in) the level of the organization of
utterance.6 Concerning the third level, Danes writes (quoting Firbas):
i
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The place of information structure in grammar
7
[The level of utterance] "makes it possible to understand how the
semantic and the grammatical structures function in the very act of
communication, i.e. at the moment they are called upon to convey some
extra-linguistic reality reflected by thought and are to appear in an
adequate kind of perspective" (Firbas). Further all extra-grammatical
means of organizing utterance as the minimal communicative unit are
contained at this level as well. Such means are: rhythm, intonation ... ,
the order of words and of clauses, some lexica) devices, etc. (DaneS
1966:227)
In a similar vein, and acknowledging the influence of the Prague School,
Halliday (1967) defines what he calls theme as the third of three areas in
the domain of the English clause, the two other areas being TRANsmvnY
(roughly the study of syntax and semantics) and mood (roughly the study
of illocutionary force):
Theme is concerned with the information structure of the clause; with
the status of the elements not as participants in extralinguistic processes
but as components of a message; with the relation of what is being said
to what has gone before in the discourse, and its internal organization
into an act of communication ... Given the clause as domain,
transitivity is the grammar of experience, mood is the grammar of
speech function, and theme is the grammar of discourse. (Halliday
1967:199)
A threefold division of grammar is also postulated by Dik (1978, 1980),
who in his model of “Functional Grammar" distinguishes the three levels
of "semantic functions,” “syntactic functions," and “pragmatic
functions” (1980:3). It should be noted that for Danes, Halliday, and
Dik, the forma) domain of information structure (functional sentence
perspective, theme, pragmatic function) is the sentence or the clause..
Thus for these linguists, as for the author of the present study,
information structure belongs to sentence grammar. It is not concerned
with the organization of discourse, but with the organization of the
sentence within a discourse.
A somewhat different threefold division of grammar is found in
Fillmore 1976. Although Fillmore’s notion of pragmatics is much
broader than my notion of information structure, his definition for
linguistics of the notions syntax, semantics, and pragmatics is.
nevertheless relevant;
Syntax, in short, characterizes the grammatical forms that occur in a
language, whereas semantics pairs these forms with their potential
communicative functions. Pragmatics is concerned with the three-
8
Introduction
tensed relation that unites (i) linguistic form and (ii) the communicative
functions that these forms are capable of serving, with (iii) the contexts
or settings in which those linguistic formscan have those communicative
functions. Diagrammatically,
Syntax
Semantics
Pragmatics
[form]
[form,
function]
[form, function, setting] (Fillmore 1976:83)
Fillmore’s diagram provides a further explanation for the earlier
mentioned difficulties encountered in the study of information
structure. Indeed the diagram suggests that pragmatics, since it
presupposes the other two levels, is the most complex of the three
levels of grammar, hence the most difficult to be clear about. The
diagram also suggests an explanation for why syntax, being in a sense the
simplest level, has been given such preference in modem as well as
traditional linguistics. Although I do not think that in order to engage
successfully in discourse-pragmatic research one must first have a
complete account of the levels of syntax and semantics, I do believe
that such research requires awareness of the intricate relationships
between the three levels and of the various ways in which they interact.
An illustration of the complex ways in which syntax, semantics, and
information structure interact with each other in different languages will
be presented in Section 1.3.
If-we accept a model of grammar containing a subdivision into
different domains along the lines indicated in the above quotes, we may
ask ourselves whether these domains are autonomous subsystems or
Whether they are interdependent. It is well known that in the Chomskyan
view the level of syntax is an autonomous level of linguistic structure
while semantics is a component which ‘interprets’ syntactic structure. In
generative grammar, the theoretical problem posed by the existence of
different "‘cognitively synonymous" (Chomsky 1965) formal expressions
of a given proposition has mostly been addressed in terms of the question
ofhoWSuch different structures are to be generated. Since the business of
generative syntax is seen as that of specifying which structures are
permitted by a grammar, the fact that such semantically related
structures have different communicative functions has received little
attention. In particular, one theoretical question is not asked: why should
grammars provide the means of generating so many different syntactic
and prosodic structures for expressing one and the same propositional
content?
The place of information structure in grammar
9
One remarkable early exception to the lack of concern among
generative linguists for the function of language in discourse is research
on the focus-presupposition distinction within the framework of the socalled “Extended Standard Theory” (Chomsky 1970, Jackendoff 1972,
Akmajian 1973). Characteristically, most of this research concerns
pragmatic distinctions which are marked phonologically only, i.e. which
do not involve alternative syntactic structures. The possibility of syntactic
structures having specific communicative functions is acknowledged in
Chomsky 1975 (p. 58). In more recent work, Chomsky (1980:59ff)
suggests that matters of stress and presupposition may fall within
“grammatical competence" rather than “pragmatic competence,” both
types of competence being part of “the mental state of knowing a
language.” The notion of pragmatic competence is left rather vague by
Chomsky, but it seems that it is closer to what I have called
conversational pragmatics than to discourse pragmatics, leaving open
the possibility that information structure is indeed part of grammar.
In the present study, the question of the function of allosentences, i.e.
of multiple structures expressing the same proposition, is given primary
theoretical importance. The functional linguist’s concern with the
diversity of competing grammatical structures is comparable, mutatis
mutandis, to the ecologist’s concern with the diversity of organisms. To
quote the biologist Stephen Jay Gould:
In its more restricted and technical sense, ecology is the study of organic
diversity. It focuses on the interaction of organisms and their
environments in order to address what may be the most fundamental
question in evolutionary biology: "Why are there so many kinds of
bving things7" (Gould 1977:119)
If ecology focuses on the interaction of organisms and their environ­
ments, the study of information structure focuses on the interaction of
sentences and their contexts. It addresses the fundamental question of
why there are so many kinds of sentence structures.
Reacting to the view of syntax as an autonomous structural component
of grammar, contemporary linguists from various schools have proposed
models of language in which the level of syntax is not the most basic level
and in which syntax is not, or not to the same extent, considered
autonomous. The most radical departure from the belief in the autonomy
of syntax is found in the various ‘‘functionally" oriented approaches to
grammar which have been developed in Europe and the United States
IV
itiit UUUCitUH
over the past twenty years or so, either in direct reaction to
transformational-generative grammar or as continuations of wellestablished older linguistic trends. Analyses of the relationship between
syntax and discourse are often said to be "functional” rather than
"formal” insofar as they are primarily concerned with explaining the
communicative function of morphosyntactic or intonational structure in
discourse rather than with developing formal models of the structure of
sentences. A clear statement concerning the importance attributed to
functional considerations is the following;
In terms of the well-known distinction between syntax, semantics, and
pragmatics, the functional approach to language regards pragmatics as
the all-encompassing framework within which semantics and syntax
must be studied. It regards semantics as subservient to pragmatics, and
syntax as subservient to semantics. Syntax is there in order to allow for
the construction of formal structures by means of which complex
meanings can be expressed; and complex meanings are there for people
to be able to communicate with each other in subtle and differentiated
ways. (Dik 1980:2)
The common characteristic of these often heterogeneous approaches is
that the syntactic component and the information-structure component
of grammar are seen as connected to each other rather than as
independent subsystems. Sometimes certain syntactic phenomena whose
discourse function cannot be clearly established synchronically are
explained in diachronic terms as grammaticizations of erstwhile
functional distinctions. In some cases, the difference between form and
function has been minimized to an extreme degree, so that the two levels
have been interpreted as ultimately identical.7
It is in my opinion an unfortunate outcome of certain tendencies in
structuralist and post-structuralist linguistics that the so-called formal
and functional approaches to grammatical structure are seen as being
diametrically opposed rather than as complementing each other. The
antagonism of form and function in linguistics is not one of necessity but
rather of methodological and often ideological preference. If there exists
some level of autonomous structure at which any appeal to such nonstructural notions as "communicative function" is excluded, this does not
entail the non-existence of another level at which autonomous structure is
indeed connected with communicative function, nor does it entail that all
of grammatical structure must be equally autonomous II I use the term
“functional" in this book, it is with the understanding that a functional
'
!
I
i
The place of information structure in grammar
II
explanation for some grammatical phenomenon does not in principle
obviate a formal account of it, and that a formal explanation does not
make a functional account superfluous or irrelevant.
I see my own research as located somewhere in between the “formal’’
and the “functional” approaches to syntax. I do not believe that linguistic
form can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of its communicative
function in discourse. Nor do I believe that syntax is autonomous in the
sense that it does not directly reflect communicative needs. As I said
before, this book is based on the assumption that there are aspects of
grammatical form which require pragmatic explanations. But it is also
based on the understanding that there are many formal phenomena for
which such explanations are not readily available. As I see it, the
interesting theoretical question is not whether or to what extent syntactic
form can be studied in isolation from communicative function, but to.
what extent a research agenda based on the idea of the autonomy of
syntax can further our understanding of the workings of human
language. The issue which ultimately divides the “formal” and the
"functional" approach is not so much disagreement about facts but the
question of what constitutes explanation in linguistics.
A view of the relationship between the different levels of grammar
which I find appealing is expressed in the following passage from
Fillmore’s already mentioned paper “Pragmatics and the description of
discourse”:
1 assume three ways of looking at linguistic fads, the three viewable as
independent from each other or not, depending on whether we are
thinking of classes of fads or explanations. In the broadest sense,
I believe that syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic facts can be
distinguished from each other, but 1 also believe that some syntactic
facts require semantic and pragmatic explanations and that some
semantic facts require pragmatic explanations. Put differently, inter­
preters sometimes use semantic and pragmatic information in making
judgments about the syntactic structure of a sentence, and they
sometimes use pragmatic facts in making semantic judgments.
(Fillmore 1976:81}
Syntax may be autonomous in its own domain, but by its nature it must
provide the resources for expressing the communicative needs of
speakers. Therefore its nature cannot be fully understood unless we
explain the principles which determine its function in discourse. In my
view, the most promising but perhaps also the most difficult approach to
12
Introduction
grammatical analysis is one in which the different components of
grammar are seen not as hierarchically organized independent sub­
systems but as interdependent forces competing with each other for the
fimited coding possibilities offered by the structure of the sentence.8 I
take a linguistic theory of high explanatory value to be one in which these
forces are not only analyzed in isolation but also in their multiple
dependence relations to each other. In such a theory the grammatical
structures found in particular languages would then be seen as language­
specific manifestations of the interplay between the different components
of grammar.
If we conceive of the structure of the clause as a domain in which the
different components of grammar-syntax, morphology, prosody,
semantics, information structure-compete and interact with each other,
regulated by universal principles and language-specific constraints, we
can understand why, for example, the notion of “subject” has given rise to
so much discussion and controversy in the recent and less recent history of
linguistics. The label “subject” has been applied to phenomena from any
of the four components of syntax, morphology, semantics, and
information structure. In “subject-prominent” languages (Li & Thomp­
son 1976) like modem English or French, "subject” has been defined as a
prominent grammatical relation which is crucially involved in certain
syntactic phenomena such as verb agreement, passive, “raising”
constructions, etc. But it has also been identified via the semantic notion
of agent, the pragmatic notion of topic, and, in so-called "case
languages," via a morphological case (the "nominative"). All of these
definitionshave their independent justification, but also their problems. It
is easy, indeed, to provide examples of sentences in which one or the
other of the various suggested criteria for subjecthood does not apply.9
- An important insight to be gained from the difficulties encountered in
defining the notion of subject is that certain grammatical phenomena
cannot be fully captured unless elements from different levels of grammar
are seen as mutually determining each other. This insight has been
commonplace in many good traditional grammars and has been kept
alive in work by such linguists as Paul (1909), Mathesius (1928) and other
Prague School scholars, Bally (1932), and more recently Halliday (1967)
and Dixon (1972). In modem generative or typological studies it is only
relatively recently that attempts have been made at providing integrated
descriptions in which the levels of syntax, morphology, semantics, and
information structure are dealt with on a par. As an outstanding example
A sample analysis
13
of such an attempt I would like to mention Comrie’s short typological
comparison of Russian and English clause structure as two grammatical
domains in which semantic and pragmatic roles, grammatical relations,
and morphological cases interact with each other in different language­
specific ways (Comrie 1981: Section 3.5). Given's Syntax (1984) also
deserves to be mentioned here. Integrated descriptions have been
attempted within the frameworks of “Functional Grammar” (Dik
1978, 1980) and “Role and Reference Grammar” (Foley & Van Valin
1984 and especially Van Valin 1993; the latter has integrated parts of the
theory presented in this book). Attempts at dealing with notions of
information structure have been made also within the framework of
‘Lexical Functional Grammar' (see e g. the discussion of “topic” in
Bresnan & Mchombo 1987). Most recently, “Construction Grammar"
has developed a descriptive framework in which morphosyntax,
semantics, and pragmatics are treated as integrated aspects of
grammatical constructions (see Fillmore 1991 and Fillmore, Kay, and
O’Connor 1988, as well as the "constructionist’’ analyses in Lambrecht
1984b, 1986a, 1988b, 1990, and 1992). A brief informal characterization
of Construction Grammar will be presented in Section 1.4 below.
1.3
Information structure and sentence form: a sample analysis
My own objective in this book is not to offer a comprehensive description
of the grammatical system. Rather I will concentrate my attention on the
relatively unexplored level of information structure, relating it whenever
possible to the other levels, and offering here and there samples of formal
analyses. However, I would like to illustrate here, with examples from
three languages, some of the implications of a multi-level approach to
grammatical analysis of the kind mentioned in the preceding section. This
sample analysis will also allow me to demonstrate the possibilities and the
limits of information-structure research. The analysis involves the use of
a few information-structure concepts which I will briefly explain as 1 go
along but which will be fully explained only in later chapters.
1.3.1
Three examples
Consider the following real-life situation. Al a bus stop, the departure of
a crammed bus is delayed because a woman loaded down with shopping
1-4
IfUFifUUCitU/I
bags is boarding very slowly. Turning to the impatient passengers in the
bus, the woman utters the following sentence with an apologetic smile:
(1.1)
My car broke down.
In terms of the taxonomy of focus structures developed in Chapter 5, the
example in (1.1) is of the "sentence-focus” type, i.e. of the type in which
the domain of the “new information” extends over the entire proposition,
including the subject. The communicative function of such sentence-focus
structures is either to introduce a new discourse referent or (as in this
case) to announce an event involving a new discourse referent. Sentences
with the latter kind of communicative function will be called “event­
reporting sentences” (see Sections 4.1.1 and 4.2.2). In (1.1) the new
discourse referent is the woman’s car. The constituent in small capitals is
the locus of the main sentence accent, which is characterized by pitch
prominence. The sentence accent serves as the focus marker, i.e. as the
formal indicator of the focus structure of the sentence. Notice that
although in (1.1) the focus accent falls on the subject only, the focus
domain as the domain of “new information” extends over the entire
proposition (see Sections 5.1.2 and 5.6.2).10
The utterance in (1.1), an example of actually observed speech, could
have the following natural equivalents in Italian and in French, given the
same real life situation:
(1.2)
Mi si e rotta la macchina.
to-me itself is broken the car
(1.3)
J’ai ma voiturc qui est en panne.
1 have my car that is in breakdown
The communicative intention and situation being identical in the
three examples, we may say that the three sentences have the same
meaning, both semantically and pragmatically. Semantically (truthconditionally) they are synonymous in that they express the same state
of affairs in a given world. They presuppose, via the use of the definite
possessive noun phrase, that the speaker has a car-a pragmatic
presupposition made possible by the cultural situation tn which it is
expected that people have cars-and they assert that this car is presently
not in working condition. (The use ol the terms “presuppose" and
“assert” will be explained in Chapter 2.) All three sentences express a
simple proposition composed of two elements a (one-place) predicate
denoting an event involving some mechanical malfunction and one
A sample analysis
15
argument designating the non-functioning entity, i.e. the speaker's car.
(Strictly speaking, the French predicate est en panne does not express an
event but a state; the event interpretation is pragmatically inferred.) Let
us call “theme” the semantic role of the noun argument car (macchina,
voiture) in the given proposition.11 The sentences, at least in English and
French, also contain a secondary proposition, within the syntactic
domain of the noun phrase, expressing the relationship of possession
between the speaker and the car. Let us call the speaker semantically the
“possessor," expressed in the possessive determiners my and ma, and the
car the “possessed.”
In addition to their propositional meaning, which is derivable from
their lexicogrammatical structure, the sentences also have an utterancespecific conversational meaning. We can understand the communicative
function of the woman’s utterance only if we understand its relevance in
the situation in the bus. The point of the woman’s remark is to explain
her behavior in the bus, not to tell her audience about the mechanical
state of her car. The state of the car is relevant only inasmuch as it
explains the woman’s present situation. Even though the car is the subject
argument at the conceptual level of the proposition, and even though the
noun phrase expressing this argument is the grammatical subject of the
sentence (at least in English and Italian), the expression my car does not
correspond to a topic at the level of the pragmatically structured
proposition. Rather the topic is the speaker: the woman, not the car, is
"what the utterance is about.” This pragmatic fact will turn out to be a
crucial factor in the grammatical structuring of the sentence in all three
languages.
1.3.2
A note on markedness in information structure
Before I proceed to the analysis of our three examples, I would like to
make explicit two assumptions which I will be making concerning the role
of markedness in the expression of information structure. (These
assumptions will be justified and further developed in Chapters 4 and
5.) The first assumption is that in our three languages the pragmatically
unmarked constituent order for sentences with full lexical arguments is
Subject-Verb-Object. (Pronominal arguments obey rather different
syntactic and prosodic constraints.) The second assumption is that in
these languages the pragmatically unmarked sentence-accent position
is clause-final (or near-final, if the clause contains “deaccented" post-
16
htroducrim
focal material; see Section 5.3.3). Assuming the existence of a relationship
between sentence accent and focus, these two assumptions, taken
together, entail that in the unmarked case a clause-initial subject will
have a topic relation and a clause-final object a focus relation to the
proposition (the terms "topic relation” and “focus relation" will be
explicated in Chapters 4 and 5). The unmarked information-structure
sequence for lexical arguments is thus topic-focus. (I am ignoring here
the pragmatic status of non-argument constituents, in particular of the
verb; see Section 5.4.2 for justification of this procedure.) Given these
assumptions, the constituent order in the Italian sentence (1.2) and the
position of the focus accent in the English sentence (I.I) must be
characterized as marked.
These assumptions concerning the markedness status of the syntactic
and prosodic structure of our sentences are not uncontroversial and call
for some justification. In assuming that languages have a pragmatically
unmarked (or canonical) constituent order and an unmarked focus­
accent position, I am by no means suggesting that sentences having these
formal properties are "pragmatically neutral.” The widespread idea of
the existence of pragmatically neutral syntax or prosody is misleading
because it rests on the unwarranted assumption that grammatical form
"normally” has no pragmatic correlates. (A terminoiogically more
elaborate version of this idea is that unmarked word order or accent
,position is used in discourse situations which lack “particular pre­
suppositions"; such statements remain vacuous as long as they are
not accompanied by a definition of "normal presuppositions ") The
assumption that certain sentence forms are pragmatically neutral
naturally leads to the view, which I take to be misguided, that the task
of linguists interested in information structure is at best that of figuring
out which "special constructions” are in need of a pragmatic inter­
pretation. Just as there are no sentences without morphosyntactic and
phonological structure, there are no sentences without information
structure. Saying that some syntactic or prosodic structures “have a
special pragmatic function” while others do not is somewhat like saying
that some mechanical tools have a special function while others are
functionally neutral. According to this logic, a screwdriver for example
would be said to have a "special function" because the objects
manipulated with it (i.e. screws) must have a special shape, while a
hammer would be said to be functionally neutral because it may be used
to drive in various kinds of objects including nails, fence poles, and it
A sample analysis
17
need be even screws. The difference is of course not that hammers have
no special function or are functionally neutral but simply that their
potential domain of application is larger, hence that they tend to be used
more often.
Concerning the pragmatic markedness status of grammatical struc­
tures, we can state the following general rule: given a pair of
allosentences, one member is pragmatically unmarked if it serves two
discourse functions while the other member serves only one of them.
While the marked member is positively specified for some pragmatic
feature, the unmarked member is neutral with respect to this feature. For
example, the canonical SVO sentence She likes Germans is unmarked for
the feature “argument focus" while its clefted counterpart fl is Germans
that she likes is marked for this feature (see Section 5.6 for details). The
canonical version may be construed both with a broad (or "normar’) and
with a narrow (or “contrastive”) focus reading, i.e. the sentence may be
used to answer either the question “What kind of person is she?" or a
question such as "Does she like Americans or Germans?" The clefted
aliosentence, on the other hand, only permits the narrow-focus reading.
In other words, while the former can be used in the reading of the latter,
the latter cannot be used in one of the readings of the former.12 This
approach to pragmatic markedness entails that the marked member of a
given pair of allosentences may in turn be the unmarked member of
another pair. For example, the Italian inversion construction in (1.2),
whose syntax is marked in comparison to its canonical counterpart (see
(1.2’) below), is unmarked with respect to the feature "argument focus."
Herein it contrasts with the clefted allosentence E la mia macchina que st
e rotta "It is my car that broke down": the VS sentence has both a
broad- and a narrow-focus reading (like its subject-accented English
counterpart in (1.1)). but the cleft sentence can only be construed as
having narrow focus.
In calling SV(O) constituent order and clause-final focus-accent
position “pragmatically unmarked" in our three languages I am
referring to the fact that this pattern has greater distributional free­
dom than alternative patterns and, as a corollary, that it has greater
overall frequency of occurrence. I am not implying that alternative, i.e.
marked, patterns are somehow' "stylistically remarkable" or “abnormal."
For example with a certain class of intransitive predicates (the so-called
"unaccusatives" as well as impersonal .vi-predicates) VS order in Italian is
in fact often perceived by native speakers to be more natural than SV
18
Introduction
order, when no context is provided. This native intuition is comparable to
that of many speakers of English who in the absence of contextual clues
find focus-initial prosody in such sentences as A/y oxa broke down or Her
father died more natural than the focus-final prosody of My car broke
íwh.v or Her father díed.'' Such intuitions result from the fact that
certain propositional contents are most frequently expressed under
certain pragmatic circumstances, hence tend to be associated in the minds
of speakers with those grammatical structures which are appropriate for
those circumstances. A structure like Her father died is perhaps more
often used to announce the death of a previously unmentioned individual
(subject accentuation) than as a comment in a conversation in which the
individual is already the topic under discussion (predicate accentuation).
They have no bearing on the status of SV(O) constituent order or clause­
final focus accentuation as unmarked.
It is a distributional fact that in Italian all predicates permit SV(O)
order while only a restricted set of predicates permit the alternative VS
order in such sentence-focus structures as (1.2). Similarly, focus-final
prosody in English is permitted with all predicates, while focus-initial
prosody in sentence-focus structures such as (1.1) is permitted only with a
relatively small number of, mostly intransitive, predicates (see Lambrecht
1987a and forthcoming). In other words, in both languages there are
many predicates which require the subject to be a preverbal topic and the
object a postverbal focus constituent, but there are no predicates which
require the reverse situation. It is in this distributional sense that I call
focus-final prosody and SV(O) order unmarked in the three languages.
Cognitively, the marked pattern receives its value not from some inherent
feature specification but from the fact that it is perceived as a deviation
from the unmarked pattern. This, I believe, is the reason why traditional
grammar has characterized VS structures in languages in which the
subject normally precedes the predicate as “inversions," i.e. as deviations
from what is perceived to be the norm. By analogy, in languages with
focus-final prosody one might call focus-initial sentences like (1.1)
“prosodic inversions” (see Section 5.6.2). This approach to markedness
in word order and prosody is based on the classical notion of markedness
elaborated by Trubetzkoy and Jakobson (see e.g. Waugh 1982). It is
different from the widespread usage in which “unmarked” designates any
pattern which is perceived to be more natural than some alternative
pattern in a given discourse context
¡
!
A sample analysis
1.3.3
19
Analysis
Let us return to our three examples. How is the semantic and pragmatic
structure of these sentences related to the level of morphosyntax and
prosody and, more specifically, what is the role of information structure
in the shaping of these utterances?
In the English sentence My car broke down, the semantic role of THEME
is associated with the syntactic relation of subject in the subject phrase
my car. Within this phrase, the determiner my plays the semantic role of
the possessor, and the noun car that of the possessed entity. The subject
NP is the initial constituent in an intransitive sentence, resulting in a
sequence of the form NP-V. As for the information structure of (1.1), we
notice that the linguistic expression designating the topic of the utterance
(the speaker) is the initial pronominal element my. The pragmatic relation
of topic is thus mapped with the non-phrasal syntactic category of
determiner, which is not an argument of the main predicate, and whose
position is fixed within its phrasal domain. The sentence accent falls on
the subject noun car, marking the designatum of this noun as having the
pragmatic relation of focus rather than topic to the proposition andgiven the particular focus structure of this sentence-indirectly marking
all subsequent constituents as part of the focus domain (see Section 5.6.2).
Thus in (1.1) both the semantic role of theme and the pragmatic role of
focus are associated w'ith the grammatical role of subject in a constituent
of type NP, and this subject NP occupies its unmarked preverbal
position. Moreover this NP is also the only nominal constituent in the
sentence. However the position of the focus accent on the noun car is
marked. Instead of being coded syntactically, the information structure
of the utterance is coded prosodically. It follows that the syntactic
pattern in (1.1) is not directly motivated by the pragmatics of the
utterance. Rather the sequence NP-V is an independently motivated
syntactic structure in the language. Indeed, the same syntactic sequence,
but with a different intonation contour, could be used under different
pragmatic conditions, as when I ask "What happened to your car?” and
you answer, with perhaps somewhat unnatural explicitness:
(1.1’)
My car broke
down.
(1.1’J conveys a pragmatically different piece of information, in which the
referent of the noun phrase my car is already established as a topic under
discussion. Sentences such as (1.1’), in which the domain of the “new
:
i
20
iMroduction
information" extends over the predicate to the exclusion of the subject
will be referred to as "predicate-focus structures" (Chapter 5) and the
pragmatic articulation of the proposition will be called the “topiccomment articulation" (Chapter 4). The syntactic structure of (1.1) is thus
neutral with respect to the expression of information structure. What
distinguishes (1.1) from (1.1') is not its syntax but its prosodic structure,
and this prosodic structure is marked. Symbolizing the accented
constituent with the letter Z and the non-accented part of the sentence
with the letter A (a simple representation introduced by Bally, 1932:530),
we can represent the prosodic sequencing in the English sentence (l.l) as
Z-A (ignoring the role of the determiner) and that in (1.1’) as A-Z.
Let us now consider the Italian sentence Aft si e rotia la mac^hina in
(1-2).1* Concerning the mapping relation between syntax and semantics,
we notice that it differs from that in (1.1) in one interesting respect: the
possessive relation between the car and its owner is left unexpressed
within the subject NP. Instead, this relation is indirectly conveyed via the
relation between the clause-initial dative pronoun mi and the lexical NP
la macchina. The semantic role of the pronoun mi is perhaps best
described as that of an “experiencer” since the event is described as
happening to the speaker. In spite of the presence of the dative pronoun
mi, the sentence is intransitive in that it contains neither a direct nor an
indirect object (the reflexive si is not an object argument but a “middle
voice” marker). In Italian, as in English, the semantic role of theme is
expressed as the subject NP of an intransitive predicate.
More interesting within the present argument is the radical difference
between English and Italian with respect to the way in which the
information structure of the proposition is reflected in the syntax of
the sentence which expresses it. In Italian the canonical SV(O) constituent
sequence in which the subject NP is a topic and the object part of the
focus is changed to fit the pragmatic requirements of the utterance, by
inverting the order of the subject with respect to the verb. By placing the
subject after the verb, Italian respects the unmarked prosodic sequence in
which the constituent carrying the main sentence accent occupies final
position. We can see that a syntactic adjustment has taken place by
comparing sentence (1.2) with the corresponding sentence in (1.2’). in
which (as in the English sentence (1.1’) above) the car is the topic of a
Statement intended to increase the addressee's knowledge about the car,
not a previously unmentioned entity depicted as participating in a
reported event:
A sample analysis
(1.2')
21
La mia macchina si e rotta.
Sentence (1.2’) has the the canonical (unmarked) form, with the topical
subject NP in initial position and the focus accent on the predicate.15
There is another interesting difference between the Italian and the
English example with respect to the formal manifestation of the
information structure of the proposition, having to do with the syntactic
status of the pronoun mi. Like the English possessive my, mi has the
pragmatic role of topic. But in Italian this topic is a personal pronoun
bound to the verb rather than a determiner bound to a noun. 0y
replacing the ordinary NP-internal possessive relation (as in la mia
macchina “my car” in (1.2')) by a relation between a personal pronoun
and a non-possessive NP, Italian is able to maintain the topic constituent
in its unmarked initial position rather than have it follow the verb. Notice
that this expression of the “topic-first principle" occurs again at the
expense of the unmarked, canonical Syntax.
To summarize, even though the Italian example (1.2) resembles the
English (1.1) in that the theme, the subject, and the focus are all
combined in the same NP constituent, the manifestation of the
information structure of the proposition in the form of the sentence is
radically different in the two languages In Italian it is not the unmarked
syntactic SV sequence but the unmarked prosodic sequence that is
maintained, with a topic constituent as the initial and the constituent
carrying the focus accent as the final element in the clause. The Italian
sentence contains two argument constituents, while its English counter­
part contains only one.16 Using Bally's schematic representation, we may
symbolize the prosodic sequence in the Italian sentence as A-Z.
In the discussion of the Italian sentence I have assumed, with
traditional grammar, that the postverbal constituent la macchina is the
subject of the sentence, albeit an “inverted” one. This has become a
controversial assumption in generative syntax. One can argue that la
macchina is in fact not a full-fledged subject because it shares certain
formal properties with direct objects (in particular its position), an idea
which has been much discussed in recent years in connection with the socalled “unaccusative hypothesis” (Perlmutter I97R, Burzio 1981, etc).
According to this hypothesis, the postverbal subject in (1.2), as in other
VS constructions containing certain intransitive predicates, would in fact
not be a subject but an object at a deeper level of analysis. I consider it a
major advantage of the approach to grammatical analysis advocated in
the present study that the postulation of an abstract level of
representation at which the postverbal subject is an object is made
superfluous. By adopting a framework in which the categories of
information structure are recognized as grammatical categories on a par
with the categories of syntax and semantics, we are in a position to
preserve the traditional insight that the NP in (1.2) is indeed the subject of
the sentence, albeit not a canonical one In such a framework, we can
account for the difference between the canonical and the inverted
structure in terms of different mappings of pragmatic and syntactic
relations. An inverted subject can then simply be defined as one with the
marked information struciure status of a focus constituent.”
Let us now- look at the French example in (1.3). Here the situation is
rather complex. In the sentence J'ni nia iwriKE qui est en pmvc, both the
semantic structure and the syntactic structure are adjusted in order to
accommodate the information structure of the proposition. To appreciate
the extent of the adjustment it is useful to compare (1.3) with the
canonical SV structure in (1.3’):18
(1.3’)
Ma voiture est en
panmf..
Due to a powerful grammatical constraint against the co-mappmg of the
pragmatic relation focus and the grammatical relation subject (see
Lambrecht 1984a and 1986b: Ch. 6), spoken French makes abundant use
of such clefted constructions as in (1.3) to avoid focus-initial SV
structures. Constructions such as (1.3) may be called clefts because the
propositional meaning expressed by the two-clause sequence is identical
to that expressed in the canonical (1.3), with no difference in truth
conditions. In spoken French, a canonical sentence such as A/,; ioitl-re
esl en panne, with the accented NP in preverbal subject position, would be
unacceptable because prosodically ill-formed. In {13), which is used
instead of this ill-formed sequence, the constituent carrying the focus
accent, voitlre, does not appear as the subject NP of an intransitive
clause, as in English and Italian, but as the syntactic <>bji<t ol the verb
avoir, in a clause of its own. The pragmatic lunction ot the clotting
structure is to create an additional postverbal argument position in which
the focus NP may appear, preventing it trom occurring in sentence-initial
position. The structure in (1.3) thus makm up both (or the tinacceptability of subject-accented SV Mriidiiic-- ■ die F iighdi type and tor the
ungrammaticaiity of accent-final VS sti iiviuiw ot the Italian type (a VS
A sample analysis
23
sentence such as Esi en panne ma eoiruftE, which would have the focus in
the right place, would be syntactically ill-formed).19
In the bi-clausal structure thus created, the function of the first clause
J'ai ma voiture, which appears to express a semantically independent
proposition, is in fact not to make the (tautological) assertion that the
speaker “has her car.” Rather the sole function of the avoir-clause is to
pragmatically pose the referent of the NP in the discourse in such a way
that its lexical manifestation does not coincide with the grammatical role
of subject. The subject position of this clause is occupied by the first
person subject pronoun je which, like the Italian dative mi, has the
pragmatic role of topic. The semantic role of this topic argument may be
described as locative (see Lambrecht 1988b). The semantic relation of the
referent of the lexical NP ma voiture to the predicate est en panne is
expressed in the ^id-clause, whose pronominal subject qui is anaphoric to
the object NP in the preceding clause. This ^ur-clause, even though it has
the internal structure of a relative clause, differs in crucial ways both
from the restrictive and the appositive relative clause type. Not only
could the antecedent NP in the avoir-clause be a proper name, thereby
excluding the modifying function associated with the restrictive relative,
but the information expressed in the <jui-clause in (1.3) is neither
(pragmatically) presupposed, as in the restrictive relative, nor parenthe­
tical, as in the appositive relative. In fact it is the predicate of the quiclause, not of the avoir-clause, which expresses the main assertion
expressed by the sentence (see Lambrecht 1988a for further discussion).
Thus in the French sentence both grammatical relations and syntactic
constituent structure are accommodated to fit an independently
motivated information structure, at the price of complex formal
adjustments. While in English the proposition is expressed with one
predicator and one argument, and in Italian with one predicator and two
arguments, in French it is expressed with two predicalors and three
arguments (two of which obligatorily designate the same entity). Since
the French sentence is synonymous with the monoclausal English and
Italian sentences, and since the French canonical monoclausal version in
11.3’) is syntactically and semantically well-formed, this proliferation of
arguments can only be explained by the requirements of information
structure. We can symbolize the sequence in the French sentence as A-ZA-Z, t.e. as a grammatical compromise between the English sequence ZA and the Italian sequence A-Z. The accented NP ma failure is final in its
24
Introduction
own clause, as in Italian, but it precedes the main predicate “break
down,” as it does in English.
¡.3.4
Summary
The purpose of the preceding analysis was to defend the view that the
grammatical patterns illustrated in our three examples can be understood
in all their complexity only by interpreting them as the result of multiple
language-specific dependencies between the various components of
grammar semantics, information structure, morphosyntax, and pro­
sody. As the examples show, the interaction between the components
may lead to quite different formal results, even in languages as closely
related as English, French and Italian. In the case of the English example
(1.1), information structure “loses out” on the syntactic level. However
this loss is compensated for by the fact that in English the sentence accent
can in principle “move" from right to left, allowing for prosodic focus
marking in any position in the sentence. Because of the importance of
sentence accentuation in English, syntactic expression of information
structure is often unnecessary in this language, or, phrased differently,
sentence accentuation makes up for the rigid word order constraints of
English grammar. Sentence prosody is thus pragmatically highly
motivated in English. Typologically, English presents itself as an
example of extreme “subject prominence" (Li & Thompson 1976), i.e.
as a language in which a great variety of semantic and pragmatic
functions may be associated with the invariant syntactic function of
subject and in which word order is to a large extent grammatically and
not pragmatically controlled.20
The competition of grammatical factors has different consequences in
the Italian example (1.2). Here, it is syntax that “yields” in the
competition between formal structure and information structure: the
canonical constituent order is altered to accommodate the requirements
of discourse. Just as English is reluctant to tolerate a violation of its
canonical SV order, Italian is reluctant to tolerate a violation of the
information-structure constraint that places a focus argument in post­
verbal position.21 In Italian, word order is thus to a greater extent
controlled by information structure than in English, even though the
syntax of Italian is far more rigid in this respect than the syntax of socalled free word order languages, like Russian or Latin. Given our
assumption that the SV(O) pattern in (1.2’) illustrates the unmarked
Information structure and syntax
25
constituent order in this language, we may say that the formal structure
of (1.2) is motivated by the pragmatic function of the utterance.
As for the French structure in (13), syntax and information structure
both win and lose in the competition. The constituent order in the French
sentence being strongly grammatically controlled, the language does not
freely permit subject-verb inversion or other types of word-order
variation found in languages with pragmatically controlled word order.
Nevertheless the global structure of sentence (1.3) directly reflects its
pragmatic function. Even more so than in Italian, the syntactic structure
of the French sentence may be said to be pragmatically motivated, since
this cleft construction involving the verb avoir has as its unique function
to express a single proposition in bi-clausal form under the specific
pragmatic circumstances discussed above. As shown in Lambrecht 1986b
(Section 7.2.2), certain formal and semantic properties of the construc­
tion (such as the use of the verb avoir in cooccurrence with a possessive
object NP) can be made sense of only if reference is made to its pragmatic
function. By using grammatical constructions of the clefting type, spoken
French achieves several things at once. It substitutes structures of a
certain pragmatically preferred type for the pragmatically unacceptable
SV(O) sequence; it preserves its syntactically controlled basic word order
without violating the information-structure constraint which maps topic
with subject and focus with object; and it avoids violation of its strict
oxytonic accent pattern. The “mixed strategy" of cleft formation allows
the language to have its cake and eat it too. It represents one of the
specific solutions in French to the competition between syntax and
pragmatics.
1.4
Information structure and syntax
In the previous section I illustrated some of the implications of a view of
natural language in which information structure is seen as a component
of sentence grammar on a par with morphosyntax, semantics, and
prosody and in which these components are seen as interacting with each
other in various language-specific ways. Let me now address again the
theoretical issue raised earlier concerning the place of information
structure in grammar and in particular of the relationship between
information structure and syntax
1.4.1
Autonomy versus motivation in grammar
To avoid a certain misunderstanding which radical “functionalist” views
of syntax have allowed to arise, I want to emphasize from the outset that
I would find it misleading to say that the communicative requirements of
discourse directly determine not only the content but also the form of
utterances and that information structure therefore can in some sense
explain the structure of sentences. Taken to its extreme, such a view
would imply that sentences expressing similar propositional contents in
similar communicative situations must have similar forms across
languages, an idea which is blatantly contradicted by our three
examples. It is true that our three sentences have an important feature
in common, i.e, they depart in certain systematic ways from their
canonical counterparts, but the form which this departure takes does not
follow in any predictable way from the function they serve. Moreover,
since the number of states of affairs which one can talk about is infinite
but since the number of different structures which the grammar of a
language makes available to speakers is severely limited, there can be no
one-to-one relationship between communicative requirements or inten­
tions and the grammatical forms of sentences. There can only be a
mapping from types of situations to preestablished formal types.
Speakers do not create new structures to express new meanings. They
make creative use of existing structures in accordance with their
communicative intentions.
Within the ‘‘competing-motivations” view illustrated with our model
sentences it would therefore be inconsistent to claim that information
structure by itself determines the differences in formal structure between
sentences. To go back to our examples, information structure cannot
explain, for example, why in expressing the propositional content of (1.1)
only Italian may resort to the inversion construction in order to mark the
non-topical status of the subject, while the analogous English and French
VS sentences *Broke down mv Car and *Est en panne ma voiture are
ungrammatical, even though clause-final position is the unmarked focus­
argument position in all three languages. Nor can information structure
explain the internal syntax of the relative clause in the French example or
the grammatical mechanism which allows this clause to enter into a cleft
construction with the matrix clause. If it could, it would be difficult to
understand why in Italian and English such a cleft construction would be
inappropriate if not ungrammatical “ Such differences in grammaticality
<
I
Information structure and syntax
27
clearly are determined by the structural properties of the individual
languages, which in turn follow from, or are at least consistent with,
universal typological principles and perhaps universal constraints on
possible syntactic structures. It is in this sense that the syntactic structure
of sentences may be said to be “autonomous."
Having said this, I wish to emphasize that I find it equally misleading
to say that information structure plays no role in the formal organization
of sentences. In this view, which has informed various versions of
generative grammar, information structure-to the extent that it is
acknowledged as a component of grammar-plays the role of an
interpretive mechanism which checks fully formed syntactic structures
for their appropriateness in given utterance contexts. Such an interpretive
view of information structure seems difficult to reconcile with some of the
facts discussed in the preceding section, for example the facts of focusaccent assignment. It has often been observed, both by generative and by
functional linguists, that focus prosody may not only have an influence
on the pragmatic interpretation of sentences (as in the difference between
example (1.1) and (1.1*) above), but also on certain phenomena
traditionally called “semantic," such as the interpretation of anaphoric
relations between nouns and pronouns (see e.g. Kuno 1972, Akmajian
1973, Bolinger 1979, and the useful summary in Van Valin 1990b).23 The
facts of focus-accent assignment therefore strongly suggest interaction if
not between syntax and phonology, at least between the “interpretive"
components of phonology and semantics.
To accommodate the facts of focus prosody within a modular
approach to grammar, the claim has been made (see Culicover &
Rochemont 1983:123ff, Horvath 1986:94ff) that focus accentuation is in
fact not a prosodic feature but an abstract syntactic feature which is
assigned at the level of S-structure and which has no syntactic realization
whatsoever. This S-structure feature is then translated into stress
assignment in “Phonetic Form" and semantically interpreted in
“Logical Form” and “Discourse Grammar.” As I understand it, the
main purpose of such interpretations of focus prosody is to reconcile the
facts of focus with the notion of modularity and of the autonomy of
syntax. They seem to do little to elucidate the nature of the relationship
between prosody and syntax. They constitute examples of the recourse to
"placeholders” in generative theories as a way of preserving the internal
consistency of a model in the face of strong empirical evidence against
certain predictions made by it. The use of such placeholders is cogently
1
I
J
J
l|
j
!|
i
I
j
|
1
ii
jj
>
i
t
j{
J
I
28
introduction
criticized by Woodbury (1987:688fl), who observes that abstract
placeholder morphemes were invoked at various points in the history of
generative grammar, both in phonology and in syntax, whenever some
grammatical phenomenon threatened to invalidate given views of the
organization of grammar. According to Woodbury, “a placeholder can
be seen as a symptom that the formal organization of grammar has been
distorted” (ibid.).
Interpretive views of information structure seem even more difficult to
defend in the face of the Italian and especially the French facts of focus
marking. As we saw before, the sentence-focus structure which in English
is expressed prosodically, via changes in accent placement, is expressed in
French syntactically, via the combination of two canonical clauses in
each of which the focus accent has its unmarked clause-final position. In
the French example, the focus reading is clearly a property of the
complex grammatical construction itself, not an interpretation imposed
on an independently motivated syntactic configuration. While the lexical
and phrasal elements which make up the construction are familiar from
other parts of the grammar, and while these elements are for the most
part assembled according to general combinatorial principles, the global
Construction resulting from the combination of these elements is unique
and serves a unique function in discourse. In this sense, syntactic form
may be said to correlate directly with discourse function, hence cannot be
fully understood without reference to it. To use an analogy, claiming
total independence of grammatical form from discourse function is like
claiming independence of the form of the automobile from its locomotive
purpose on the grounds that the form is determined by the laws of
mechanics only and not by the desire to get from one place to another.
While the reasoning is sound, it obscures the crucial fact that there would
be no automobile, and hence no form, if people didn’t have the need to
travel. Since the automobile owes its existence to this need, and since
existence Is a logical prerequisite to form, the existence of a logical link
between form and function is undeniable.
Even though information-structure analysis allows us to recognize the
pragmatic motivation of grammatical form, it must be acknowledged
that it does not account for the process whereby the constraints of
information structure are translated into, or mapped onto, grammatical
structure, resulting in the creation of such constructions as the French
avoir-cleft While it is true, as I said earlier, that speakers do not create
new structures to express new meanings, it is nevertheless the case that
Information structure and syntax
29
grammatical structures arise diachronically under pressure from
information-structure constraints, which I take to be universal. It is the
pressure to distinguish two types of pragmatically structured propositions
that has led to manifestation of the formal contrasts discussed in the
previous section. What would be needed to account for the mapping of
information structure and sentence form is something which to my
knowledge does not exist, and according to some cannot exist: a theory of
grammaticalization with predictive power. Such a theory could show us
how universal discourse requirements get expressed in grammatical form
in accordance with the structural and typological properties of individual
grammars.24 But even though we cannot rely on such a theory, we can
nevertheless rely on the notion that the complex relationship between
form and function is not arbitrary but motivated within the grammatical
system of individual languages. While the form of constructions like the
French avoir-cleft cannot be predicted on the basis of communicative
needs, this form can be shown to be motivated within the grammatical
system of the language. Given the formal constraints of French grammar,
and given the need to express a universal pragmatic category, it “makes
sense” that the avoir-construction looks the way it does in spoken
French. The notion of the pragmatic motivation of grammatical form is
one of the major theoretical concepts underlying the present study.“
L4.2
I
|
I
i
I
The functional underspecification of syntactic structures
Having made explicit the notion that the grammatical form of sentences
is motivated by the requirements of information structure, 1 must
introduce a caveat concerning the extent to which syntactic structure
per se may be said to be motivated. Let us first remember the fact,
illustrated for example in the two sentences in (1.1) and (1.1‘), that
syntactic patterns, such as the NP VP pattern of English, may be
underdetennined with respect to their discourse function and that
functional differences may be expressed by non-syntactic means. That
syntactic structures may serve more than one function is well known. As
a useful example of the functional diversity of unmarked syntactic
patterns one might mention the well-known fact that the canonical SV
sequence of English (and other languages) may not only be used for
declarative but also for interrogative sentences, by providing the sentence
with the appropriate non-declarative intonation contour (compare He is
ju
i/iiruuucltort
hungry with He is hungry?). Herein the SV pattern contrasts with the
auxiliary-inversion pattern (Is he hungry?), which cannot be used in
declarative contexts, no matter how the intonation is modified, and
which must therefore be characterized as marked for the feature "non­
declarative.’'
An example in French of a highly general syntactic pattern which is
used in the formation of various functionally divergent sentence
constructions is the [pro-V (XP)] pattern which is discussed in
Lambrecht 1986b (Chapter 6) under the label “preferred-clause
construction." Although this syntactic pattern typically serves to code
propositions with a topic-comment relation between the subject and the
predicate, it may also be used for the expression of propositions involving
no such relation. Compare the [pro-V] structure // pleure "He is crying,”
in which the predicate expresses a property of the subject and which can
therefore function as a topic-comment sequence, with the structurally
identical II pleul "It is raining," where no topic-comment relation is
possible because the pronoun has no referring function, the sentence
expressing instead a kind of existential statement: “there is rain falling."
Or compare the two [pro-V NP] structures II boil une gouile "He is
drinking a drop" and II lombe une goutte “A drop is falling”: the first
expresses a proposition with topic-comment articulation, in which the
predicate is construed as a comment about the referent of the subject; the
second has an "eventive" articulation, in which the pronoun has no
referent and in which the domain of the focus extends over the entire
proposition (see the discussion of “thetic" propositions in Section 4.2.2).
The example of this preferred-clause construction shows that such
fundamental semantic-pragmatic distinctions as the one between subject­
predicate statements and existential statements (or, in the terms of the
present study, between predicate-focus and sentence-focus structures)
may go unexpressed at the level of morphosyntax.
The possibility of multiple form-function correspondences is not
restricted to highly general, semantically or pragmatically unmarked
syntactic patterns. Even with marked patterns there is often no one-toone relationship between a specific ss ntactic form and a specific
communicative function. A useful example, discussed by Akmajian
(1984), is the already-mentioned auxiliary-inversion pattern in English.
While this pattern is functionally restricted in that it cannot be used to
express simple statements, it may nevertheless be used in two clearly
*
different functions, i.e. to express questions (Is he hungry1} and
t
[
1
,
''
Information structure and syntax
31
exclamations (Soy, is he hungry!). Here again, intonation crucially
interacts with syntax to produce the narrow fit between communicative
function and grammatical form.
Another case in point is the so-called topicalization construction
known from English and other languages, whose pragmatically marked
character has often been noticed. The term "topicalization” is commonly
used with reference to syntactic constructions in which an object noim
phrase whose canonical position is after the verb appears in clause-initial
position before the subject (or cjirectly before the verb in languages with
V-2 order, in which case the subject appears in the position of the object).
As the name suggests, the discourse function of the “topicalized"
sentence is assumed to be different from that of its canonical counterpart,
the object noun phrase now being a topic (rather than being part of the
focus domain). What is often not recognized is that this syntactic type
serves in fact two very different discourse functions. As Stempel (1981)
and Prince (1981b) have demonstrated for French and English respec­
tively, the "topicalized” phrase may stand either in a topic relation or in a
focus relation to the proposition expressed by the sentence. (In terms of
the framework developed in Chapter 5 below, the first has “predicatefocus" and the second "argument-focus" structure.) And this clear
difference in pragmatic function correlates with an equally clear pro­
sodic difference. At the level of syntax, however, the difference is not
marked.26
This lack of overt syntactic differentiation of the topic-focus contrast
in sentences with topicalized NPs does not entail that no form-function
correlation can be established for such sentences. It simply confirms the
observation that syntax is not the only formal level at which information
structure is coded. What syntax does not code, prosody does, and what is
not coded by prosody may be expressed by morphology or the lexicon.
Within the interactive view of grammar suggested here, such facts do not
come as a surprise. In fact it would be surprising if the opposite were true,
i.e. if all syntactic patterns were uniquely paired with specific discourse
functions. Since the morphosyntactic resources of a language are limited,
and since the number of communicative distinctions is potentially
infinite, economy of form is a logical necessity in the expression of
functional differences in natural language. In the case of the OSV (OVS)
pattern, the reason for its dual function seems fairly clear: since sentence­
initial position is a cognitively highly prominent position, it is ideally
suited to express the contrast between unmarked and marked structures.
32
Introduction
Marked topics and marked foci naturally compete for this cognitively
privileged position.27
1.43
Sentence types and the notion of grammatical construction
We must draw the conclusion that there is often no one-to-one
■correspondence between syntactic form and discourse function, even in
■the case of non-canonical sentence patterns.28 The general tendency
■htross languages seems to be that the fit between form and discourse
fimttion involves multiple correspondences between the various
components of grammar. In what sense, then, may specific syntactic
configurations, such as the topicalization construction, the “dative”
"construction, the passive construction, as well as other, less commonly
■analyzed, patterns be considered to be pragmatically motivated if no
unique discourse function may be assigned to them? What exactly is the
nature of the relationship between pragmatic function and syntactic
form?
One clearly articulated though tentative answer to this question is
■provided by Akmajian in his earlier-mentioned paper “Sentence types
"and the form-function fit" (1984). Discussing the syntactic and
pragmatic structure of such sentences as What, me worry? or Him wear
a tuxedo?!, which he calls “Mad Magazine sentences,” Akmajian notices
a number of formal similarities between such sentences and the class of
imperative sentences. On the basis of these similarities, he argues that
imperatives and Mad Magazine sentences may in fact be generated by the
same, highly general, phrase structure rule, “with the proviso that
pragmatic principles for the use of imperatives will in fact limit
imperatives to a subset of the structures in question" (p. 14). Akmajian
concludes that neither the Mad Magazine sentence type nor in fact
imperative sentences have a special status in a syntactic theory. Rather
such notions as "imperative,” "interrogative,” “assertive," and so on are
to be determined in a theory of speech acts, i.e. in the pragmatic
component of language.
Akmajian then raises the question whether "particular clusterings of
-formal properties should be singled out as constituting significant
sentence-types” (p. 18). He suggests that the answer to this question is
“yes" and that the notion “sentence-type" indeed has theoretical status in
formal grammar. However, according to Akmajian such sentence-types
belong to a highly general, and perhaps universal, “Formal Sentence-
Information structure and syntax
33
Type Schema.” In the case of English, it is the presence and the position
of the auxiliary which determine a significant set of formal sentence
types, in conjunction with a set of intonation features which directly
interact with the syntax. Although Akmajian acknowledges the
theoretical possibility of a one-to-one form-function fit (for example in
such constructions as Down with X! or Off with X's Y!, which he calls
“highly marked”), his main claim is "that something along the lines of
the Formal Sentence-Type Schema, based on a small and restricted set of
formal parameters, provides the input from formal grammar to the
pragmatics" and that across languages “the task will be to specify a set of
correspondence principles that relate certain formal sentence-types and
certain pragmatic functions” (p. 21).
Akmajian's theoretical stance may be characterized as follows. Given
the fact that there are clear cases of one-to-many form-function
correspondences, i.e. given the fact that in many cases a single syntactic
structure serves more than one pragmatic function, let us assume a
syntactic component which is as simple and general as possible and let
this component generate a small set of highly general sentence types. Let
us furthermore allow this component to interact with certain aspects of
phonology, and let a sophisticated pragmatic component, in the form of a
universal theory of speech acts, provide principles of pragmatic
interpretation which will rule out undesirable surface configurations.
Any formal phenomena which are not accounted for in this way will have
to be specified as a set (small, we hope) of exceptions to the general
system, e.g. in the form of special syntactic rules.
Although there is an undeniable theoretical appeal in this idea of a
mapping function between highly general syntactic types and equally
general pragmatic principles, I believe that this approach does not
provide a realistic picture of the relationship between form and function
in natural language.*9 Even though it is true that a great many syntactic
patterns cannot be uniquely paired with specific uses. I believe that the
number of “highly marked” and idiosyncratic form-meaning-use
correspondences in natural languages is much greater than assumed
in most current approaches. With Fillmore and other proponents of
Construction Grammar, I take it to be impossible to draw a dividing
line on principled grounds between idiosyncratic (or “idiomatic") and
general or ("regular") types of constructions One of the most important
tenets of Construction Grammar is the belief that the distinction
between “idiomaticity" and "regularity" (syntactic generativity, semantic
compositionality) has been overemphasized in generative grammar and
that an adequate linguistic theory must be able to account equally well
for idiomatic as for regular aspects of a grammar (see Lambrecht 1984b
and in particular Fillmore, Kay, & O'Connor 1988).
According to Construction Grammar, linguistic theory can bridge the
gap between idiomaticity and regularity by recognizing as the
fundamental unit of grammar the grammatical construction.30 A
grammatical construction is defined as "any syntactic pattern which is
assigned one or more conventional functions in a language, together with
whatever is linguistically conventionalized about its contribution to the
meaning or the use of structures containing it" (Fillmore 1988:36). In
Construction Grammar, complex grammatical constructions are not
viewed as being derived from more general or simpler structures via
generative rules of the type familiar from phrase structure grammars,
even though in some cases the principles for the combination of smaller
constructions into more complex ones may be fairly general. Rather they
are seen as ready-made templates used as such by the speakers of a
language.
In this book, I will assume the existence, and theoretical importance, of
a large number of more or less specific form meaning-use correspond­
ences in the grammars of individual languages, expressed in the form of a
variety of more or less complex grammatical constructions. Grammatical
constructions may appear at different levels, as lexical, phrasal, clausal,
or sentential structures. At the end of this book, I will argue that
grammatical constructions can also be defined al the level of prosody.
They may be highly productive, in the sense that their structural
descriptions may provide a relatively large number of positions which
may be freely filled with smaller constructions or large classes of lexical
items. Or they may be more constrained, in the sense that the number of
open phrasal or lexical positions which they provide and of the
expressions capable of filling these positions is relatively small. As a
general rule, the fewer substitutions a construction permits within the
Structural positions it provides, the more it is perceived as idiomatic.31
For the purposes of the study of information structure, it is useful to
distinguish grammatical constructions at the phrasal level from
constructions whose syntactic domain is the clause or sentence. Since
information structure has to do with the pragmatic structuring of
propositions in discourse, I am mamlv concerned in this book with
constructions capable of expressing propositions, and these belong
information structure and syntax
:
'
!
t
I
।
■
।
t
;
35
typically to the syntactic category “sentence.” However, information*
structure contrasts may in principle be expressed within any syntactic
domain which expresses a predicate-argument relation, for example
within the noun phrase (see the information-structure contrast between
my car and my car or French ma yoiture and ma voiture d Moi).
Among sentence-level constructions it is further necessary to
distinguish three major types. The first is represented by constructions
whose purpose is to express varieties of speakers' attitudes (such as the
let-alone construction analyzed in Fillmore, Kay, & O’Connor 1988 or
Akmajian’s aforementioned “Mad Magazine" type). These constructions
are often categorized as “idiomatic” and do not necessarily have analogs
across languages. The second type is made up of constructions expressing
speech-act differences (such as interrogative vs. imperative vs.
declarative sentences). Unlike the first type, this type is entirely
productive and can be easily identified across languages.32 The third
type, which is the one I am concerned with in this book, comprises
construclions whose function is to express differences in information
structure proper, i.e. which, for a given proposition and a given speech*
act type, express differences in the respective scope of the presupposition
and the assertion, differences in topic-focus structure, or differences in
the cognitive status of the referents of argument expressions. Like the
second type, this type is entirely productive and identifiable across
languages. As I mentioned earlier (Section 1.1), these constructions come
in pairs of allosentences, i.e. semantically equivalent but formally and
pragmatically divergent surface manifestations of given propositions. The
pragmatic contrasts in question are always interpreted against the
background of available, but unused, grammatical alternatives.
I
2
Information
In this and the next three chapters I will analyze the concepts which I
consider fundamental to the study of information structure. These
concepts are: (i) propositional information and its two components
presupposition and assertion (Chapter 2); (ii) the identifiability and
, activation states of the representations of discourse referents in the
■minds of the speech participants (Chapter 3); (iii) the pragmatic relations
topic (Chapter 4) and focus (Chapter 5). Many of the observations in
these chapters have been made by other linguists before me, and I will
acknowledge my predecessors whenever possible. Other portions, I
believe, contain new insights, such as the analysis of the pragmatic
relations “topic” and “focus" and of the relationship between the two. In
particular, what I believe is new in my treatment, and what prompts me
to call.it loosely a “theory," is the idea that an account of information
structure must include all three of the sets of concepts listed above and
must explain how they relate to each other.
2.1
The universe of discourse
I will begin by sketching a simple model of the universe of discourse. In
this model, I presuppose the primacy of spoken language over other
forms of linguistic communication (see Lambrecht 1986b: Ch. 1). I will
therefore always refer to "speakers" and “hearers" (or "addressees' ) not
to “writers" and “readers.” The model makes no claim to originality but
simply serves to establish certain background assumptions for the
discussions to follow.
The universe of discourse is divided into two parts:2
(a)
36
the text-external world, which composes (i) speech participants, i.e. a
speaker and one or several addressees, and (ii) a speech setting, i.e. the
place, time and circumstances in which a speech event takes place;
The universe of discourse
(b)
37
the TEXT-INTERNAL WORLD, which Comprises LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS
(words, phrases, sentences) and their meanings.
The text-internal world is the abstract world of linguistic represen­
tations created in the minds of the interlocutors in the process of
communication. It is the manipulation of such representations that
allows for the conveying of information. In accordance with the
definition provided in Section 1.1, the information-structure compo­
nent of language necessarily involves both text worlds, since it matches
form-meaning pairs with mental states of interlocutors.
I will not attempt to define the notion "meanings of linguistic
expressions” in the above characterization, as this is not of primary
concern in the study of information structure. However I would like to
make three distinctions having to do with meaning which are important
for the following discussion. The first is a distinction between two kinds
of meaning: (i) lexical, which is the meaning inherently expressed in
lexical items (words and word-like expressions), and (ii) relational,
which is the meaning that arises by establishing relations between words.
For the purposes of this study, the most important kind of relational
meaning is that between arguments and predicates, expressed in
propositions. The distinction between lexical and relational meaning
will be of importance in the discussion of information in Section 2.2,
where I will argue that information necessarily involves the meaning
expressed by propositions. An analogous distinction will be drawn in
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 between the pragmatic states of discourse referents
and the pragmatic relations between discourse referents and propositions.
The second distinction relating to meaning is that between the meaning
of linguistic expressions and the things designated or denoted by these
expressions in particular utterances. The entities and states of affairs
designated by linguistic expressions in particular utterances are their
referents. In the case of expressions which do not designate entities or
states of affairs but attributes or relations, such as small, in. wen! home,
etc., 1 will use the term designatum or denotatum instead of "referent.”
The third distinction I would like to make is that between the referents of
linguistic expressions and the abstract representations of these referents
in the minds of the speech participants. Information-structure analysis is
primarily concerned with such mental representations This distinction
between referents and their mental representations, though theoretically
tnjormatwn
important, is tenninologically cumbersome and I will often neglect it
when it is not required for the clarity of the argument.
It is an inherent property of our bipartite model of the universe of
discourse that elements of the text-external world do not have to be
established by speakers via discourse representations but may be taken
for granted by virtue of their being present in, or recoverable from, the
speech setting. Linguistic expressions designating such text-external
elements are referred to as deictic expressions. Deictic expressions
allow a speaker to directly designate elements of the text-external world
by "pointing” to them (Greek deiknymi "1 show, designate”). Among the
deictic expressions of a language are those which denote (i) the speaker
and the addressee (/, you, etc.), (ii) the time of the speech event and points
in time measured with reference to it (e.g. now, yesterday, tomorrow, etc.),
(iii) the place of the speech event and places situated in relation to it {here,
there, etc.), and in general all expressions whose meaning can only be
understood with reference to some aspect of the text-external world (see
in particular Fillmore 1971a and 1976). The text-external world is also
coded in certain elements of form usually not labeled deictic, e.g. in the
feminine adjective ending in the French sentence Je suts coniente “I am
happy," which owes its occurrence to the fact that the speaker is a
woman.3 Moreover certain aspects of the social interaction between
speech participants may be expressed with linguistic categories relating to
the text-external world, such as the grammaticalized expression of
politeness via deictic categories.4
Elements of the discourse which pertain to the text-internal world
cannot be taken for granted in the same way by a speaker. In the textinternal world referents are not designated deictically by “pointing" but
indirectly, via representations which the speaker must set up for the
addressee (Section 3.2). The form of expressions denoting entities in the
text-internal world often depends on whether, and bow recently, mental
representations of these entities have been established in a discourse.
Entities for which a representation has been recently evoked or activated
(Section 3.3) in the text-internal world are often denoted or "related to”
in more abstract form via a special class of anaphoric expressions (Greek
anaphero “to bring back, relate") like she. it. so, there, then, etc. For
example the decision to designate a particular discourse referent with the
indefinite noun phrase a woman, the definite noun phrase the woman, the
proper name Mary, or the pronoun she is determined by the status of the
discourse representation of this referent in the text-internal world. If a
The universe of discourse
1
;
pronoun is used, the question of the stress it will receive, where it will
appear in the sentence, or (depending on the language) which pronoun
type it will belong to is also determined by text-internal criteria. Most of
the information-structure concepts used in this study, such as “topic,”
“focus,” “aboutness," “information,” etc., are categories of the text­
internal world. They have to do with the discourse representations of
entities and states of affairs in the minds of the speech participants,, not
with the properties of entities in the real world.
Particularly revealing from the point of view of the formal
manifestation of the categories under analysis are linguistic situations
where the two discourse worlds come together or overlap. This happens
for example when an element in the text-external world (e.g. the speaker
and/or the addressee) is at the same time a topic in the ongoing
conversation. In such cases, one and the same entity can be expressed in
different grammatical forms depending on whether it is referred to by
virtue of its presence in the speech setting or by virtue of its role as a topic
in the text-internal world. Let us consider one example of this kind of
correspondence between the two discourse worlds and of the grammatical
changes which the transfer from one to the other can bring about.
English, like other languages, has a special “presentational" construc­
tion, involving a small number of intransitive verbs like be and come, the
subjects of these verbs, and the deictic adverbs here or there. The point of
using this construction is to call the attention of an addressee to the
hitherto unnoticed presence of some person or thing in the speech setting.
This construction is called “presentational" because its communicative
function is not to predicate a property of a given entity but to introduce a
new entity into a discourse. (The notion “presentational construction” is
not restricted to deixis, as in the case I have in mind; such constructions
may also function to introduce a new entity into the text-internal world,
in which case they are usually- and misleadingly - called “existential"; see
Section 4.4.4.1.5) Let us assume a speaker wants to draw her addressee’s
attention to the fact that a hitherto absent entity, say someone’s cat, is
now arriving at the speech setting. She can do this by uttering the
sentence
(2.1)
i
>
39
Here comes the cat.
In this sentence, the subject noun cat is placed after the verb and its
prosodic prominence characterizes it as having a focus relation to the
proposition. Now if at the time of the utterance the entity newly
•’
*
i
40
Information
r
introduced into the text-external world happens to be already represented
as a topic in the text-intemal world, the speaker can express this fact
grammatically by coding the introduced referent in such a way that its
topic status in the discourse prior to its appearance in the text-external
world is apparent:
1
(2-2) •
1 k
Here he comes.
The passage of the referent from the text-intemal to the text-external
world is linguistically expressed in (2.2) by combining a deictic device (the
presentational Acre-construction) with an anaphoric topic-marking
device (the unaccented pronoun he), resulting in a construction which
ÍS both presentational and predicating. Using a theoretical concept from
Construction Grammar, we can say that the presentational construction
in (2.1) “inherits” the pragmatic features of the pronominal expression
Ae;in particular the feature "established topic” (Section 4.4.3).
Notice that the different status of the animal as previously established
in the universe of discourse or not is expressed not only morphologically,
by the choice of lexical vs. pronominal coding, and prosodically, by the
placement of pitch prominence, but also syntactically, by the position of
the word in the sentence. While the subject expression designating the
newly introduced referent (the noun phrase the cat) appears after the
verb, the subject expression designating the referent which was
represented in the text-intemal world prior to its arrival at the speech
setting (the pronoun he) appears before the verb. Since this difference in
word order has no semantic import, we may conclude that it correlates
directly with the difference in the discourse status of the referent in the
two utterances. Like the choice of pronominal vs. nominal coding and of
presence vs. absence of prosodic prominence, the syntactic choice is
determined at the level of information structure. The contrast between
(2.1) and (2.2) may be seen as another manifestation of the principle
enunciated in Section 1.3 according to which the topical vs. focal status of
an expression may be reflected in the syntax of the sentence by preverbal
vs. postverbal position of the constituent.
It is important to acknowledge that the difference in NP position in the
two examples is not an automatic grammatical consequence of the
morphological difference between a noun {cat) and a pronoun (he). The
difference is the result of a meaningful choice. To see this, consider the
following attested utterance, made by someone with an allergy to cats
The universe of discourse
41
who was sitting in the house of a cat owner and who was hoping the
animal wouldn't show up:6
(2.2’)
And here the cat
comes!
In (2.2’), the expression designating the animal appears in the same
position and with the same lack of prominence as the pronoun he in (2.2),
but this time it is an NP with lexical content. Its external syntax and its
prosody are the same as that of the anaphoric pronoun, but its internal
syntax (or its morphology) is different. As in the previous cases, the
difference is pragmatically motivated. Even though in both cases the
referent is already topical in the text-intemal world prior to its physical
emergence at the speech setting, there is a difference in pragmatic
salience: in (2.2') the speaker does not consider the referent salient
enough in the interlocutors” consciousness to warrant the use of a
pronominal variable. To use a concept to be introduced in Section 3.3,
the mental representation of the referent has a lower degree of
“activeness” in (2.2’) than in (2.2), requiring lexical rather than
pronominal coding.
The use of the deictic /rere-construction is not restricted to third person
referents. It is possible for a speaker to announce his or her presence to a
hearer with this construction, thereby creating a change in the text­
external world. The speaker can do this e.g. by uttering the following
sentence:
(2.3)
Here I
am.
It is also possible for a speaker to acknowledge the arrival at the speech
setting of a previously absent interlocutor by uttering either one of the
sentences
(2.4)
a. Here you are
b. here you are.
(The choice of (a) or (b) depends on whether the arrival of the
interlocutor was expected or not, a distinction to which I will return later
on.) Notice that even though in these examples the speaker or the hearer
is introduced into the text-external world via the presentational
construction, the status of / and you is fundamentally different from
that of the cat in (2.1} since the speaker and the hearer are necessary
participants in the text-external world. This fact is again reflected
grammatically The expressions referring to the speech participants are
42
Information
pronouns, they are unaccented, and they appear before the verb. They
are thus formally similar to the anaphoric he in example (2.2). The
pronouns are not given prosodic prominence and cannot appear in the
postverbal focus position which the NP the cat occupied in (2.1). The
sequences Here's me or Here's you would be unacceptable under the
circumstances (but see below), and the sequences Here am t or Here are
you are Ungrammatical.
In spite of the intonationai and positional similarity between the deictic
Ijyou in (2.3), (2.4) and the anaphoric he in (2.2) there is an important
difference between the two kinds of pronouns. With 1 and you the
contrast between the two discourse worlds is to some extent neutralized,
because of the dual status of speakers and addressees as interlocutors and
as possible topics of discussion. Speakers can talk about themselves as
well as about other referents, and an addressee can simultaneously be
talked to and talked about by a speaker. Nevertheless, the contrast in
question is sometimes grammatically expressed with first and second
person pronouns. This happens whenever the presence of the speaker or
the hearer, in spite of their role as interlocutors in the text-external world,
is unexpected in a world which is not that of the ongoing discourse. For
example, when a speaker discovers herself or the addressee in a group
photograph she might utter sentence (2.5) or (2.6):
(2.5)
Look, here’s me!
(2.6)
Look, here’s you!
In these sentences the pronoun now carries the focus accent and is placed
in postverbal position, as in the case of the cat in example (2.1). The
similarity is due to the fact that in both cases a referent is newly
established in a discourse world, a situation which entails prosodic
prominence of the NP (see Section 5.7). Notice that, unlike the topic
pronouns in (2.2) through (2.4), the focus pronoun me has oblique case­
marking and the verb does not agree with it. (rot in (2.6) is also oblique,
but formally ambiguous between nominative and oblique case.) This
illustrates the often noticed (though by no means absolute) correlation
between subject, topic, and agreement on the one hand, and non-subject,
focus, and lack of agreement on the other (see Given 1976, Lambrecht
1984a, Bresnan & Mchombo 1987).7
The various examples involving the deictic /teri-construction show that
pragmatic differences having to do with the contrast between the text-
Information
43
external and the text-internal world may be formally reflected in the
grammatical structure of the sentence. This is especially clear in the
contrast between Here comes the cat and Here the cat comes, or between
Here you are and Here's you. The difference between the members of
these pairs of ailosentences cannot be captured with a rule which merely
relates syntactic form and semantic interpretation since the members of.
each pair are syntactically well-formed and semantically equivalent. Any
impression of ill-formedness disappears once the right context is
established. The formal difference can only be explained with reference;
to the component of information structure.
In more general terms, the examples discussed in this section
demonstrate the existence of a series of systematic correspondences
between grammatical and pragmatic factors. While preverbal position
and lack of pitch prominence correlate with topic status and previous
presence of a referent (or its mental representation) in the universe of
discourse, postverbal position and pitch prominence correlate with focus
status and previous absence of a referent from the universe of discourse.
As with our English, Italian, and French model sentences in Chapter 1,
the grammatical contrasts illustrated in (2.1) through (2.6) are
illustrations of the pragmatic motivation of grammatical form.
2.2
Information
In my brief sketch of the universe of discourse I characterized the textinternal world as the abstract world of linguistic representations in which .
information is created in the minds of the interlocutors. As a first step
towards understanding the notion of information in natural language let
us carefully distinguish the information conveyed by the utterance of a
sentence from the meaning expressed by the sentence. While the meaning
of the sentence is a function of the linguistic expressions which it contains
and thus remains constant, the information value of an utterance of the
sentence depends on the mental states of the interlocutors. Whether a
given piece of propositional meaning constitutes information or not
depends entirely on the communicative situation in which it is uttered.
One useful way of characterizing information is to say that by
informing the hearer of some situation or state of affairs, the speaker
influences the hearer’s mental representation of the world. This
representation is formed by the sum of “propositions” which the hearer
knows or believes or considers uncontroversial at the time of speech. (My
in
.¡|
*•
tr
p.
j
44
Information
use of the term "proposition” will be justified in the next section.) We
may refer to this sum of propositions loosely-and perhaps somewhat
misleadingly—as the hearer’s knowledge. “To have knowledge of a
proposition” is understood here in the sense of "to have a mental picture
of its denotatum,” not in the sense of “to know its truth” (see below for
further discussion). To inform a person of something is then to induce a
change in that person’s knowledge state by adding one or more
propositions. The notion of information which I am concerned with
here is well described in the following quote from Dahl (1976):
.■ >'
!■
Let us consider one important use of declarative sentences, namely as
means to influence the addressee’s picture of the world. In such cases,
the speaker assumes that the addressee has a certain picture - or model of the world and he wants to change this model in some way. We might
then identify theold or the given with the model that is taken as a point
of departure for the speech act and the new with the change or addition
that is made in this model, old will here be equivalent to presupposed in
one sense of the term. We can say that the addressee receives “new
information” in the sense that he comes to know or believe more about
the world than he did before. What he believes may be true or false - the
information he gets about the world may be correct or incorrect. If we
accept that last statement, it follows that the object of his belief or the
new information must be something which is capable of being true or
false-that is what is usually called a proposition. Let us therefore call
this kind of information propositional information. (Dahl 1976:38)
It should be noted that when a speaker influences the hearer’s “picture”
of the world by adding to it, only a small portion of that picture is
normally affected, namely the portion which is “under discussion" and
with respect to which the piece of information conveyed is meant to be
relevant. Pictures, like human knowledge, are structured. For example,
when someone talking to me 'about her brother says that he is studying
linguistics, it is my knowledge of the speaker’s family that is affected and
not my knowledge of, say, the economic situation of the United Slates. I
Will come back to this point in the discussion of presupposition in the
next section.
While I fully agree with the importance attributed in (he above quote
to the propositional nature of “new information," 1 depart from Dahl’s
characterization in one important point, at least as far as terminology is
concerned.8 I believe that in the linguistic analysis of information, hence
in the grammatical domain of information structure, the logical concept
of truth has no place. While propositions may be said to be true or false,
Information
45
in the sense that their application to states of affairs in given worlds may
be correct or incorrect, the mental representations of events, situations,
or states which we think of in terms of propositions and which are
communicated in sentences can hardly be characterized as having truth
values. Such representations simply exist, or do not exist, in the heads of
speakers and hearers. One can know, or be ignorant of, a certain event
denoted by a proposition, i.e. one may, or may not, have some mental
“picture" of the event; and one may be thinking of the event, or be
oblivious of it, at a certain time, i.e. one may, or may not, have that
picture at the forefront of one's consciousness. But to characterize the
event, or the picture of it, as true or false seems incongruous.
If someone informs me that “The cat in the hat is back," my
representation of the world is increased by one proposition, indepen­
dently of whether what I'm being told is true. If later I find out that the
proposition "The cat in the hat is back” was not true in the situation in
which it was used, the representation of the cat being back may
nevertheless linger in my mind. And this representation does not become
false just because it does not correspond to the world as it is. It just
becomes outdated. To lake another example, if someone says to me “I
just found out that Sue is married," and I happen to know that in fact she
is not married, it is certainly possible to say that the speaker has a false
belief about Sue’s marital state, hence that the proposition “Sue is
married" is false under the circumstances. But this way of phrasing things
does not seem to contribute much to our understanding of the utterance
as a piece of information. If 1 correct the speaker by saying "But it's not
true that she is married,” I am still evoking the same mental
representation “Sue is married.” and 1 assume my addressee still has
this representation in his mind, even though the proposition is not true.
From the point of view of the information structure of the sentence, it is
the existence and cognitive state of this representation in the mind of the
interlocutors that counts, not the question of the truth of the proposition
in terms of w'hich it is conceptualized. What we are concerned with is the
fit between states of minds and sentence structures, not between states of
affairs and propositions.
Let us turn to the notions "old" and “new" in Dahl's quote. It is a
fundamental property of information in natural language that whatever
is assumed by a speaker to be new to a hearer is information which is
.added to an already existing slock of knowledge in the hearer's mind.
The hearer’s mind is not a blank sheet of paper on which new
propositions are inscribed. Conveying information therefore requires
constantly changing hypotheses on the part of the speaker about the state
of knowledge of the hearer as speech progresses. Information can
normally be conveyed only if the hypotheses made by the speaker
concerning the hearer’s state of knowledge are correct, i.e. if the
information the speaker is trying to convey is not already stored in the
hearer’s mind. This condition on the successful transmission of
information has been called the “Principle of the Presumption of
Ignorance” by Strawson (1964), Now, since the state of ignorance of a
hearer is never total-new information always being added to already
existing knowledge-this principle must be complemented by another
principle, which Strawson calls the "Principle of the Presumption of
Knowledge.” This second principle is based on the idea that
statements, in respect of (heir informativeness, are not generally selfsufficient units, free of any reliance upon what the audience is assumed
to know or to assume already, but commonly depend for their effect
upon knowledge assumed to be already in the audience’s possession.
(Strawson 1964:97)
To use two popular terms, there is normally no "new information”
without already existing "old information.”
The notions of new information and old information have given rise
to great confusion in the literature and it is my main concern in the
present chapter to clarify and difleremiate them. As a firs! step towards
clarification, let us recall the difference between information and
meaning. While meaning is expressed either in individual words or via
relations established between words, information can strictly speaking
only be conveyed relationally, via propositions. Informing a hearer of
something means informing him or her of some state of affairs, i.e. of
something which necessarily involves not only participants but also
something to participate in. One can inform someone e.g. of the price of a
book but not of a book or of ten dollars. The expression the price of a
book, codes the proposition "The book has a price," i.e. it codes a relation
between a predicate and an argument, but the expressions a book or ten
dollars code only quantities of entities Ji is true that a proposition can
State the mere existence of an entity, but such a statement still involves a
predicate and an argument. If I say "Money!" upon seeing a dollar bill in
the street, I am informing my addressee of a stale of affairs, i.e. that there
is a dollar bill in the street or that I have noticed this bill.
,
I
t
’
J
mjormaiion
47
Thus it is necessary to distinguish the propositional information
conveyed by a sentence, as characterized in the quote from Dahl above,
from the elements of information in a sentence, i.e. the contributions
made by individual words or phrases to the propositional information.
One might want to call such contributions “lexical information** or
“referential information.” However, to avoid confusion J will use the
term “information” only for the creation of knowledge via propositions.
By insisting on the distinction between information as expressed via
propositions and the elements or building blocks with which propositions
are formed, we may avoid one type of confusion which often arises in
discussions of new vs. old information. It is often said that certain
constituents of a sentence, in particular the subject, “convey’ old
information," meaning that they are known to the addressee or have
been mentioned in previous discourse or are inferable from previously
mentioned elements, whereas other constituents, in particular the
predicate, “convey new information”, meaning that they are not known
or inferable in that way. Implicit in such statements is the notion that the
information expressed by a sentence is segmentable, i.e, that it can be
divided up among the various sentence constituents, each carrying a
subportion - either old or new—of this total information. It is easy to see
why this idea has some intuitive appeal. Consider the following questionanswer pair:
(2.7)
Q. Where did you go last night?
A: I went to the movies.
I
Il is tempting to say that in the answer to the question in (2.7) the
constituent the movies or perhaps to the movies expresses “the new
information” because the remaining portion of the sentence, made up of
the words I and went, was already contained in the question (and in the
case of J taken for granted from the text-external world). Therefore, the
reasoning goes, the referents or desígnala of these words may be assumed
to be present in the speaker/hearer’s mind, therefore they cannot count as
new, and therefore these words “convey old information."
In spite of its intuitive appeal, I consider this account of the
information structure of (2.7) incorrect, or at least misleading. If “new
information" were equated with “new constituent," i.e. a constituent
whose referent or designatum is “new” to the hearer in a particular
48
Information
discourse, it would be difficult to account for the information structure of
the answer to the question in (2.8):
(18)
Q: When did you move to Switzerland?
A: When 1 was seventeen.
What constitutes the information conveyed by this answer is of course
not the fact that at some point in his life the speaker was seventeen
(expressed by I was seventeen), let alone some abstract time indication
(expressed in when and was), but the relation established between an act
of moving to Switzerland, the person involved in that act, and the time at
which the moving occurred. It is the role of the time expression as an
argument (or “adjunct”) in an open proposition that is unknown to the
addressee, hence it is the indication of this role that makes the answer
informative. The fact that in (2.8) the mere use of the temporal clause is
sufficient to express the requested information does not entail that it
expresses by itself “the new information." The conveyed information is
not “when I was seventeen" but (clumsily expressed) “The time when I
moved to Switzerland is the time when I was seventeen.” The information
is the establishment of a relation between terms in a proposition.
In a similar vein, the information conveyed by the answer in (2.7) is not
“to the movies" but something like "The place I went to last night was
the movies." That to the movies in (2.7) and when 1 was seventeen in (2.8)
cannot constitute the information in themselves is clear from the fact that
they could not function as interpretable answers without the associated
full propositions. This is not to say that there is no grammatically
relevant difference between the answers when I was seventeen or to the
movies and the elements of the propositions which were already contained
in the questions. This difference will be described in the next section in
terms of the notions “presupposition” and “assertion” and later on
(Chapter 5) in terms of the notion of “focus.”
The dilemma for the segmentation view of information is particularly
striking in the case of a simple sentence like (2.9):
(2.9)
She did it.
In this sentence all constituents must be equally ‘'old" because otherwise
they could not all appear in anaphoric pronominal (and “pro-verbal")
form: to be able to interpret these constituents we must know from
previous discourse who or what they refer to (none of these expressions is
information
49
used deicticaliy). Nevertheless, in an appropriate utterance context this
sentence clearly may convey new information in the sense that it may
change the addressee's representation of the world. The conveying of
information is in principle independent of the previous mention or non­
mention of the desígnala of the different constituents in a sentence. As in
the previous examples, the conveying of information comes about here
via the establishment of relations between the elements of the proposition
(or, as in one interpretation of (2.9), via a change in the polarity of the
proposition). The sentence in (2.9) may convey some piece of new
information as readily as the following (pragmatically somewhat
peculiar) sentence cited by Allerton (1978):
(2.10)
A clergyman's opened a betting shop on an airliner.
In this sentence the three constituents a clergyman, a betting shop., and an
airliner have referents which were presumably not mentioned in the
discourse preceding the utterance. Moreover the predicate has opened
may also be “new" to the discourse (The question to what extent
predicates may be said to be “new" or “old" will be discussed in Sections
3.4 and 5.4.2.) The relevant difference between Í2.9) and (2.10) is not a
difference in the “newness" or "oldness" of the information but rather a
difference in the assumed states of the representations of the referents or
designata of the various sentence constituents in the addressee's mind at
the time of utterance?
To sum up, the information conveyed by a proposition cannot be
factored out and matched with individual sentence constituents. In
particular, the difference between "old information" and "new informa­
tion” cannol be equated with the difference between “old” and “new"
referents (see Section 5.4.1 for further discussion). 1 will therefore reject
the segmentation view of information and replace it with an account of
the information structure of sentences in which a distinction is made
between (i) the pragmatic states of the denotata of individual sentence
constituents in the minds of the speech participants and (ii) the
pragmatic relations established between these denotata and the
propositions in which they play the role of predicates or arguments. It
is the establishment of such pragmatic relations that makes information
possible
The need to draw’ a theoretical distinction between the pragmatic status
of individual items tn a proposition and the information conveyed by the
proposition as a whole is not a new idea. It is stated, for example, by
Jespersen in his Philosophy of Grammar (1924). In his discussion of the
concepts “subject" and “predicate,” Jespersen writes:
The subject is sometimes said to be the relatively familiar element, to
which the predicate is added as something new ... This may be true of
most sentences, but not of all, for if in answer to the question "Who said
that?” we say "Peter said it." Peter is the new element, and yet it is
undoubtedly the subject. The "new information" is not always
contained in the predicate, but it is always inherent in the connection
of the two elements,-in the fact that these two elements are put
together. (1924:145)
Jespersen’s statement contains both a clear distinction of the two
categories “new referent" and “new information" and the germ of their
confusion. For even though he emphasizes the propositional nature of
information by insisting that information arises through the connection
established between the elements of a proposition and not through the
elements themselves, he blurs this distinction by saying that “the ‘new
information* is not always contained in the predicate" (emphasis mine),
thus leaving the door open to the interpretation that sometimes, or in
most cases, it is indeed contained in the predicate. The distancing effect
Jespersen creates by putting the phrase “new information" in scare
quotes seems to indicate that he was aware of the possible confusion but
trusted the reader to make the necessary adjustments. 1 will return to the
particular issue of the information status of focal arguments like "Peter"
in Jespersen’s example in Section 5.2.3.
In my own terminological practice I will restrict the use of the terms
“old information" and "new information" to aspects of information
associated with propositions. “Old information,” then, is the sum of
“knowledge” (in the above-stated sense) evoked in a sentence which a
speaker assumes to be already available in the hearer's mind at the time
of utterance - “the old," “the given," or “the presupposed" in the quote
from Dahl-while "new information" is the information added to that
knowledge by the utterance itself - “the new” in Dahl’s terms Both old
and new information correspond to propositions and cannot be equated
with the lexical or phrasal elements out of which propositions are formed.
Because of the confusion attached to the two terms. I will replace them in
most contexts with the more specifically linguistic terms “presupposi­
tion" and “assertion," to which I will turn now
I
j
’
J
,
1
I
1
!
i
1
Presupposition and assertion
2.3
51
Presupposition and assertion
In my discussion of the dual nature of information as expressed in
Strawson's two principles of the “Presumption of Ignorance" and the
“Presumption of Knowledge,” I mentioned that the information
conveyed by a proposition is itself normally a combination of old and
new elements, insofar as what is new is normally new with respect to
something which is already given. This property of information is
reflected linguistically in the fact that sentences typically contain some
lexical or grammatical manifestation of the information assumed to be
already given in the hearer’s mind, as a verbal point of departure or basis
for the new information to be added.
,
The point that new information is made up of a combination of old
and new elements is by no means trivial. If our goal as speakers is to
increase the knowledge of an addressee, why should we ever have to say
things that we assume the addressee knows already? In a naive model of
information as a way of helping an addressee acquire knowledge, there
would be no reason for such redundancy. However if it is understood that
information arises by relating something new to something that can
already be taken for granted this apparent redundancy becomes a
necessity.
Let us look at an example. It is often said that the proposition
expressed by a restrictive relative clause is “presupposed" (in one sense of
this word), meaning that it is assumed to be already known (or believed
or otherwise taken for granted) by the addressee. Thus when I say
(2.11)
I finally met the woman who moved in downstairs
>
.
;
i
;|
I
!
|
!
!
!
■
what I want to communicate to my addressee is that I met my new
neighbor (whose existence and sex I assume my addressee is aware oi),
not that someone moved in downstairs. By using the restrictive relative
clause iv/jo moved in downstairs I express the fact that I take for granted
j
;
|
I
that my addressee already knows that someone moved in downstairs. If I
wanted to inform my addressee of the proposition expressed in the
relative clause, 1 would have to say something like Someone moved in
downstairs. It’s a woman or perhaps This woman moved in downstairs.10 So
why do I bother to utter the relative clause, if my addressee already
|
knows the proposition expressed by it? The answer is, of course, that the
relative clause helps the hearer determine the referent of the phrase the
woman, by relating this referent to some already given piece of
!
52
information
knowledge, which I assume the hearer happens not to be thinking of at
the time I utter the sentence.
To confirm the claim that in using the restrictive relative clause in
(2.11) the speaker indeed takes for granted that the addressee knows the
proposition expressed tn it we can apply to this sentence what ErteshikShir & Lappin (1979, 1983) call the “lie-test’. Let us assume the addressee
were to challenge the statement in (2.11) with the reply Thai's not true.
This reply would be understood as challenging only the proposition that I
met my new neighbor, not that someone moved in downstairs from me. If
he were to make his challenge more explicit, he could say That's not true,
you didn’t, but hardly That's not true, she didn't. In saying That's not true
the addressee would be understood as challenging only that portion of
the utterance which is presented as new, not the portion which is
grammatically marked as to be taken for granted. If he wanted to indicate
that the proposition which the speaker is treating as known can in fact
not be assumed to be known, he would have to modify the
presuppositional situation explicitly, by saying e.g. I didn't know that
you had a new neighbor or What are you talking about, you live in a onestory building! 11
Let us refer to the “old information” contained in, or evoked by, a
sentence as the pragmatic presupposition (or simply the presupposition,
see the comments below), and let us refer to the "new information”
expressed or conveyed by the sentence as the pragmatic assertion (or
simply the assertion).12 “Presupposition" and “assertion" are defined in
(2.12) (the definition of “presupposition" will be extended below and
slightly modified later on):
(2.12)
pragmatic presupposition: The set of propositions lexicogrammadcally
evoked in a sentence which the speaker assumes the hearer already
knows or is ready to take for granted at the time the sentence is uttered.
PRAGMATIC assertion: The proposition expressed
the hearer is expected to know or take for granted
the sentence uttered.
by a sentence which
as a result of hearing
Recall that “to know a proposition” is understood here in the sense of
“to have a mental representation of its denotatum ’’ The expression is
neutral with respect to the question of whether the proposition is true or
false. In making an assertion, a speaker expresses a pragmatically
STRUCTURED proposition,
i.e. a proposition which reflects not only a stale
of affairs but also the speaker's assumptions about the state of mind of
Presupposition and assertion
53
the hearer at the time of utterance, by indicating what is assumed to be
already given and what is assumed to be new.
A comment first about my use of the term proposition in (2.12), whose
logico-semantic connotations may seem inappropriate in the present
context. What a speaker assumes a hearer knows or takes for granted are
strictly speaking not propositions but states of affairs, situations, events
etc., i.e. the kinds of things which may be denoted by propositions. Since
I know of no generally accepted simple term for the denotatum of a
proposition, I will simply use the term “proposition" ambiguously,
making the distinction explicit in cases such as this where I fear confusion
may result. I am not suggesting that the knowledge shared between a
speaker and a hearer has the status of a set of propositions or “latent
sentences" in the interlocutors' minds. In particular, I am not suggesting
that the pragmatic presuppositions evoked in an utterance must be
linguistically represented by some verbal or other predicating expression
in the sentence, although they may of course be.
To take one example, the use of the definite article in the noun phrase
the woman who moved in downstairs in example (2.11) evokes the
presupposition that the addressee can identify the individual designated
by that noun phrase (see Section 3.2). The definite article is a
grammatical symbol for an assumption on the speaker's part, and this
assumption can be represented in the form of a proposition, i.e. the
proposition “the addressee is able to identify the individual in question."
(This is what philosophers cal! the “existential presupposition" of the
definite description expressed by the noun phrase the woman who moved
in downstairs.) This does not entail that the definite article expresses a
proposition or should be viewed as a kind of sentence. Notice also that
while the definite article may be said to symbolize an assumption, it is
misleading to say, as is often done in the literature on discourse
pragmatics, that the referent of a definite noun phrase, let alone the noun
phrase itself, “is presupposed." Just as I cannot “inform you of a
woman” (see Section 2.2 above), I cannot "presuppose this woman” (see
the discussion of the relationship between presupposition and topic in
Section 4.3).
To the presuppositions evoked by a sentence which concern the
assumed knowledge state of the addressee we must add those w'hich
have to do with the speaker's assumptions about the state of
consciousness or awareness of the addressee at the time of utterance.
I will refer to such presuppostions as consciousness presuppositions.
>4
IHJOrmatliUI
Consciousness presuppositions are evoked in particular by the
differences between lexical vs. pronominal (or phonologically null)
codings of denotata or by dilTerences in pitch prominence. These kinds of
presuppositions will be dealt with in Section 3.3 under the heading of
"referent activation.” For example the use of the personal pronoun she in
the sentence She is my friend evokes the speaker's assumption that the
addressee is in a certain state of awareness with respect to the individual
in question, i.e. that some mental representation of that individual is at
the forefront of the addressee’s consciousness al the time of utterance.13
Last, but not least, I will count among the presuppositions evoked by a
sentence the assumptions a speaker has concerning the contextual
relevance or topicality of a referent in the discourse, i.e. the degree to
which a referent can be taken to be a center of current interest with
respect to which a proposition is interpreted as constituting relevant
information (see Section 4.3). 1 will refer to such presuppositions as
relevance presuppositions. For example, the above-quoted sentence She
is my friend evokes not only the presupposition that the hearer is
presently aware of the particular female individual denoted by the
pronoun she (a consciousness presupposition) but also that this
individual is topical in the discourse, i.e. lhal the proposilion expressed
by that sentence can be contextually construed as constituting relevant
information with respect to this individual. This topicality assumption
would not be evoked by the allosentence she is my friend, even though
this sentence would still evoke the given consciousness presupposition
(see Section 5.2.3). One may object to applying the term “presupposition" to matters of consciousness and relevance since these do not seem
to be appropriately described in terms of a hearer’s knowledge or beliefs.
However, since the phenomena in question clearly have to do with a
speaker's assumptions about the stale of mind of the hearer I will
subsume them under the general heading of "pragmatic presupposition.”
A comment is necessary also about my use of the term assertion. I use
this term as nearly synonymous with what 1 called "new information” in
the previous section. Nevertheless the two notions are distinct. While
“information” has to do with the communicative act whereby a speaker
increases a hearer's knowledge-or enriches her representation of the
world-by adding a new proposition to it. "assertion" is the added
proposition itself. I should emphasize that my use of "assertion" does not
coincide with the common usage in which "asserting" a proposition
contrasts with denying or questioning it. Nor does it coincide with the
*
|
i
j
!
I
i
1
i
I
|
Presupposition and assertion
55
usage in which "assertion" is synonymous with "statement," i.e. in which
the term refers to a kind of speech act, expressed in declarative as
opposed to interrogative, imperatjve, or exclamative sentences. From
the point of view of information structure, questions as well as orders and
requests convey information, even though they are not statements. For
example by asking a question, a speaker may inform his addressee of his
desire to know something; by giving an order he may inform his
addressee of the obligation to do something, etc. Within the present
framework, non-declarative sentences, like their declarative counterparts,
are viewed as having pragmatic presuppositions and as being used to
make assertions. This extension is necessary because many of the
grammatical phenomena analyzed in this book are found in questions
and negated sentences as well as in statements (see example (5.13) and
discussion).
Of special importance in the definition of the pragmatic presupposition
in (2.12) is the phrase lexicogrammatically evoked. Unlike the more
general cognitive notions “representation of the world" and "knowl­
edge," which 1 discussed in the section on information, "presupposition"
is understood here as a specifically linguistic concept. To count as a
pragmatic presupposition in the sense of (2.12), an assumption made by
the speaker concerning the hearer's state of mind must have some actual
manifestation in the grammatical or lexical structure of the sentence, i.e.
the presupposed proposition must be in one way or another formally
evoked by the speaker in the sentence. Any assumption on the part of the
speaker which has no formal manifestation in a sentence is irrelevant for
the study of information structure.
Let us apply the definitions tn (2.12) to example (2.11) I finally met the
woman who moved in downstairs. The pragmatic presuppositions
lexicogrammatically evoked with the utterance of this sentence may be
loosely stated as the following set of propositions:
(i)
the addressee can identify the female individual designated by the
definite noun phrase;
(u)
someone moved in downstairs from the speaker;
(in)
one would have expected the speaker to have met that individual at
some earlier point in time.
The first presupposition is evoked by a grammatical morpheme, the
definite article the; the second is evoked by a grammatical construction,
56
information
the relative clause who moved in downstairs; and the third is evoked by a
lexical item, the adverb finally.14 To these three presuppositions
concerning the knowledge state of the addressee we must add the
consciousness presuppositions evoked by the personal pronoun I and the
relative pronoun who:
(iv)
the addressee is aware of the referents of the pronouns i and who al the
time these pronouns are uttered.
Finally the sentence evokes the following relevance presuppositions via
the two unaccented pronouns:
(v)
the proposition expressed by the sentence is construable as relevant
information about the referent of !; the proposition expressed by the
relative clause is construable as relevant information about the referent
of who.
(The status of the relevance presupposition evoked by the relative
pronoun is somewhat special; see the remarks about relative clause
presuppositions in Section 4.1). The assertion expressed by (2.11) may
then be informally stated as follows: “Taking for granted the pro­
positions in (i) through (v) above, the speaker has now met the individual
in question.’
Now the speaker who utters (2.11) surely assumes that he and the
addressee share knowledge in addition to the above set of pragmatic
presuppositions, e.g. the knowledge that moving is a hassle, or that two
and two makes four. However, such shared knowledge is not evoked in
the utterance, i.e. has no lexicogrammatical manifestation in the sentence,
hence is irrelevant to the analysis of the information structure of this
sentence. There is thus a difference between the grammatically relevant
notion of pragmatic presupposition needed in information-structure
analysis and the notion of presupposition found in many discussions on
pragmatics, such as, for example, Kempson’s notion of the “Pragmatic
Universe of Discourse” (1975:16611), which she defines as the entire
“body of facts which both speaker and hearer believe they agree on ” in a
conversation (see also the references on p 345, note 12). Only the former
has a direct bearing on the formal structure of a sentence. The distinction
I am emphasizing here echoes the distinction between "information
structure” and “(conversational) pragmatics” which I emphasized at the
beginning of Chapter I.15
Prest/ppositicn and assertion
57
Often the presuppositions evoked in an utterance are fully or partially
expressed in the preceding linguistic context, either in already
presupposed or in asserted form. For example, in the question-answer
pair in (2.7) the presupposition evoked by the answer, i.e. that the speaker
went somewhere, was already evoked in the question IF/iere did you go
last night? (see the discussion of the presuppositional structure of WHquestions in Section 5.4.4).16 In (2.8) one of the presuppositions required
by the answer IF/ien I was seventeen is the proposition "the speaker
moved to Switzerland,” which was explicitly stated in the question and
which may be left grammatically unexpressed in the answer because it is
assumed to be still “active" in the hearer's consciousness. Even though
this presupposed proposition is not overtly expressed in the answer, it is
nevertheless grammatically evoked, as a phonologically null string.
Notice, incidentally, (hat the proposition "1 was seventeen" itself
represents a piece of knowledge already shared by the interlocutors.
The assertion thus consists here in establishing a time relation between
two pragmatically presupposed propositions (see example (2.13) below
and discussion.)
Similarly, in Jespersen’s above-quoted passage, the presupposition
evoked by the answer peter said it is the proposition "Someone said it”
which was already evoked in the question Who said that? (see Section
5.4.3 on presupposed “open propositions"). The presupposition of the
answer is again evoked by non-lexicai means, in this case prosodically.
Another presupposition evoked in this answer is the assumption that the
referent of the pronoun it is presently at the forefront of the addressee’s
consciousness and, a fortiori, that the addressee can identify this referent.
The speaker also presupposes that the addressee can identify the
individual referred to as "Peter.” (The presupposition attached to
definite descriptions, which has to do with (he mental representations of
discourse entities, will be discussed in Section 3.2 under the heading of
“identifiability.") With her answer, the speaker then makes the assertion
that the particular individual who said the thing referred to as “that" is
the individual "Peter." A more explicit characterization of the
presupposition-assertion relation in sentences such as this will be
presented in Section 5.2.3.
The presupposition and the assertion are thus propositions which
coexist in the same sentence. To make an assertion is to establish a
relation between a presupposed set of propositions (which, as we shall
see, may be empty) and a non-presupposed proposition, the latter being
58
Information
io some sense added to, or superimposed on, the former. The assertion is
therefore not to be seen as the utterance "minus the presupposition" but
rather as a combination of two sets of propositions. In view of the claims
to be made later about the grammatical signaling of the presupposition­
assertion relation it is important to understand that the superimposition
of the asserted proposition on the set of presupposed propositions often
occurs in such a way that the two cannot be lexically factored out and
identified with specific sentence constituents (see also my remarks to this
effect in the section on information above). For example in (2.11) the
presupposition “someone moved in downstairs” does not exactly
coincide with the meaning of the relative clause who moved in downstairs
since the relative pronoun who and the indefinite someone have different
referential properties, nor does it coincide with the meaning of the
complex noun phrase the woman who moved in downstairs since that noun
phrase evokes several different presuppositions. Rather the grammatical
domain for both presupposition and assertion is the sentence or clause as
a whole. This fact will be of special importance in the discussion of focus
in Chapter 5, where “focus” will be defined as that portion of an
utterance whereby the presupposition and the assertion differ from each
other. Since that portion can often not be identified with a particular
sentence constituent, the relationship between focus meaning and focus
marking will be shown to be rather indirect.
From the characterization of “assertion" as the proposition which the
hearer is expected to know as a result of hearing a sentence, it follows (as
a truism) that the asserted proposition must differ from the set of
propositions which are presupposed. One cannot inform an addressee of
something she already knows (although one can obviously tell an
addressee something she knows already). However, while an assertion
cannot coincide with a presupposition, it may consist in relating two or
more presuppositions to each other This possibility was hinted at in the
discussion of the presuppositional structure of (2.8). As another example
consider the following conversational exchange:
(2.13)
A: Why did you do that?
B: I did it because you're my friend
Even though both the proposition “1 did il" and the proposition
“you’re my friend" may be considered pragmatically presupposed,
speaker B’s answer clearly is informative The assertion it expresses
Presupposition and assertion
59
consists in the establishment of a relation of causality between two
previously unrelated presupposed propositions. We can again apply
Erteshik-Shir & Lappin's lie-test to make this clear. If speaker A were to
challenge speaker B’s explanation by saying "That’s not true,’’ the
challenge would normally be understood as involving the causal relation
between the two presuppositions (“That’s not true, you didn’t do it
because of that”) not the presuppositions themselves. The reply “That’s
not true, I'm not your friend” would of course not be impossible but it
would constitute an explicit modification of the presuppositional
situation. The observation that the combination of known propositions
can result in an assertion is related to the earlier observation (see example
(2.9) and discussion) that a piece of new information may result from the
combination of expressions whose referents are entirely given by the
preceding context. Failure to recognize this fact has often led to
confusion in analyses of “new” and “old” information.
Consider now the following utterances. Sentence (2.14a) is to be
imagined in a situation where the speaker has just noticed that the
addressee recently had his hair cut; (2.14b) was said to me by my three
year old son (who knew that I knew what was in my kitchen drawers);
and (2.14c) is self-explanatory;
(2.14)
a. You got a haircut!
b. There's some candy in the kitchen drawer.
c. You lied to me!
It is clear that the propositions expressed in these sentences are
pragmatically entirely presupposed, in the sense that the addressee
obviously was assumed to know them before hearing the utterances. But
it is equally clear that these utterances are assertions, in the sense that
after hearing them the addressee knows more than he did before. The
apparent contradiction is easily resolved. What is communicated with
these sentences is not their propositional content but the fact that the
speaker knows a proposition which he assumes the addressee did not
think he knew. The communicative point of the utterances in (2.14) is to
make explicit that the speaker and the addressee now have the knowledge
of those propositions in common. To use Stalnaker’s expression, the
utterances have created “common ground” between the interlocutors.
This last observation concerning the difference between hearer­
presupposition and speaker-hearer-presupposition makes it necessary to
60
Information
slightly revise the notion of pragmatic presupposition in (2.12). What
counts for this notion are not only the speaker's assumptions about the
hearer’s state of mind but also the speaker’s assumptions about the
hearer’s assumptions about the speaker’s state of mind. Instead of
reformulating the definition in (2.12), I will simply append to it the one
proposed by Stalnaker:
A proposition P is a pragmatic presupposition of a speaker in a given
context just in case the speaker assumes or believes that P, assumes or
believes that his addressee assumes or believes that P, and assumes or
believes that his addressee recognizes that he is making these
assumptions, or has these beliefs. (1974:200)
Stalnaker’s definition, like that of other philosophers and linguists, is
phrased exclusively in terms of propositions, not in terms of the
lexicogrammatical manifestation of propositions in sentences. As I
mentioned before, such manifestation is crucial for the purposes of
information-structure analysis.
While all utterances must express pragmatic assertions in order to be
informative, it is less clear whether all assertions require presuppositions,
i.e. whether the set of presupposed propositions in a sentence may be
empty. Perhaps the best candidates for assertions without presupposi­
tions are “thetic” propositions (see Section 4.2.2) like It's raining or There
is going to be a fight. Another candidate for a presuppositionless assertion
is a discourse-initial utterance like our model sentence (1.1) My car broke
down, made under the described circumstances. As I observed in the
discussion of that sentence in Chapter 1, the interpretability of this
Utterance depends heavily on the situational context (the situation in the
bus), which determines in particular the relevance of the utterance.
However, nothing in the lexicogrammatical structure of this sentence
evokes knowledge shared by the speaker and her audience, except for the
“accommodated” presupposition that the speaker has a car (see Section
2.4 below). The sentence may therefore count as (quasi-)presuppositionless for the purposes of information structure. Finally one might consider
such examples as the earlier-discussed “hot news” sentence (2.10) A
clergyman's opened a betting shop on on airliner. What makes such
sentences pragmatically so exceptional is precisely that they lack any
overt presuppositional reference point and therefore violate Strawson’s
“Principle of the Presumption of Knowledge” (see 2.2).17
Presupposition and assertion
61
The last aspect of the definition in (2.12) in need of explanation is the
modifying adjective pragmatic in the term “pragmatic presupposition.”
This adjective is meant to differentiate the phenomenon under analysis
here from a different kind of presupposition, which has often been
referred to in formal semantics as semantic or logical presupposition,
and which has to do with the effects of certain lexical items on the truth
conditions of the sentences containing them.’8 Even though the difference
between “pragmatic presupposition" and “semantic presupposition" is
by no means clear-cut (the terminological, if not the conceptual,
distinction has in fact been ail but abandoned in the literature), it is
necessary to emphasize one point of divergence, which has to do with the
above-mentioned difference between information and meaning. While
pragmatic presupposition in the sense of information-structure analysis
has to do with the assumptions of speakers concerning the information
status of propositions in utterance contexts, i.e. with communication,
semantic presupposition, at least in one common use of this term, has to
do with the semantic relations between sentences or propositions, i.e.
with logical meaning and truth conditions.
According to one widespread notion of semantic presupposition, “one
sentence presupposes another just in case the latter must be true in order
that the former have a truth value at all" (Stalnaker 1973:447). To cite a
common example, it has often been observed, since Kiparsky & Kiparsky’s
seminal article “Fact” (1970), that sentences containing certain “factive"
verbs presuppose the truth of the complements of these verbs, i.e. that the
truth value of these complements is not affected by matrix-clause
differences in polarity or modality. For example, both the sentence John
regrets that he lied to Mary and its negative counterpart John doesn 7 regret
that he lied to Mary are said to presuppose the truth of the proposition
“John lied to Mary " If this last proposition is not true, i.e. if John did in
fact not lie to Mary, then both the positive and the negative version of
the sentence are said to lack a truth value because neither the claim that
they are true nor the claim that they are false seems to make much sense.
Let us look at some linguistic phenomena with respect to which the
"pragmatic" and the “semantic” approaches to presupposition differ.
Consider the following variants of example (2.14c):
(2.15)
a. I didn't realize that you
lifo
to me.
b. J didn’t realize that inr lied to me
c 1 didn’t rulizf that you lied to me
Since the verb realize is (active, an account of (2.15) in terms of the
semantic notion of presupposition will have to state that if the three
sentences are to have truth values al all, the complement clauses must be
true in all three cases. What is semantically presupposed is the
"factuality" of the proposition expressed in the t/iat-clauses. This
presupposition is entirely determined by a lexical feature of the
sentence, i.e. the presence of the verb realize, and does not change with
the conversational circumstances under which the sentence is uttered. The
meaningful distinctions expressed by the different accent placements in
the sentences in (2.15) (a), (b), and (c), remain unaccounted for.
A pragmatic account of the presuppositional structure of these
sentences is rather different. First, we notice that in the (a) sentence the
proposition expressed in the complement clause need not be pragmati*
cally presupposed at all, since, as in the case of the original utterance
(2.14c), the knowledge of that proposition may not yet be part of the
common ground between the interlocutors (i.e. the meaning of the
sentence can be similar to "I’ve just found out that you lied to me”).
Second, assuming a discourse situation in which the fact that the speaker
was lied to is indeed shared knowledge, the presuppositional status of the
complement clause is nonetheless different in each of the three sentences.
In (a) it is presupposed that the addressee lied to the speaker (and
asserted that the speaker didn’t realize that fact at some earlier point in
time); in (b) it is presupposed that someone lied to the speaker (and
asserted that the speaker didn’t realize that that person is the addressee);
in (c) it is not only presupposed that the addressee lied to the speaker, i.e.
that both speaker and hearer know' this fact, but the sentence also evokes
the assumption that this presupposed proposition was recently touched
upon or "activated” in the conversation. This is shown by the fact that
one can imagine a situation where the complement clause in (2.15c) could
be replaced by an unaccented anaphoric pronoun (/ didn'i realize dial),
while such a substitution would be impossible in (a) or (b). This last
distinction, which I mentioned earlier, between propositions touched
upon or not touched upon in preceding discourse is of major importance
from the point of view of the information structure of sentences. The
relationship between presupposition and activation will be analyzed in
Section 5.4.3.
The semantic observation concerning the truth-conditional stability of
presupposed propositions under differences in polarity or modality in the
non-presupposed portion of a sentence can be easily accommodated
Presupposition and assertion
63
within the pragmatic framework adopted here. From the definition of the
pragmatic presupposition of a sentence as a (lexicogrammatically evoked)
set of propositions which the speaker and the hearer are assumed to have
in common at the time of utterance it follows naturally that the truth of
any pragmatically presupposed proposition is simply taken for granted
by the interlocutors and therefore cannot be affected by an assertion
(unless the point of the assertion is to make the addressee aware that
some presupposition was faulty). As we saw with the application of the
lie-test (example (2.11) and discussion), any aspect of a sentence which
affects the truth value of the proposition expressed by it must be an
element of the assertion, not of the presupposition. For example, let us
assume a state of affairs in which Jespersen's sentence peter said it would
I
’
(
I
i
I
1
be false as a reply to the question Who said that? The falsity of this reply
would not affect the pragmatic presupposition required by the false
answer, namely that a particular person said a particular thing. What
would be affected is rather the assertion that the person who said it is the
individual named Peter. As a result, the proposition as a whole would
cease to be true and, if believed by the addressee, would constitute false
information.
What is interesting from the point of view of information structureand what further distinguishes a pragmatic from a semantic analysis of
the presuppositional structure of this sentence-is the pragmatic status of
the negation of the answer, i.e. peter didn 7 say it. From the point of view
of two-valued logic, if the proposition expressed by the affirmative version
of the sentence is false, its negation must be true, and that is ail there is to
say. However it is obvious, from a communicative point of view, that this
negative sentence, though true, would normally be inappropriate as an
answer to the question “Who said that?” By its prosodic structure-(in
particular the lack of pitch prominence on some element in the verb
phrase, see Section 5.6) the sentence peter didn't say it evokes the
pragmatic presupposition underlying another question, i.e. the question
“Who didn’t say that?”, i.e. it pragmatically presupposes that one or
several individuals did not say a particular thing (and it asserts that Peter
is among these individuals). This, however, is not the presupposition
evoked in the original question "Who said that?’’, hence the striking
inappropriateness of the answer. This important fact of communication is
unaccounted for in the logico-semantic view of presupposition.
It has been observed that in natural language negative sentences are
ordinarily uttered only if the speaker assumes that the addressee believes.
€<
Information
OF at least entertains the possibility, that the corresponding affirmative
sentence is true (see Given 1975b, Gazdar 1979:67, Horn 1989: Ch. 3).
For example, when 1 answer the question How was your afternoon? with
the statement I look a nap. my answer leaves open whether f assume that
the hearer believes that I normally nap in the afternoon. But if I answer I
tfiidh'r take a nap, my statement normally does evoke that assumption.
While the positive answer is unmarked with respect to this presupposi­
tions] feature, the negative answer is marked. It is interesting to notice
that the above observation does not apply to such “narrow-focus”
sentences as our example peter didn't say it. This sentence does not
conjure up the presupposition that Peter did make the remark in question
but rather that someone did not make this remark.
To summarize the foregoing observations about the differences
between pragmatic and semantic presupposition, not only is it the case
that a proposition which in the logico-semantic view counts as
presupposed may count as asserted in the pragmatic view, but one and
the same proposition expressed by one and the same complement clause
may or may not be pragmatically presupposed, depending on the context
of utterance.19 In most cases, differences in pragmatic presupposition will
correspond to differences in grammatical form, whether prosodic, as in
example (2.15), or morphosyntactic, as shown in later chapters. When
presuppositional differences are not grammatically expressed but merely
compatible with the form of the sentence, the sentence or clause evoking
the pragmatic presupposition will be said to be unmarked for the given
presuppositional feature (as e.g. the r/wt-clause complement in (2.15a)
above; see also examples (2.16) through (2.18) below and discussion).
While T do not claim to have done justice to a semantically oriented
view of presupposition, I do hope to have shown that it is not the
semantic but the pragmatic notion which is relevant for informationstructure analysis. With Stalnaker (1973, 1974, 1978). I believe that “the
basic presupposition relation is not between propositions or sentences,
but between a person and a proposition" (1973:447), or, perhaps more
appropriately, between two persons and a proposition. Stalnaker
emphasizes that speakers, not sentences, have presuppositions and he
suggests that, instead of saying that a sentence ' has" a presupposition,
linguists ought to say that it requires a presupposition, without which it
cannot be used appropriately (1973:451).
Stalnaker’s statement that presuppositions belong to speakers rather
than sentences requires a proviso. While this statement expresses a valid
The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure
65
objection against the then prevalent view of presuppositions as purely
semantic phenomena, it conflicts, at least terminologically, with the
definition of pragmatic presupposition in (2.12) above. Inasmuch as
presuppositions are evoked via lexicogrammatical structure it is justified
to say that they are indeed properties of linguistic expressions, including
sentences. However, instead of saying that linguistic expressions (whether
words or constructions) "have certain presuppositions,” 1 will say that
they have presuppositional structures. These presuppositional Struc­
tures, which are used to evoke speaker presuppositions, must be matched
with presuppositional situations, i.e. the actual presuppositions of
interlocutors in discourse situations. Presuppositional structures are then
grammatical conditions on the appropriate use of words and construc­
tions in given discourse situations.
2.4
The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure
The notion of presuppositional structure as the lexicogrammatical coding
of pragmatic presuppositions entails that presuppositions are not merely
a matter of the assumptions of speakers and hearers in a discourse; they
are also a matter of grammar and of the lexicon. And as stated at the
beginning of this book, it is only to the extent that the mental states cf
speakers and hearers are reflected in linguistic form that they are relevant
to the study of information structure. The theory of information
structure presented in this book involves the assumption that a great
number of simple or complex expressions in natural languages have
presuppositional structures in the sense just discussed, i.e. that the
relationship between these expressions and the presuppositional situa­
tions in which they can be used appropriately is regulated by grammatical
convention. This assumption is empirically justified in Lambrecht (in
preparation), where I analyze the presuppositional structures of a number
of complex grammatical constructions in French.
In this section, I would like to discuss a number of phenomena which
seem to contradict the notion of presuppositional structure as a direct
and conventional association between a grammatical form and a
presuppositional situation. These examples are all instances of the
conscious or unconscious exploitation of presuppositions for special
communicative purposes. I will conclude that presuppositional structures
are indeed inherent properties of linguistic expressions and that such
66
Information
apparent counterexamples can be accounted for in terms of a general
cognitive principle called pragmatic accommodation.
In his discussion of pragmatic presupposition, Stalnaker (1973) makes
the following important observation concerning certain apparent
violations of pragmatic rules or principles:
If, in a normal context, a speaker uses a sentence which requires a
presupposition ... then by that very act, he does make the required
presupposition. Whatever his actual beliefs and assumptions, he does
act as if he takes the truth of the proposition for granted, and as if he
assumes that his audience recognizes that he is doing so. (1973:451)
This possibility that speakers have of "making a presupposition,’’ or of
creating a presupposilional situation, by using a sentence that requires it
is illustrated by Stalnaker with a well-known type of conversational
exchange: "Someone asks of my daughter, ‘how old is he?’ I answer, 'she
is ten months old’ ” (1973:449). At first glance such an example seems to
contradict the notion of presuppositional structure. Indeed if the
presuppositional structure of a linguistic expression is taken to be an
inherent property of that expression and if we define pragmatic
presuppositions as grammatical evocations of shared background
assumptions of interlocutors, then how can the answer she is ten months
old be correctly understood, given that the presupposition required by the
pronoun she (i.e. that the referent is female) is not the one taken for
granted in the question?
The answer is that by using the pronoun she the speaker creates a
presuppositional situation in the conversation which differs from the one
the addressee took for granted at the time of her question. This newly
created presuppositional situation can then be used as the required
background for the assertion about the age of the child. The actual
presuppositional structure of the pronoun remains unchanged
throughout the conversation. The same point could be made, mutatis
mutandis, about the use of the definite noun phrase my car in example
(1.1) (My car broke down), i.e. in a context in which no one in the
audience could be expected to know that the speaker had a ear The fact
that the latter example seems less striking in context than the use ofr/ie in
Stalnaker's example may be explained by assuming that some
presuppositional structures are easier to exploit than others, lor reasons
which I cannot go into here.20 What counts tor the present argument is
this: if a speaker can create a new presuppositional situation merely by
The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure
67
using an expression which requires this situation, then presuppositional
structures must indeed be inherent properties of linguistic expressions,
whether words or constructions.
Stalnaker’s views of presupposition, in particular the idea expressed in
the above quote, are further developed by Lewis (1979). Lewis observes
that it is difficult to think of an utterance which would be unacceptable
only because it lacked a required presupposition. If the presupposition
evoked by some expression does not correspond to the presuppositional
situation in the discourse, it is normally automatically supplied by the
speech participants: “Say something that requires a missing presupposi­
tion, and straightway that presupposition springs into existence, making
what you said acceptable after all" (Lewis 1979:172). The newly created
presupposition will then become part of the set of pragmatic
presuppositions in the universe of discourse of that particular conversa­
tion. Lewis then formulates the following rule, which he calls the rule of
ACCOMMODATION FOR PRESUPPOSITION:
If at time t something is said that requires presupposition P to be
acceptable, and if P is not presupposed just before t, then-ceteris
paribus and within certain limits-presupposition P comes into existence
at t.
In what follows I will present a few examples illustrating this rule, using
constructions whose presuppositional structure is relatively well under­
stood.21
Let us first consider the case of the presuppositional structure of
adverbial clauses involving such adverbial conjunctions as when, after,
before, because, since, although, etc. Here is a simple example:
(2.16)
A: What did you do before you sat down to eat?
0: (Before I sat down to eat) 1 washed my hands.
In speaker B’s reply, the proposition that B sat down to eat, which
appears in the form of a dependent clause, is pragmatically presupposed
(to the point that it could be omitted altogether without influencing the
interpretation of the sentence). The presuppositional status of the
proposition expressed in the main clause, on the other hand, is left
unspecified. Speaker A may well have known as a fact that B washed his
hands at some point in time, but such knowledge is irrelevant in this
context. Speaker A clearly did not know that B washed his hands at the
time before he sat down to eat, unless he was testing B’s sincerity or
68
information
mentory.22 The assertion in B's reply consists in establishing a relation
between a presupposed proposition and a proposition whose presupposi­
tions! status is left open.
While in (2.16) the presuppositional status of the main-clause
proposition “B washed his hands" was unspecified, it is clearly
specified, as presupposed, in the following syntactically different
example:
r
(2.17)
A: When did you wash your hands?
B: (I washed my hands) before I sat down to eat.
In (2.17) the main-clause proposition that B washed his hands is shared
knowledge at the time the question is asked and a fortiori at the time B
answers it (again to the point that it could be omitted). The fact I am
interested in here is that the proposition expressed in the before-clause in
B’s reply has not itself ceased to be pragmatically presupposed in (2.17),
even though it appears in the same position and with a similar prosodic
structure as the main clause in B’s reply in (2.16), whose presuppositional
status was unspecified. As in (2.16), the knowledge that B sat down is
assumed to be shared by the interlocutors. What has changed is the topic
and focus distribution in the sentence as a whole, i.e. the relation between
the presupposed proposition and the rest of the proposition, an issue to
which I will turn in later chapters.
The two examples above show that the propositional content of beforeclauses is regularly interpreted as being pragmatically presupposed,
independently of the discourse context. Such adverbial clauses may
therefore be said to be grammatically marked with respect to their
presuppositional structures, while main clauses tend to be unmarked
with respect to the presupposition-assertion contrast.23 But consider now
the following imaginary beginning of a short story:
(2.18)
Before I moved to Switzerland I had never seen a Rolls Royce.
Since (2.18) is assumed to be the first sentence of the story, the reader
cannot be expected to know that the protagonist moved to Switzerland at
one point in his life. Nevertheless, the use of the ftefore-clause is
appropriate and causes no difficulty of interpretation (at least not within
the-given literary genre). The important fact here is that this does not
invalidate my claim concerning the presuppositional structure of beforeclauses. If the short story were to continue with the sentence In fact, that's
The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure
69
not quite true, the reader would understand that it is the proposition
expressed in the main clause, not in the ¿e/ore-clause, whose truth is
being challenged. The explanation for the appropriateness of (2.18) is
provided by Lewis” rule of accommodation for presupposition. By the
act of using the clause which required the presupposition, the writer
created the presupposition in the reader’s mind and made it available as
a background for the assertion in the following main clause.
The phenomenon illustrated in (2.18) is not restricted to literary
discourse. Consider the two English adverbial conjunctions because and
since. Both indicate a causal relation between two propositions, but they
differ from each other in their presuppositional structure. As a rough
characterization of this difference let us say that the presuppositional
structure of since is such that the proposition expressed in the clause
which it introduces can be taken for granted in the reasoning process that
links this proposition to the proposition expressed in the main clause.^
Because, on the other hand, does not require such a presupposition.
While since is marked for the presuppositional feature in question,
because is unmarked in this respect. The basic difference is clearly
illustrated in question-answer pairs such as the following (the # symbol
indicates unacceptability on the discourse level):
(2.19)
A: Why did you hit him?
B: Because he insulted me. / #Since he insulted me.
It is clear from the word why in the question that speaker A does not
know (or purports not to know) the reason for speaker B’s action. The
difference in acceptability between the two answers shows that the
proposition “because P" can be used to make an assertion while the
proposition “since P" cannot. Now consider the following dialogue:
(2.20)
A: Where are you going on vacation this summer?
B: Well since my wife can’t take more than two weeks off, we’re not
going to Europe ibis lime
The use of the conjunction since would normally signal that speaker B
assumes that speaker A already knows that B’s wife has only two weeks’
vacation. However, in spite of this presuppositional requirement, the
answer in (2.20) is felicitous even if B assumes that A does in fact not
have that knowledge. (In fact, it would be felicitous even if A did not
know that B is married, in which case the “existential" presupposition
expressed in the possessive noun phrase my wife also has to be
accommodated). By the very use of the linguistic expression requiring
these pragmatic presuppositions, the speaker creates them and can use
them as a background for his statement.
A somewhat special kind of exploitation of presuppositional structure,
which I take to be different from the cases of accommodation discussed
above, is the one illustrated in the hackneyed example Have you slopped
beating your wife? This kind of presupposition exploitation is discussed
by Clark and Haviland (1977) under the name of “bridging.” The authors
observe that if I ask you the question “Do you admit to writing this
letter?” you are in trouble whether your reply is “Yes” or “No." In either
case you do not escape the presupposition that you did something bad.25
What distinguishes this kind of devious exploitation of presuppositional
structure from the phenomenon of pragmatic accommodation is that it
does not serve to indirectly convey information but merely to create a
fictitious presuppositional situation.
The pragmatic accommodation of certain presuppositional structures
may to a greater or lesser extent become conventionalized and
eventually grammaticalized, a fact which makes the phenomenon more
complex than the preceding discussion suggests, but which also increases
the range of facts it may be called upon to explain. It can happen that the
presuppositional structure of a frequently used construction is exploited
so regularly that it loses some of its force, sometimes resulting in a new
meaning for the construction.
As a case in point, consider the use of the rr-cleft construction in
English. It is generally assumed that in order for this construction to be
used appropriately, the proposition expressed in the relative clause must
be pragmatically presupposed, i.e. assumed by the speaker to be known
to the addressee. This is what Burkin (1984:Appendix B) calls the
“grammatical meaning” of the jr-clefl construction. (Typically, this
proposition is not only assumed to be known, but also to have been
activated in the addressee’s consciousness at the time of the utterance; see
Section 5.4.3.) Thus, if I utter the sentence it's my keys that I lost, I
normally presuppose in my addressee the knowledge that I lost
something and I assert that the thing which I lost is my keys. But as in
the previous cases, the presuppositional structure of the construction may
be exploited for special communicative purposes. Consider the following
sentence uttered by a lecturer to his audience at the beginning of the
lecture;
The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositionai structure
(2.21)
i
71
It was George Orwell who said that the best books are those which tell
you what you already know.
-
In the discourse situation in which this sentence was uttered, it could
not be assumed as a fact known to the audience that some person had
made the statement expressed in the w/m-clause. The lecturer may well
have thought that no one in the audience was familiar with this statement
(nor with the author, for that matter). Strictly, then, it made no sense to’
assert that the person who had made that statement was George Orwell.
Nevertheless the utterance did not become unacceptable for lack of the
required presupposition because the speaker could count on the
audience’s willingness to accommodate it.
There is a qualitative difference between (2.21) and the cases of
pragmatic accommodation discussed so far. As Prince (1978) and Borkin
(1984) have shown, instances of //-clefts where the proposition expressed
by the relative clause is actually not assumed to be pragmatically
presupposed occur so regularly that it seems psychologically unmotivated
to assume that in such cases the relative-clause proposition has to be
accommodated via Lewis’ rule. Example (2.21) is not necessarily
interpreted by the audience as an invitation to act as if the proposition
expressed in the r/tur-clause were pragmatically presupposed in the strict
sense. Rather it can be seen as a conventionally established indirect way
of communicating the content of that proposition. Because of the
regularity with which this convention is used, Prince and Borkin
postulate two types of h-cleft constructions, with different presupposi­
tionai structures. However, given their formal similarity, it is important
to emphasize the relatedness of the two types. Indeed, in all instances of
ii-clefts, the proposition in the t/int-clause is grammatically marked as
factual and non-asserted. In what I take to be the original case, the
proposition of the Mm-clause is assumed to belong to the common
ground between the interlocutors; in the second case it belongs to the
common ground between the speaker and some third party, and the
addressee just happens not yet to be included in this parly. The common
syntax and the overlap in presuppositionai structure between the two
types make it possible, 1 believe, to interpret the second type as an
extension of the first via conventionalized pragmatic accommodation.
Another, perhaps less controversial, case of the conventionalization
and. grammaticalization of pragmatic accommodation is the so-called
emphatic Jn-construclion in English. In what I take to be its original use.
72
Information
this construction requires the presupposition that the truth of the
proposition expressed by the sentence containing do was questioned in
the immediately preceding discourse context. In this case, the verb phrase
following do is entirely unaccented. For example the statement
(122)
I did pay you back
is normally appropriate only if it was suggested in the immediately
preceding discourse that the speaker did not pay the hearer back, or at
least if the possibility was raised that no payment was made. (In this use,
the rfo-constniction has a function somewhat similar to that of the
particles doch and si in German and French.) Now, as with the
constructions mentioned before, the presuppositional structure of the
emphatic <io-construction can be exploited via the principle of
accommodation, as e.g. in (2.23):
(213)
I was afraid to hit him; I did insult him, though.
In order to make the second part of (2.23) appropriate it is not necessary
for someone to have explicitly claimed earlier in the discourse that the
speaker did not insult the person in question. Rather, by saying I did
instdt him the speaker merely suggests that someone could have made that
claim or might be tempted to make it. That the original pragmatic
presupposition is missing in the context of (2.23) is phonologically
expressed in the fact that the portion of the sentence following did is not
unaccented, as it was in (2.22). Now consider the sentence in (2.24):
(2.24)
I do hope that doggie’s for sate.
In the context of the popular song in which this sentence occurs there is
no previous suggestion that the speaker did not have that hope. What
distinguishes this last example from the previous ones is that there seems
to -be no presupposition left at all. The use of the emphatic doconstruction has become a conventionalized grammatical way of
expressing emphasis. The word do in (2.24) acts as a mere intensifier,
equivalent to an adverb like really, so that / do hope is equivalent to I
really hope.26
i Leaving aside the issue of conventionalization, I would like to
emphasize the importance of the phenomenon of pragmatic accommoda­
tion for the theory of information structure By recognizing the
theoretical status of this principle of interpretation, we are in a position
to simplify the description of presuppositional structures and at the same
The pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure
73
time to counter in a principled way certain arguments raised against
presuppositions! analyses. The analysis of the presuppositions! structure
of a given expression or construction cannot be falsified simply by
pointing to examples in which an actual presuppositional situation does
not correspond to the presuppositional Structure postulated by the
analysis. For example by pointing to examples like (2.18) or (2.20) one
cannot purport to have demonstrated that the pragmatic analysis I
cursorily suggested for 6e/ore-clauses or for the difference between the
conjunctions since and because is wrong. Moreover, by allowing for the
possibility of conventionalization and grammaticalization of pragmatic
accommodations we can account for systematic extensions and changes
in presuppositional structures (see e.g. the analysis of the French y «-cleft
construction in Lambrecht 1986b, Chapter 7). In the case of the abovementioned //-cleft construction, this means that we do not have to
postulate two different constructions whose presuppositional structures
are the opposite of each other, but one basic construction and one or
several cognitively motivated extensions of it.
3
The mental representations of
discourse referents
3.1
Discourse referents
Id the present chapter I will be concerned with the nature of the
representations of the referents of linguistic expressions in the minds of
interlocutors. In particular, I will be concerned with the changes which
these mental representations may undergo in the course of a conversation
and with the linguistic forms which code these changes. The set of
representations which a speaker and a hearer may be assumed to share in
a given discourse will be called the discourse register. As indicated in
the remark in Section 2.1, I will tend to neglect the terminological (but
not the conceptual) distinction between referents and the mental
representations of referents in a discourse. Il is primarily the latter
that I will be concerned with in the following discussion.
Discourse referents may be either entities or propositions.1 A
proposition may acquire the status of a discourse referent once it is
assumed by a speaker to be known to the addressee, i.e. once it has been
added to the set of pragmatic presuppositions in the discourse register.
The mental representation of such a propositional referent may then be
stored in the register together with the representations of entities. Like
expressions denoting entities, those denoting presupposed propositions
may serve as arguments of a predicate. Propositional referents may be
expressed via various kinds of subordinate clauses (including non-fmite
verb phrases) or they may be expressed by pronouns, as in the following
short text (from a cereal box):
(3.1)
This package is sold by wcighl. not by volume .. 11' a does not appear
full when opened, it is because contents have settled during shipping and
handling.
Id (3.1), the referent of the first it is the entity designated by the
antecedent NP this package, i.e. the cereal box, the referent of the second
74
Discourse referents
75
it is the proposition (or state of affairs) expressed in the antecedent clause
it does not appear full when opened. (The mood operator if does not enter
into the antecedent-anaphor relation.) While the representation of the
entity exists in the mind of the addressee prior to its linguistic expression
on the box, the representation of the propositional referent is created via'
the clausal antecedent itself (unless the state of affairs described is already*
known to the reader, in which case it is being reactivated). By the time,
they are anaphorically referred to with definite pronouns, both constitute
discourse referents, which may serve as arguments in a predicate­
argument structure.
. .
Discourse referents are syntactically expressed in argument (including
adjunct) categories, such as noun phrases, pronouns, various kinds of
tensed or non-tensed subordinate clauses, and certain adverbial phrases
(those that can be said to refer to the circumstances of a predication).1
They cannot normally be expressed in phrases which serve as predicates.
Predicates by definition do not denote discourse referents but attributes
of, or relations between, arguments. For example a finite verb phrase
cannot play an argument role in a sentence, unless it is made into a
referential expression by being “nominalized" (in the sense of traditional
grammar), i.e. by being stripped of its tense and person markings. This is
shown in the following contrasts:
(3.2)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
We went to the movies yesterday.
it was a mistake.
Our going to the movies yesterday was a mistake.
Going to the movies yesterday was a mistake,
*Went to the movies yesterday was a mistake.
In (3.2b), the subject it refers to the propositional content of the entire
preceding sentence (3.2a). The function of this pronoun is similar io that
of the second it in (3.1) above. Sentence (a), or the proposition denoted
by it, appears in pronominal form in (b) and the proposition referred to
by the pronoun now has the status of a discourse referent. Sentence (a)
can also be nominalized, as in the subject expression our going to the
movies in (c). It is also possible to nominalize the verb phrase alone, as in
(d) (going to the movies). This nominalization involves an understood
subject, hence counts semantically as a proposition, hence may serve as
the argument of another predicate. However, as (e) shows, the finite verb
phrase went to the movies cannot itself function as an argument. The
morphosyntactic difference between non-fimte and finite (or tensed)
>4
76
The mental representations of discourse referents
clauses is another grammatical correlate of the fundamental commu­
nicative distinction between pragmatic presupposition and assertion.
Nominalizing a proposition is one way of marking it as non-asserted.
A potential problem for my account of the difference in discoursereferential status between arguments and predicates is the occurrence of
expressions with predicate morphology in topic position and function, as
e.g. in the German sentence Arzt ist er nicht “He’s not a doctor” (lit. “A
doctor he is not”), used to answer the question 1st er Arzt? “Is he a
doctor?” In the reply, the bare noun Arzt functions as an anaphoric topic
expression, hence its denotatum must have the status of a discourse
referent (see Section 4.3), even though it has the grammatical appearance
of a predicate nominal (it lacks a determiner). That Arzt must indeed be a
referential argument expression is demonstrated by the fact that it could
be replaced by the definite anaphoric pronoun das “that,” as in Das ist er
mcht “That he isn’t.” Nevertheless, both Arzt and das function as the
non-subject complements of the copula ist, i.e. they correspond to the
traditional definition of predicates, except for their position. Similarly
problematic for my account is the occurrence of anaphoric pronouns
referring to predicate adjectives, as e.g. in the French sentence fa il lest
“That'he is” (lit. “That he is it”) used as a reply to Est-ce qu'il est
intelligent? “Is he intelligent?”, where both the free topic pronoun pa and
the bound direct object pronoun 1(e) seem to refer to the predicate
intelligent. I must leave this issue unresolved here.
Two information-structure categories will be discussed in this chapter.
The first is identifiability, which has to do with a speaker's assessment
of whether a discourse representation of a particular referent is already
stored in the hearer’s mind or not (Section 3.2). The second is activation,
which has to do with the speaker’s assessment of the status of the
representation of an identifiable referent as already "activated”, as
merely “accessible," or as "inactive” in the mind of the hearer at the time
of the speech act (Section 3.3). At the end of the chapter, I will introduce
the categories topic and focus, which have to do with the pragmatic roles
which referents with given identifiability and activation properties can
play within propositions. While identifiability and activation are
categories of memory and consciousness, having to do with the assumed
states of the mental representations of discourse referents in the minds of
the speech participants at different points in a discourse, topic and focus
are relational categories, having to do with the pragmatic relations
between denotata and propositions in given contexts. Although the
Identifiability
77
various categories mentioned above involve independent sets of concepts,
they will be shown to be related to each other as well as to the previously
discussed categories of presupposition and assertion.
3.2
Identifiability
When a speaker wishes to make an assertion involving some entity which
she assumes is not yet represented in the addressee's mind and which
cannot be referred to deictically, it is necessary for her to create a
representation of that entity via a linguistic description, which can then
be anaphorically referred to in subsequent discourse. The creation of such
a new discourse representation for the addressee can be compared to the
establishment of a new referential "file” in the discourse register, to
which further elements of information may be added in the course of the
conversation and which can be reopened in future discourses.3
To account for the difference between entities for which the speaker
assumes a file has already been opened in the discourse register and those
for which such a file does not yet exist, I will postulate the cognitive
category of identifiability, using a term once suggested by Chafe (1976).
Chafe observes that to designate referents for which a representation
exists in the addressee’s mind the term “identifiable” is preferable to the
sometimes suggested terms “known" or "familiar." As we shall see, what
counts for the linguistic expression of the cognitive distinction in question
is not that the addressee know or be familiar with the referent in question
(a newly opened file may contain no more than a name) but that he be
able to pick it out from among all those which can be designated with a
particular linguistic expression and identify it as the one which the
speaker has in mind.
3.2.1
Identifiability and presupposition
The distinction between identifiable and non-identifiable referents is
conceptually related to the distinction between pragmatically presup­
posed and asserted propositions. A presupposed proposition is one of
which the speaker and the hearer are assumed to have some shared
knowledge or representation at the time of utterance. An asserted
proposition is one of which only the speaker has a representation at the
time of utterance. Similarly, an identifiable referent is one for which a
shared representation already exists in the speaker’s and the hearer’s
<o
me mental representations uj discourse rejerents
mind at the time of utterance, while an unidentifiable referent is one for
which a representation exists only in the speaker’s mind. Moreover, as we
saw earlier (examples (3.1) and (3.2)), when a presupposed proposition
becomes a discourse referent and serves as an argument in another
proposition, it may be linguistically designated with the same expression
type as an entity (i.e. with a “personal” or demonstrative pronoun). It is
also well known that in many languages the morpheme used as an
identifiability marker, e.g. the definite article or a demonstrative
determiner, is the same as, or is at least historically related to, the
subordinating morpheme used to introduce a nominalized sentence
(compare e.g. the German neuter definite article and demonstrative
pronoun das "the, that” with the complementizer dass "that”).
The relationship between presupposition and what I call identifiability
has long been recognized by philosophers, who speak of the “existential
presupposition” expressed in. or required by, “definite descriptions."
However, there is an important difference in perspective between the
logical (or semantic) view of existential presupposition and the
information-structure (or pragmatic) view of identifiability. This
difference is analogous to the previously discussed difference between
meaning and information or between the truth of propositions and the
mental representations of states of affairs (see Chapter 2). In the domain
of information structure, the relevant property of an identifiable referent
is not that it is presupposed to exist, but that the speaker assumes that it
has a certain representation in the mind of the addressee which can be
evoked in a given discourse. For example if I use the expression the King
of France in an utterance, I signal to my addressee, via the form of the
expression, that I assume that she has some mental representation of the
individual designated by that expression which allows her to identify it as
the one I have in mind. What we have in common is not a presupposition
of existence but the mental representation of an entity. The question of
whether the individual exists or not is irrelevant within the conversational
exchange (see Section 4.3).
From the point of view of natural language use. it seems counter­
intuitive to assume that the mental representations of the referents of
noun phrases like John or mr children or the King nJ France have the
status of propositions in the minds of speakers and addressees This is not
to deny, of course, that elements ol noun phrases may evoke
presuppositions. For example, the possessive determiner my in the
phrase mv children evokes the presupposition that the speaker has
Identifiability
19
children. (Compare also the remarks on the function of the definite article
in the discussion of pragmatic presupposition in Section 2.2.) Moreover,
it seems reasonable to assume that the representations of given entities in
people’s minds are associated with sets of "propositions” corresponding
to various attributes of these entities. Nevertheless the referent of that
noun phrase is mentally represented as an entity, not as a set of
propositions. For the purposes of the present study, I will therefore not
count existential presuppositions as pragmatic presuppositions in the
sense of (2.12) and I will treat the notion of identifiability as a category in
its own right. The concepts of identifiability and of existential
presupposition do not necessarily exclude each other; they merely
represent different theoretical perspectives on the same or a similar
phenomenon. I will return to this issue in the discussion of the
relationship between topic and presupposition in Section 4.3.
3.2.2 Identifiability and definiteness
An important grammatical correlate of the cognitive distinction between
identifiable and unidentifiable referents is the formal distinction made in
many languages between definite and indefinite noun phrases. The
grammatical category of definiteness is a formal feature associated with
nominalexpressions which signals whether or not the referent of a phrase
is assumed by the speaker to be identifiable to the addressee. In many
languages this category is regularly expressed via the contrast between a
definite and an indefinite article or other determiners (typically
possessive or demonstrative). In other languages, definiteness, or rather
its cognitive correlate identifiability, may be marked by other
grammatical means, such as word order, the presence or absence of a
numeral, a case-marking particle, etc (see below). Certain languages
arguably have no grammatical category for the expression of identifia­
bility, for example Russian (Johanna Nichols, p.c.). This does of course
not mean that speakers of Russian have no concept of pragmatie
identifiability and could not signal it in some indirect way.
It must be emphasized that the correlation between the cognitive
category of identifiability and the grammatical category of definiteness is
at best an imperfect one. There is no one-to-one correlation between
identifiability or non-identifiability of a referent and grammatical
definiteneness or indefiniteness of the noun phrase designating that
referent. Obvious evidence for this lack of correspondence is found in the
i
J
M
80
The mental representations of discourse referents
fact that the use of the definite and the indefinite article varies widely
from language to language, in idiosyncratic and sometimes quite subtle
ways, while the mental ability to identify referents is presumably the same
for speakers of all languages. Moreover, languages which have
definiteness markers often differ with respect to the grammatical option
of not using them. Certain languages offer a three-way distinction
between a definite, an indefinite, and a zero article. Such a three-way
contrast is found e.g. in English and in German, but not in French, where
referential common nouns must ordinarily be accompanied by a
determiner. Moreover the types of nouns with which the three options
can be used are not the same across languages. For example, while
English allows for a three-way distinction between the man, a man, and
man (as in Man is a dangerous animal), German has only der Mensch and
ein Mensch, prohibiting *Mensch. But German does permit such threeway contrasts as die Grammatik, eine Grammatik, and Grammafik (as e.g.
tn Grammatik ist nichl seine Starke, “Grammar isn’t his forte"). French,
however, permits only I'homme and un homme, la grammaire and une
grammaire, normally prohibiting both *homme and * grammaire, except
when the noun is used predicatively, i.e. non-referentially.4
An important semantic distinction having to do with identifiability
which has no direct correlate in the grammatical definite/indefinite
contrast is that between specific and non-specific referents of indefinite
noun phrases. It is often said that in an English sentence like
(3.3)
I am looking for a book.
the indefinite NP a hook can be either specific or non-specific (i.e. can
have either a specific or a non-specific referent), depending on whether
the speaker is looking for a particular book or whether “any old book”
will do. The semantic difference between specific and non-specific
indefinite NPs can be made explicit in anaphoric contexts. If the
referent is specific, the anaphor must be a definite pronoun or noun
phrase. For example the speaker in (3.3) could go on to say I found it or I
found the book I was looking for (but not Ifound a book or Ifound one). If
the referent is non-specific, the anaphor must be an indefinite expression.
In this case, the speaker might go on to say I found one or ¡found a book
(but not [found it or Zfound the book). Notice that in the answer I found a
book the referent has necessarily become specific and must be
subsequently referred to as it or the book. One way of describing the
specific/non-specific distinction in pragmatic terms is to say that a
Identifiability
81
“specific indefinite NP" is one whose referent is identifiable to the
speaker but not to the addressee, while a “non-specific indefinite NP" is
one whose referent neither the speaker nor the addressee can identify at
the time of utterance. This is tantamount to saying that a non-specific
indefinite NP is one which may have no referent at all.
The specific/non-specific construal of an indefinite noun phrase may be
influenced in subtle ways by the modality of the predicate of which the
noun phrase is an argument. For example if. in order to put an end to a
drawn-out phone conversation, I want to tell my interlocutor that a
certain obligation is waiting for me, only the first of the two versions in
(3.4) is fully appropriate:
(3.4)
a. I have to go to a meeting now. It starts in five minutes,
b. ? I’d better go io a meeting now. It starts in five minutes.
Even though (3.4b) is intended to be more polite, it is a strange thing to
say. The non-assertive form I'd better strongly suggests that there is in
fact no specific meeting which I have to attend.
In some languages, the semantic distinction between specific and non­
specific referents of indefinite noun phrases has grammatical correlates.
For example in French the two readings of sentence (3.3) above are
formally distinguished if a restrictive relative clause is added modifying
the noun livre “book,” as in (3.5):
(3.5)
a. Je cherche un livre qui e.u rouge. 'Tm looking for a book that’s red.’’
b. Je cherche un livre qui .rnif rouge 'Tm looking for a book that’s red.”
In (3.5a) the indicative mood of the verb of the relative clause indicates
that the referent of the NP is specific, i.e. that the speaker is looking for a
particular red book which exists but which she assumes the addressee
cannot yet identify, while the subjunctive mood in (3.5b) indicates that
the referent is non-specific, i.e. that the speaker would like to find a book
whose color is red, but of which there may not exist an instance in the
given universe of discourse. The correlation between indicative mood and
specificity on the one hand and subjunctive mood and non-specificity on
the other is a result of the different semantic functions of the two moods.
While the indicative treats the relative clause proposition as a matter of
fact, the subjunctive marks it as being subject to incertitude or doubt. The
use of the subjunctive in the relative clause is motivated by the fact that it
is not possible to assign with certitude a properly (e g redness) to
* । if/*cjvni«iuj uoLt'uot' rejtMHS
something which may not exist, hence the necessarily non-specific
interpretation of the indefinite noun phrase?
What is expressed via mood variation in French may be expressed via
word order variation in colloquial German:
(3.6)
a. Ich suche ein Buch, das rot isi. Tm looking for a book that’s red.”
b. Ich suche ein Buch, das ist rot. “I’m looking for a book that’s red."
The standard version in (3.6a), which has the verb in final (subordinate
clause) position in the relative clause, has both the specific and the non­
specific reading. The colloquial version in (b), however, which has the
verb in second (main clause) position, has only the specific reading. The
fact that main clause word order only yields the specific reading is a
consequence of the correlation between main-clause status and assertion
(cf. Section 2.4). In (3.6b) it is asserted that the object designated by the
pronoun das is red. For such an assertion to make sense, the existence of
the object must be taken for granted. Hence the necessarily specific
reading of the noun phrase.6
A grammatically indefinite noun phrase may have yet another
semantic value, as in the sentence
(3.7)
A book is a useful thing to have in a doctor’s waiting room.
where the indefinite noun phrases a book and a doctor! ’s) are said to be
generjc, meaning that their referents are either the classes of all books or
doctors or perhaps some representative set of members of these classes,
but not specific or non-specific individuals. Since such noun phrases
merely require that the addressee be able to identify the semantic class
designated by the lexical head, generic indefinite NPs may be said to have
identifiable referents, further weakening the correlation between the
formal category of definiteness and the information-structure category of
identifiability. That the referents of generic indefinite noun phrases must
be considered identifiable is confirmed by the fact that they may be
anaphorically referred to either with another indefinite NP or with a
definite pronoun, without a clear difference in interpretation. For
example after uttering (3.7) I can go on to say J book is also something
easy to carry around as well as It is also something easy to carry around.
This possibility distinguishes generic indefinites from indefinites with
specific or non-specific referents which, as we saw, permit only one or the
other kind of anaphoric expression, but not both.
JdentifiabUity
83
To complicate matters further, the definite article, which is normally
used to designate specific identifiable individuals out of a particular dassi
can sometimes also be used with noun phrases that refer generically to the
whole class. For example, if, talking about a certain zoology student, I
say
<
(3.8)
She is now studying the whale.
I can either mean that she studies the species “whale," or 1 can mean that
she studies a particular whale, for example one which got stranded on a
beach, and which has become identifiable because of its prominence in
the real world situation.7
Yet another cognitive distinction which cross-cuts the definite/
indefinite contrast and which also varies from language to language
involves the coding difference between specific unidentifiable referents
which are meant to become topics in a discourse and those which play
only an ancillary narrative role. The difference, in colloquial English,
between the phrases this guy and a guy in the sentence
(3.9)
I met {this/a guy} from Heidelberg on the train.
is an instance of this discourse-pragmatic distinction (cf. e.g. Prince 1981c
and Wald 1983). By using the phrase this guy, the speaker signals her
intention to add further information about the person in question, while in
the version containing a guy such an intention is not expressed. The
morphologically definite noun phrase this guy is thus in fact “seman­
tically indefinite" in the sense that it designates a not-yet-identifiable
discourse referent, which in other languages (e.g. German and French)
could only be expressed in the form of an indefinite noun phrase.
Following Prince and other authors, I will refer to the determiner in
question as "indefinite this” and 1 will categorize noun phrases
containing it as indefinite.
In certain languages the presence vs. absence of a numeral expression
in association with the noun can have a function analogous to the
function served by the contrast between a and this in English. In
languages with numeral classifiers it is often the case that the noun phrase
which is preceded by a classifier is marked as topical for subsequent
discourse (cf. e.g. Downing 1984:Ch. 7 for Japanese, Hopper 1986 for
Malay, and Chaofen 1988 for Chinese). In other languages, the same
distinction is expressed via the contrast between the presence or absence
of the numeral one, as in the case of Latin units (Wehr 1984:39ft), Turkish
(
J
M
Tie mental representations of discourse referents
bif (combined with the accusative case suffix on the noun, see Comrie
1981:128 and example (3.11) below), and Hebrew exad (Giv6n 1983:26).
In fact, this function of the numeral one is attested in English, as e.g. in I
saw this one woman or Z was introduced to one John Smith.
The theoretical distinction between grammatical definiteness and
cognitive identifiability has the advantage of enabling us to distinguish
between a discrete (grammatical) and a non-discrete (cognitive) category.
While the definite/indefinite contrast is in principle a matter of yes or no,
identifiability is in principle a matter of degree. Referents can be assumed
to be more or less identifiable, depending on a multitude of psychological
factors, but articles cannot be more or less definite (but see below). The
differences in the grammatical marking of definiteness among those
languages whose grammar codes this category should perhaps be seen as
reflections of different language-specific cut-off points on the continuum
of identifiability. The fact that grammatical definiteness is a (relatively)
“arbitrary” category with (relatively) unpredictable cut-off points across
languages may account for certain difficulties in second language
acquisition. The difficulties which Russian speakers encounter in the
acquisition of definiteness in e.g. English or German are notorious, but
serious difficulties also often arise for speakers who pass from one to
another of two relatively similar systems of definiteness marking, such as
those in German and English.
Even though grammatical markers of definiteness are normally
indicators of two-way distinctions and cannot mark degrees, there are
interesting formal hedges between definiteness and indefiniteness
marking, which seem to stem from a psychological need for the
grammatical expression of intermediate degrees of identifiablity. As one
instance of such hedging we can mention the above-mentioned three-way
distinction between a definite, an indefinite, and a zero article in English
and German. Another instance is the French expression iun(e) “one (of
them)” (not “the one"), in which the definite article le, la serves as a
determiner in a noun phrase whose head is the indefinite article (and
numeral) un(e), as illustrated in (3.10):
(3,10)
La chambre avait trois fenetres; l une d’elies etait ouverte.
The room had three windows; one of them (fit. "the one of them") was
open.'
Although the window described here as being open is unidentifiable in the
sense that we are not told which of the three windows is the open one, it is
Identifiability
■
’
1
J
|1
‘
'
85
nevertheless identifiable to a degree by being a member of an identifiable
set (the three windows of the room). This may explain the coocurrence of
the definite and the indefinite article? A related case is that of the
German correlative expression der eine-der andere “one of them-the
other one,” in which a definite article (der etc.) precedes an indefinite
“pronoun” (einer, eine, etc.) to indicate unidentifiable members of
identifiable sets. The same correlative expression exists in French (I'unI'aulre), where it can be used either as in German or, with different
syntax, to express the reciprocal meaning of “one another.”
A particularly rich system of grammatical contrasts coding degrees of
(un)identifiability is found in Turkish.9 Consider the data in (3.11):
(3.11)
a. Ahmet okuz - u aldi
Ahmet ox - ACC bought "Ahmet bought the ox"
b. Ahmet bir okuz - u aldi
Ahmet one ox - ACC bought “Ahmet bought this (one) ox"
c. Ahmet bir okuz aldi
Ahmet one ox bought “Ahmet bought an ox”
d. Ahmet okuz aldi
Ahmet ox bought "Ahmet bought an ox"
In (3.11a) the ox is presented as identifiable, via the accusative case
marker (here -w), which could also be called a definiteness marker. In (c)
it is presented as unidentifiable, via the numeral bir "one” before the bare
noun ¿>ku:. In (d) it is also marked as unidentifiable, but via the bare
noun alone. The contrast between (c) and (d) is reminiscent of the
specific/non-specific contrast. In (d) the noun is unmarked for number,
hence entirely non-specific: the sentence would be appropriate in a
situation where Ahmet has bought one or more oxen, somewhat like in
the English sentence “Ahmet did some ox-buying," where the referent
has lost its individuality via “incorporation" of the noun into the verb.
Particularly interesting for the present argument is example (b), in which
the NP is both marked as "definite," via the case marker, and as
“indefinite,” via the numeral. The force of (b) is similar to that of (3.9)
above, i.e. the difference between (b) and (c) is that in (b) the referent of
the noun phrase is pragmatically salient in the context of utterance and is
likely to be talked about in subsequent discourse, while in (cj the referent
has no such salient role.
A common way in which the relativity of cognitive identifiability is
structurally reflected in grammar is the phenomenon discussed by Prince
(1981b) under the name of "anchoring." Discussing the pragmatic
i
I
if./’K.jt.tilUiluii.’i <jj iiULifune rejerents
differences between the indefinite noun phrases in the two sentences I got
on a bus yesterday and the driver was drunk and A guy ! work with says he
knows your sister. Prince writes:10
Brand-new entities themselves seem to be of two types: anchored and
unanchored, A discourse entity is Anchored if the NP representing it is
linked, by means of another NP, or “Anchor," properly contained in it,
to some other discourse entity. Thus a bus is Unanchored, or simply
Brand-new, whereas a guy I work with, containing the NP I, is Brandnew Anchored, as the discourse entity the hearer creates for this
particular guy will be immediately linked to his/her discourse entity for
the speaker. (Prince 198la:236}
I will return to the notion of anchoring in Section 4.4.2, where I will show
that the various types of anchoring, which reflect degrees of identifiability
of a referent in a discourse, may have effects on the acceptability of
sentence topics.
Finally, the conceptual and terminological distinction between a
grammatical category of definiteness and a cognitive category of
identifiability enables us to avoid a certain confusion which sometimes
arises in discussions of the manifestations of definiteness across
languages. It is not uncommon to find the term "definite NP” applied
to some noun phrase in a language other than English only because the
English gloss of the sentence in which this noun phrase occurs contains a
definite NP. It has been suggested, for example, that the distinction
between definite and indefinite NPs can be expressed in Czech (which is
similar to Russian in this respect) via the difference between preverbal
and postverbal position of the NP (Krámsky 1968). Consider the
following examples:
(3.12)
a- Kniha je na stole
b. Na stole je kniha
"The book is on the table"
"On the table (there) is a book”
In (3.12a), the preverbal NP kniha "book" is appropriately glossed as
“the book,” while in (3.12b) the postverbal kniha is appropriately glossed
as "a book.” However, this difference in the English glosses should not be
taken as evidence for the existence of a grammatical definiteness/
indefiniteness contrast in Czech, expressed via preverbal vs. postverbal
position of the NP. To see this, consider these additional Czech examples
cited by Benes (1968) (the focus marking in the English glosses is mine):
(3.13)
a. Venku je Pavel
b. Pavel je venku
“Outside is cav rt tavel's outside"
“Pavel is ci rsim '
I
Identifiability
87
In (3.13), the name Pavel, which by virtue of being a proper noun phrase
is necessarily “definite" (i.e. whose referent is necessarily assumed to be
identifiable), appears both postverbally and preverbally. It follows that
the different English glosses of kniha in example (3.12) do not constitute
sufficient evidence for recognition of a category of definiteness in Czech.
The difference between preverbai and postverbal position in Czech must
correspond to some other grammatical distinction, which, in' the
particular case of (3.12), happens to coincide with a difference in
definiteness in English. I believe that the relevant contrast in (3.12) and
(3.13) is the contrast between topic and non-topic, which, as we will see in
Chapter 4, correlates with, but cannot be equated with, the definite/
indefinite contrast.11
Even though 1 will continue to use the familiar term “definiteness’*
when referring to the language-specific expression of identifiability
known under this label, I prefer not to think of definiteness as a universal
linguistic category. What is presumably universal is the cognitive
category of identifiability, which is imperfectly and non-universally
matched by the grammatical category of definiteness.
3.2.3
The establishment of identifiability in discourse
What are the pragmatic criteria according to which a speaker can assume
that a particular referent is identifiable by an addressee? In the clearest
case, the referent of a noun phrase may be considered identifiable because
in the universe of discourse of the interlocutors or of the speech
community as a whole there exists only one referent which can be
appropriately designated with that noun phrase (see Chafe 1976:39). Such
noun phrases with uniquely salient referents are expressions like mom,
John, the President of the United States, the sun, etc. Each of these four
expressions has specific referential properties which distinguish it from all
the others, but they all have in common the fact that the individual
designated by the expression may be assumed to be uniquely identifiable.
The referential properties of such expressions often entail certain
constraints on their grammatical coding, either by restricting the use of
the indefinite article or by excluding any kind of definiteness marking, as
in the case of unmodified proper names in English and many other
languages. (The fact that some languages, e g. Greek, do use the definite
article with proper names is more evidence for the non-universal,
language-specific character of grammatical definiteness.) Since referents
S
88
The mental representations of discourse referents
which are uniquely designated by some NP in the universe of discourse
are particularly easy to identify for a hearer, they can also be assumed to
be. pragmatically more easily accessible (cf. Section 3.3) than other
referents. As a result, such NPs often exhibit exceptional behavior with
respect to certain rules governing the marking of topic expressions (see
Givon 1983, and the discussion of French subject NPs in Lambrecht
1987a). Among the expressions with uniquely identifiable referents we
may also count generic noun phrases, whether definite or indefinite.
Identifying the class of all entities which can be designated with an
expression is identifying a unique referent.
. In the case of noun phrases which denote classes of entities rather than
individuals, a particular referent may be assumed to be identifiable
because it has a salient status in the pragmatic universe of the speaker
and the hearer. I have in mind phrases like the kids, the cleaning lady, the
car, etc, as used e.g. by members of a family. The intended referents of
such phrases can be easily picked out of the respective classes because in
the universe of the interlocutors there is one salient referent or set of
referents which is normally designated by such a definite noun phrase.
Ip both jases mentioned so far, i.e. in the case of NPs with unique
referents and of NPs whose referents arejmiquely identifiable because of
8onte*ihared''kfrowlecfge between the speaker and the addressee, the
idenfifiabilityof the referent (and the use of the definite articlelri English)
is-dueTcrthefacf that h referent is more or less permanently stored in the
memory of the speaker/hearer and can be retrieved without difficulty at
eny-particntai Time,’ given the appropriate discourse context. A rather
TUfftreETTHSon’ for' assuming that a hearer can identify a^particular
referent obtains when a referent is saliently present in the external or the
internal discourse world, i.e. in cases of deictic or anaphoric reference.
In the case of deictic reference, a referent may be assumed to be
identifiable because it is visible or otherwise salient in the speech setting. 1
Can deictically identify an entity by saying those ugly pictures or the
woman in the green hat over there, using the demonstratives those and
there, whose interpretation is determined by the text-external setting in
Tvhtch the NPs are uttered. A referent can also be deictically identifiable
because it is “inalienably possessed’’ or otherwise anchored in the
individuality of one of the interlocutors, as in your left leg or my sister’s
second ex-husband. In such cases, the referent is determined by the
semantic “frame” evoked by the possessive expression designating the
interlocutor.12
Identifiability
89
In the case of anaphoric reference, the status of some referent as
iderttifiabiecan be taken for granted because the referent was mentioned
in previous discourse: Notice that once a previously unidentifiable
relefent JraTbeen introduced into the discourse register in the form of an
indefinite NP, it must_ from this point on be referred, to with acdefinite
noun phrase or a pronoun. (As mentioned earlier, this requirement does
not hold-for non-specific and generic indefinite NPs.) For example, if I
say to someone
(3.!4)
I’m going to a meeting tonight.
my interlocutor and I must later in the conversation refer to this
particular meeting with a definite description, i.e. among the following
utterances only (a) or (b), but not (c) can be used:
(3.14’)
a. How long is (the/your) meeting supposed to last?
b. How long is it supposed to last?
c. #How long is a meeting supposed to last?
(The symbol # in (c) indicates unacceptability under specific interpreta­
tion of the NP referent.) Note that this constraint holds even if the only
feature identifying the meeting in question for my addressee is the fact
that I am going to attend it. The fact that identifiability can be created
through mere mention of a referent in the discourse, without any further
semantic specification, confirms our observation that identifiability of a
referent (and corresponding definite coding in English) does not
necessarily entail familiarity with, or knowledge about, the referent.
The identifiability status of a referent is normally preserved throughout
a discourse, and from one discourse to another, unless the speaker
assumes that the addressee has forgotten the existence of the referent.
Chafe (1976:40) mentions the example of the indefinite noun phrase a
letter used on page 13 of a novel and whose referent is not mentioned
again until page 118, where it appears in the form of the definite noun
phrase the note. Once the referent was introduced into the discourse
register, its identifiability status was preserved over ¡05 pages. As Chafe
remarks, "it would appear that context or scene is all-important, and that
definiteness can be preserved indefinitely if the eventual context in which
the referent is reintroduced is narrow enough to make the referent
identifiable."
In the various examples of identifiability discussed so far, a referent is
caused to become identifiable for what seem to be quite heterogeneous
90
i'he menial representations oj discourse rejerents
reasons. From a psychological point of view, the status of the
permanently established referent designated by the noun mom seems
rather different from that of the referent designated by the meeting
tonight, for which a file is opened only for the purpose of a particular
discourse and which may get permanently erased from the hearer's
memory at the end of the conversation. One may therefore wonder what
motivates the use of a single grammatical category (definiteness) for such
apparently divergent instances. I believe that the common cognitive
property which unites all instances of identifiability and therefore justifies
expression by a single grammatical category is the existence of a cognitive
schema or frame within which a referent can be identified. The concept
of “frame” is defined as follows by Fillmore (1982:111):
By the term “frame” I have in mind any system of concepts related in
such a way that to understand any of them you have to understand the
whole structure in which it fits, when one of the things in such a
structure is introduced into a text, or into a conversation, al! of the
others are automatically made available.
(See also Fillmore 1976 and 1985a.) The frame within which a referent
becomes identifiable can be so broad as to coincide with the speaker/
hearer’s natural or social universe, accounting for the identifiability of the
referents of NPs like the sun or the President of the United States. It can
be narrower, as the personal frame within which the referent of the
cleaning lady or the car becomes identifiable. Or it can be the physical
environment in which a speech act takes place, making it possible to
identify the referents of such noun phrases as the woman over there or
those ugly pictures. Finally, the text-internal discourse world itself can be
such a cognitive frame. For example the referent of the NF the meeting
tonight in (3.19) is identifiable to the hearer by virtue of the frame of
reference established by the ongoing discourse alone, independently of
whether such a meeting actually exists or will exist in the real world.15
The concept of frame-linked referent identification enables us to
account in a straightforward fashion for certain occurrences of definite
noun phrases which otherwise might seem mysterious. One instance is the
use of definite noun phrases in contexts like the following:
(3.15)
Every lime 1 go to the clinic the doctor is someone different.’4
Unlike the expressions the cleaning lady or the car, which are assumed to
designate just one specific individual tor the speaker and the hearer, the
identifiability
91
expression the doctor in this sentence refers to an unspecified individual
out of a specific subgroup. This subgroup is not coextensive with the
whole category (thus precluding generic interpretation), nor is the
individual designated by the NP entirely non-specific (thus precluding use
of the indefinite article). In cases like (3.15), semantic categories such as
specific, non-specific, or generic are not of much help. What explains the
occurrence of the definite noun phrase in (3.15) is the fact that the
individual in question is identifiable as an element in a semantic frame»in
this case the world of the clinic.
. in > : f
A striking instance of frame-determined identifiability is discussed by
Hawkins (1978:Ch. 3). Hawkins observes that under particular circum­
stances the same referent, with apparently the same pragmatic status, can
be coded as a definite or as an indefinite NP, depending on whether it is
viewed as part of a cognitive schema or not. For instance (modifying
Hawkins” example slightly) in explaining the workings of a car to. an
entirely ignorant addressee, I can point to different parts under the hood
and say
(3.16)
This is the air filter, this is the fan belt, this is the carburetor.
i.e., I can use definite noun phrases for my explanation even though the
designated objects were not previously identifiable by the hearer. This is
possible because the various car parts are all indirectly identifiable as
elements of an already identified frame or schema, which is the car itself.
However, if the same ignorant addressee wonders about some
unidentified object on a shelf in my garage, I cannot say to him This is
the carburetor but only This is a carburetor, because the object is not
interpreted as an element of an already established frame.
An intriguing case of definiteness motivated by relations between
elements of a semantic frame is the phenomenon whereby the possessee in
a possessive noun phrase gets marked as definite even if both the
possessor and the possessee are unidentifiable in the discourse. For
example I may say
(3.17)
I met the daughter of a king.
(instead of a daughter of a king) even if I assume that my addressee can
identify neither the king’s daughter nor the king himself. This suggests
that for the purposes of grammar an entity may be categorized as
identifiable merely by virtue of being perceived as standing in a frame,
relation to some other entity, whether this other entity is itself identifiable
92
The mental representations of discourse referents
or not Notice furthermore that (3.17) would be appropriate even if it
turned out that the unidentified king in question has more than one
daughter. (On the other hand, if the king were already identifiable, the
phrase the daughter of the king would not be appropriate if the individual
had more than one daughter.) The peculiar pragmatic structure of the NP
in (3.17) is shown also in the synonymous alternative version I met a
king's daughter, in which the phrase a king's acts as a possessive-hence
definite-determiner, even though it consists of an indefinite (genitive)
NP. The phenomenon in (3.17) is related to, but interestingly different
from, the cases of pragmatic anchoring discussed by Prince. While in
Prince's examples an unidentifiable referent is anchored in an already
identifiable one, in (3.17) an unidentifiable referent is anchored in
another unidentifiable one. One might call (3.17) an instance of
"anchorless anchoring” or “pragmatic boot-strapping.”1J
Interestingly, a grammatically definite complex noun phrase such as
the one in (3.17)—whose definiteness is motivated by pragmatic boot­
strapping-may behave like an indefinite NP with respect to certain
grammatical requirements which many linguists take to be of a syntactic
order. Consider the so-called “impersonal” (/-construction in French.
Like the “existential” i/iere-construction in English, this French
construction is traditionally said to welcome only indefinite noun
phrases, at least in the standard language (for exceptions, see Lambrecht
1986b, Section 7.5). Thus while the (a) example in (3.18) is grammatical,
the (b) and (c) examples are not:
(3.18)
r
a. H est entré un roi. “There entered a king."
b. *fi est entré le roi. “There entered the king.”
c. *H est entré la filie du roi. "There entered the daughter of the king.”
d, U est entré la filie d’un roi. “There entered the daughter of a king."
Example (d), however, is grammatical even though it contains a definite
noun phrase. Syntactically, the definite possessive NP in (d) patterns with
the simple indefinite NP in (a). La filie d'un roi is thus both definite (from
the point of view of morphology) and indefinite (from the point of view
of syntax).16 While such facts pose a problem for an analysis of
definiteness in purely morphosyntactic terms, they are easily explained if
definiteness is understood as the imperfect grammatical reflection of the
non-discrete pragmatic category of identifiability.
Activation
3.3
93
Activation
In my discussion of the knowledge or set of representations which a
speaker judges to have in common with an addressee at a given point in a
discourse, I was assuming as a convenient simplification that whatever an
addressee knows is something she can be assumed to be thinking of at the
time of an utterance. Given the vastness of the knowledge stored in a
person’s mind it is clear that this assumption is not warranted. Knowing
something and thinking of something are different mental states. In order
for an addressee to be able to process the presuppositions evoked by an
utterance it is not only necessary that she be aware of the relevant set of
presupposed propositions but that she have easy access to these
propositions and to the elements of which they are composed. In other
words, as Chafe has repeatedly emphasized (1974, 1976, 1987), the
conveying of information in natural language not only involves
knowledge but also consciousness. 17 The difference between these two
mental states has important grammatical consequences. A large part of a
speaker’s assumptions concerning the representations of referents in the
mind of an addressee at the time of an utterance has to do with the
limitations imposed on the short-term memory of speakers and hearers.
My description of these psychological phenomena is based on Chafe’s
(1976, 1987) account of the interaction between consciousness and
verbalization. Certain differences between my account and Chafe’s will
be discussed from case to case. Generally speaking, while Chafe
emphasizes the importance of the cognitive states of concepts in the
hearer's consciousness at the time of an utterance, I will be emphasizing
the importance of the hearer’s willingness and ability to model her state
of consciousness according to the requirements expressed by the
presuppositional structures chosen by the speaker. A partial revision
concerning the concept of “activation” discussed below will be presented
at the end of the book (Section 5.7).
3.1
The activation mates of referents
Taking as his point of departure the idea “that our minds contain very
large amounts of knowledge or information, and that only a very small
amount of this information can be focused on. or be ‘active’ at any one
time,” Chafe (1987:22ff) argues that a particular “concept" may be in any
one of three activation states, which he calls active, semi-active (or
accessible) and inactive respectively. An active concept is one “that is
currently lit up, a concept in a person’s focus of consciousness at a
particular moment.” An accessible/semi-achve concept is one “that is in
a person’s peripheral consciousness, a concept of which a person has a
background awareness, but one that is not being directly focused on.” An
inactive concept is one "that is currently in a person’s long-term
memory, neither focally nor peripherally active." In the following
discussion I will refer to what Chafe calls here “concepts" as “(mental
representations of) referents," for reasons to be explained later on.18
The psychological factors determining the activation states of discourse
referents are thus consciousness and the difference between short-term
memory and long-term memory. An item is active if it is “currently lit
up” in our consciousness, to use Chafe’s expression, and activation
normally ceases as soon as some other item is lit up instead. It is possible,
for example, to use the unaccented pronoun she to refer to a particular
female referent only as long as that referent is the current center of
attention of the speech participants (or, as I will say later on, as long as it
is one of the topics under discussion). Once the attention of the speech
participants has shifted to another item, it is no longer felicitous to use
that pronoun to refer to that person. An inactive item, on the other hand,
keeps its cognitive status for much longer periods of time, independently
of what is presently at the forefront of the interlocutors” attention.
Depending on the nature of the referent, inactive status-and the
possibility to use a definite noun phrase in languages like English-may
last for the period of a particular discourse, it may last for a stretch of
time beyond a particular discourse, or it may last indefinitely (see the
remarks to that effect in Section 3.2.3).
What makes the different activation states of referents relevant for the
study of information structure is that they have formal correlates in the
structure of sentences. A short text example illustrating the various
activation states and their formal manifestations will be discussed in
Section 3.4 (example (3.27)). Further examples, illustrating in particular
the function of differences in prosodic prominence, will be discussed in
chapter 5. Concerning the ways active referents can be expressed in a
sentence. Chafe writes:
Those concepts which arc already active for the speaker, and which the
speaker judges to be active for the hearer as well, are verbalized in a
special way, having properties which have often been discussed in terms
of “old" or “given" information The general thing to say is that given
Activation
95
concepts are spoken with an attenuated pronunciation. The attenuation
involves, at the very least, weak stress. Typically, though not always, it
involves either pronominalization or omission from verbalization
altogether. (1987:26)
The cognitive category “activeness” thus has grammatical correlates in
prosody (phonological attenuation) and morphology (pronominal,
inflectional, or zero coding). It also has correlates in syntax, but these
are not as easy to demonstrate (cf. Section 4.4.4 and in particular the
analysis of unaccented French pronouns in Lambrecht 1986b, Section
6.1), An unaccented referential expression is necessarily assumed,-to
have an active referent (barring certain cases of pragmatic accommoda­
tion to be discussed below), i.e. the prosodic evidence of “attenuated
pronunciation” is a sufficient condition for assumed activeness of a
referent. (We will see, however, that attenuated pronunciation is not a
necessary condition for activeness.) But the clearest evidence for assumed
activeness is no doubt the morphological evidence of pronominal coding,
with the possible exception of generic pronouns like English you, they or
German man and of certain deictic uses of pronouns. In the former case,
the referents are so general (“people in general") that they may always be
taken for granted and need not be activated. The special status of such
generic pronouns is reflected in the fact that they can generally not be
accented. In the latter case, activation may take place with the very
utterance of the pronoun, often accompanied by a gesture. I can
felicitously say I want that without assuming that my addressee was
previously aware of the object designated by the demonstrative pronoun.
As hinted by Chafe at the end of the passage quoted above, referents
which have been activated and which in principle satisfy the condition for
unaccented pronominal or inflectional (or zero) coding are sometime«
not coded as pronouns but as unaccented lexical noun phrases. This
happens for example when more than one referent is activated at the
same time and pronominal coding would lead to ambiguity. For example
in the sequence
(3.19)
I saw John and Bill this morning. He's sick.
it is not clear which of the two activated referents, John or Bill, the
pronoun he is intended to designate. Barring pragmatic disambiguation
(e.g. John might be known as a sickly person so that he would most likely
be interpreted as referring to him), it would therefore be preferable, in the
given context, to refer to the one who is sick with a lexical noun {John or
9$
TWe mental representations of discourse referents
Off). There are various other semantic and stylistic reasons for not
coding already activated referents as pronouns, which 1 cannot discuss
here. Languages also seem to differ widely with respect to the possibility
of, or tolerance for, non-pronominal coding of active referents.19
Nevertheless, in spite of various kinds of exceptions, the overall
correlation between assumed activeness and pronominal coding is
extremely strong on the discourse level and has important consequences
for the structure of sentences. It can be shown to play a major role in the
structure of the clause in spoken French (see Lambrecht 1986b). The
formal category “pronoun” is no doubt the best evidence for the
grammatical reality of the information-structure category of “activeness.”
-To summarize, assumed active status of a referent is formally expressed
via lack of pitch prominence and typically (but not necessarily) via
pronominal coding of the corresponding linguistic expression. In the
terminology established at the end of Section 2.3, lack of prominence and
pronominal coding are to be seen as features of the presuppositional
structure of a given expression. The term “pronominal coding” will be
understood in a very general sense, applying to free and bound pronouns,
inflectional affixes, and null instantiations of arguments. Any non-lexical
expression of a referent counts as pronominal.
As for the formal expression of the inactive status of a referent, it is
the opposite of that of active referents. Inactive marking entails
Accentuation of the referential expression and full lexical coding.
An inactive referent cannot be expressed pronominally (again, with the
possible exception of deictic pronouns). The grammatical correlate of
inactiveness is thus the coding of a referent in the form of an accented
lexical Phrase. Even though the relation between accented and
unaccented and between pronominal and lexical coding is one of simple
Opposition, we will see below that this relation is functionally
¿Symmetric, one of the members being marked and the other one
mlmarked with respect to the category of activation.
' The relationship postulated by Chafe between activeness of a referent
and “attenuated pronunciation” of the expression designating it, on the
one hand, and between inactiveness of a referent and “strong
pronunciation,” on the other, may be called iconic, in the sense that
there exists a direct correlation between different mental states and
differences in phonetic intensity or word length (pronouns tend to be
shorter than lexical NPs). Creating and interpreting a new discourse
representation of a referent requires a greater mental effort on the part of
Activation
97
the speaker and the hearer than keeping an already established referent in
a state of activeness. As a result, it involves higher acoustic intensity and
typically more phonological material. The iconic nature of intonation has
been emphasized in much work by Bolinger, in particular in his 1985
essay on “The inherent iconism of intonation,” where we find the
following statement: "Suppose we take the obvious emotive correlation
as basic: high pitch symptomizes a condition of high tension in the
organization, low pitch the opposite” (1985:99).
Important though this iconic principle may be, there are severe
limitations on its applicability. While it is true that the referent of a
pronominal expression or of a nominal expression spoken with
attenuated pronunciation is always taken to be active (again, barring
certain cases of pragmatic accommodation), it is not the case that an
expression coding a referent which is assumed to be active is necessarily
also spoken with attenuated pronunciation. In other words, weak
prosodic manifestation is only a sufficient, not a necessary condition
for assumed activeness of a discourse referent. Under certain circum­
stances, constituents with clearly active referents, including anaphoric
pronouns, may receive prominence. Compare the two examples in (3.20):
(3.20)
a. 1 saw mary yesterday. She says hello.
b. I saw mary and john yesterday, she says
ANGRY at you.
hello,
but he's still
The referent of the pronoun she is equally active in both sentences, but
the pronoun is prosodically more prominent in the second example. The
difference between accented and unaccented pronouns has often been
accounted for in terms of the notion of "contrastiveness,” which I will
discuss in detail in Section 5.5. Suffice it to say here that in (3.20b)
prosodic prominence has a distinguishing, or disambiguating, function
which is different from the simple marking of an activation state.
Active referents may also be coded as lexical noun phrases with pitch
prominence, as shown in (3.21), an example originally discussed by Kuno
(1972):
(3.21)
(= Kuno’s (1-5))
Q: Among John. Mary, and Tom. who is the oldest?
A: tom is the oldest.
The referent of the focus noun Tom in the answer is clearly active, but
this noun is also clearly the prosodic peak of its sentence.According to
■
-........ -r------ -------
Kuno, the accent on Tom in the answer is due to the fact that the referent
I
'
।
*
i,
;
|
j
,
,
•
t
of this noun is "unpredictable” as an argument in the proposition, an
explanation which I will adopt and develop in a later chapter (Section
5.7). Let me say, for the time being, that an active referent is coded with
prosodic prominence for reasons having to do with the marking of a
relation between it and the proposition in which it occurs, rather than as
a result of its activation state in the disourse. I will return to the
distinction between activation marking and focus marking at the end of
this chapter and, in more detail, in Chapter 5.
The preceding observations allow us to draw an important conclusion
concerning the interpretation of prosodic prominence in general. While
the absence of prosodic prominence on a constituent necessarily indicates
active status of the coded referent or denotatum, the presence of
prominence has no analogous distinguishing function. The function of
the one is not simply the opposite of the function of the other. There is a
fundamental functional asymmetry between accented and unaccented
constituents. This is the asymmetry of markedness. An unaccented
constituent is marked for the feature “discourse-active denotatum,”
while an accented constituent is unmarked with respect to this feature.
The characterization of unaccented constituents as marked may seem
counterintuitive, since it is normally the presence rather than the absence
of a feature that designates one member of a pair as the marked one.
Moreover, if Bolinger’s claim concerning the emotive correlation between
high pitch and high tension is correct, interpreting high pitch as
unmarked would entail that high rather than low tension is considered
the unmarked state of affairs in speech, a conclusion one may be
reluctant to accept. However, there is nothing unnatural about such a
conclusion. The negative feature “absence of sound” can be phrased
positively as “presence of silence.” And in the use of language, silence is
indeed the marked state of affairs. Thus the generalization concerning the
unmarked status of prosodically prominent constituents is to be
maintained. It will be shown to be of great importance in the
interpretation of focus prosody in Chapter 5.*1
An analogous generalization may be made in the case of the
morphological contrast between pronominal and lexical coding of a
referent. A pronoun is marked as having an active referent; a lexical noun
phrase is unmarked for the activation state of its relerent. To sum up,
while acttve referents can be unambiguously marked as such, via absence
of prosodic prominence, or pronominal coding, or both, there is no
Activation
99
corresponding unambiguous marking for the status inactive, at least not
via prosody or morphology (certain important syntactic correlates of
inactiveness will be discussed in the section on referent promotion in
Chapter 4).
A remark is in order about the status of accessible or semi-active
discourse referents. According to Chafe, semi-active (accessible) referents
can be of two kinds. A referent ("concept") may become semi-active
either “through deactivation from an earlier state, typically by having
been active at an earlier point in the discourse," or it can become semi­
active because it “belongs to the set of expectations associated with a
schema." A schema is defined by Chafe as follows:
A schema is usefully regarded as a cluster of interrelated expectations.
When a schema has been evoked in a narrative, some if not all of the
expectations of which it is constituted presumably enter the semi-active
state. From that point on, they are more readily available to recall than
they would have been as inactive concepts. (1987:29)
As an example of schema-related accessibility, Chafe mentions the
expectations associated with the typical schema of an undergraduate
class, which includes the concepts “student,” “instructor," “teaching
assistant,” “classroom," etc., all of which become accessible and can be
coded accordingly once the general classroom schema is lit up via
mention of one of its components. Chafe’s notion of a schema and its
associated expectations, which he takes from cognitive psychology; is
closely related to the Fillmorean notion of a semantic frame (see Section
3.2.3 above). Various types of inferences that can cause a referent to be
accessible are also discussed by Clark (1977) and Prince (1981a). Besides
frame relationships, Prince mentions culture-based inferences involving
stereotypic assumptions and logical set relations (set to subset, set to
number, number to set).
I believe that it is necessary to add a third kind of accessible referent to
the two mentioned by Chafe. These are referents whose accessible status
is due to their presence in the text-external world. For example, sitting in
an office room with a friend I might say Those pictures sure are ugly with
reference to some photographs on the wall which I assume my addressee
is not presently aware of but which I take to be easily accessible to him
Notice that to utter such a sentence it is not necessary to assume that the
accessible referent was in the addressee’s “peripheral consciousness"
(Chafe) at the time of the utterance. Such externally accessible referents
MP Tie HKatgi rr^atniaiiam ofdüaxne rrferoiu
pom a certñ problon for a definition of accessibility sote/y in terms of
conráwauai tod background awareness (sec Mow).
Accessibility (semi-activeness) of a referent can thus be ascribed to
three factors deactivation from an earlier state, inference from a
cognitive schema or frame, or presence in the text-external world. In
Jhe case of deactivation from some earlier active state in the discourse, I
WflJ call the accessible referent textually accessible; in the case of
accessibility via inference from some other active or accessible element in
the universe of discourse I will call it inferentially accessible; and in the
case of accessibility due to salient presence in the text-external world 1
will call the referent
shtjationally accessible.
B
V
W
I
'I
The two categories
“textually accessible” and “situationally accessible" correspond to the
text-internal and the text-external world respectively, while the category
“inferentially accessible" is neutral with respect to this distinction: a
referent can be inferred from an element in the linguistic as well as in the
extra-linguistic context.
Chafe’s distinction between active, accessible, and inactive referents is
-.based on the idea that there are different types of mental effort or “cost”
-involved in the processing of mental representations. We should keep in
mind, however, that from a strictly grammatical (phonological and/or
morphosyntactk) point of view, only a binary distinction is justified,
namely the distinction between referents which are marked as being
(attenuated pronunciation and/or pronominal coding), and those
which are NOT SO marked As I pointed out earlier, accented nonpronominal constituents may have referents in any activation state, i.e.
they are unmarked for the feature "active referent." From the
psychological point of view, there is no theoretical upper limit to the
^number and kinds of cognitive states which mental representations may
■have in the course of a conversation. But from the point of view of
grammar, only two such states are recognized and given the status of
■ formal categories. This is not to say that the postulation of an
.intermediary category “accessible” has no grammatical reality. For
example, we will see in the discussion of topic in Chapter 4 that the
difference between accessible and inactive referents can have syntactic
consequences; in particular it can influence the position of a constituent
in the sentence or the choice of one rather (han another grammatical
construction. Different syntactic constraints on the coding of inactive and
of accessible referents have been observed by Prince (1981a) and Chafe
(1987), who both conclude on the basts of text counts that the vast
active
■
■
j
i
’
Activation
101
majority of subjects in spoken English have active or accessible but not
inactive referents.22 Since subjects are normally the leftmost constituents
in an English sentence, such facts point to the existence of a correlation
between left to right order in the English sentence and the activation
states of the referents of syntactic constituents. I will return to the issue of
the cognitive category “accessible" at the end of the next section.
3.3.2
Principles of pragmatic construa!
While the category of activation accounts for the relationship between
the assumed cognitive states of discourse referents and types of
grammatical forms, it does not account for the principles of interpreta­
tion whereby particular syntactic constituents are construed as designat­
ing particular referents. In addition to the Chafean account of the
relationship between consciousness and verbalization, independent
pragmatic principles of construal are required in order to explain how
linguistic expressions which code discourse referents with certain
activation properties are interpreted in particular discourse contexts.
In what follows, I will briefly discuss some of these principles of construal
on the basis of a number of examples which pose apparent problems for
the activation analysis. These examples should not be read as evidence
against the activation approach itself but only as evidence for the
existence of additional principles of interpretation which must be taken
into account within the larger framework of information structure.
Example (3.19) showed that it is sometimes impossible to code an
active referent pronominally because of the referential ambiguity
resulting from the presence of two or more competing active referents
in the context. But in certain cases, the ambiguity may be resolved
through contextual semantic clues. In the following example, quoted by
Dahl (1976), who attributes it to Lashley (1951), correct construal of an
unaccented pronoun, in spite of the presence of two competing referents,
is made possible on the basis of the semantic content of a proposition
following the utterance of the pronoun:
(3.22)
a. ( = Dahl's 8) Peter went to see Bill, but he was not at home.
b. (= Dahl’s 9) Peter went to see Bill, but he had to return.
It is clear that in the (a) sentence the pronoun he will normally be
construed as referring to "Bill," whereas in (h) it will be construed as
referring to '‘Peter.” This is so because the hearer is able to keep the
1U2
ide mental representations of discourse rejerents
interpretation of the pronoun on hold until a referent can be assigned to
it on the basis of the entire sentence in which it occurs. As Dahl observes,
it is often the case that we cannot interpret a constituent until we have
heard part of what follows upon it. This phenomenon of delayed
construal is shown to be of great importance in the analysis of the French
"antitopic” construction in Lambrecht 1986b (Chapter 8), Example
(3.22) demonstrates that the use of a pronoun cannot always be
understood as evidence that the speaker assumes that a representation
of a specific entity is already "lit up" in the hearer’s mind at the time the
pronoun is uttered. Rather, the use of the pronoun indicates the speaker’s
assumption that the hearer is able to infer the referent from contextual
clues.
The next example demonstrates that even in a situation where there is
only one active referent in the speaker’s and the hearer’s minds, the use of
an unaccented pronoun to designate this referent may still be
infelicitous.23 Imagine the following scenario. John is returning home
from a trip during which he had no contact with his wife Mary or with
anyone in his home town. During his absence, Bill, an old friend who had
left the country years ago, arrived unexpectedly and is now waiting with
Mary for John to come home. It so happens that at the airport a fourth
person has told John of Bill’s arrival. When John arrives at the house,
both Mary and he know that Bill is in the house and both are thinking of
him. In spite of this common state of awareness concerning the referent,
it would nevertheless be inappropriate (though not impossible) for John
to say, upon entering his house:
(3.23)
Where is he?
If felicitous use of an unaccented pronoun depended exclusively on the
state of activation of a referent in the mind of the speaker and the hearer,
the inappropriateness of (3-23) would be difficult to explain. The
explanation for this inappropriateness is found in our definition of
pragmatic presupposition in terms of mutually shared assumptions (cf.
Section 2.2), or in what Clark and Haviland (1977) have called the
"given-new contract" between the speaker and the addressee. What is
wrong with (3.23) is the absence of an agreement between the speech
participants concerning the state of the mental representation of the
referent “Bill” in the discourse. While John knew that Mary was thinking
of Bill at the time of his utterance, Mary was not aware that John was
thinking of him. The utterance is inappropriate because the "given-new
Activation
103
contract” between the interlocutors was not yet negotiated with respect
to this referent. By violating this contract, John impaired the normal
communication process. In Section 5.71 will propose a revised account of
the appropriateness conditions on the use of unaccented referential
constituents, based on the added notion of “expected topic,” which will
predict the oddness of (3.23) (see example (5.80) and discussion).
Notice that (3.23), though strange, is not uninterpretable. Mary could
have correctly interpreted her husband’s utterance by means of pragmatic
accommodation.24 This indicates that it is not only, and perhaps not even
mainly, the use of the unaccented pronoun that causes the utterance to be
anomalous. If John had used a proper name instead, i.e. if he had said
Where is Bill? or even Where is bill?, his utterance would still have been
inappropriate under the circumstances. Rather than constituting evidence
against the activation approach to the use of pronouns, this example only
illustrates the intricacies of pragmatic presupposition and the importance
of shared knowledge in the processing of information in discourse.
The last example which I would like to discuss concerns an apparent
exception to the above-postulated necessary correlation between use of
an unaccented pronoun and assumed activeness of the pronominal
referent. Allerton (1978) cites the case of a man who sees another man in
a tennis outfit coming back from a tennis court and who says to that
man;
(3.24)
Did you beat him?
Even though the referent coded by him has the typical grammatical
characteristics of an active referent (lack of accent and pronominal
coding), it is unlikely that this referent is in fact “currently lit up" in the
bearer’s (the tennis player’s) consciousness at the moment of utterance.
Rather the referent is either totally inactive or it is in a state of inferential
accessibility. (The decision whether to call the referent inactive or
accessible is difficult in this case, a problem to which I will return.) What
intuitively seems to justify the coding of the referent in this form is the
fact that it is easy to irejactivate. As I see it, the interpretation of this
utterance involves two cognitive steps. The first is the pragmatic
accommodation to the presuppositional structure of the pronoun him.
Even though the speaker does not assume that the addressee is thinking
of his tennis partner, he acts as if he were making that assumption,
forcing his addressee to go along with that fiction in a cooperative
manner (or else to reject the dialogue). The second step is the reaction of
104
The mental representations of discourse referents
the addressee to the implicature created by the accommodated
presupposition. Having agreed to accommodate the referent, i.e. acting
as if he was indeed thinking of a particular male person, the addressee
must now assign to the pronominal variable an actual referent. He is able
to do this by inferring the intended referent from the semantic frame
evoked by the word beat, from elements in the text-external world (for
example the tennis outfit which his addressee must have noticed), and
from his memory of the tennis match 25
Far from constituting evidence against the activation analysis, example
(324) indirectly supports it. If the activeness assumption were not an
inherent feature of the presuppositional structure of the unaccented
pronoun, i.e. if the use of the pronoun him did not by itself signal that the
referent of the pronoun was assumed to be active in the mind of the
addressee, it would be impossible for the addressee to take the utterance
as an invitation to draw the required inferences in order to arrive at the
correct interpretation. Here again, recognition of the psychological
mechanism of pragmatic accommodation allows us to preserve the simple
analysis of the presuppositional structure of an expression type (in this
case, pronouns) and to account for apparent counterexamples in a
principled way.
iHowever, I do think that this and similar examples to be discussed later
On suggest a necessary modification of the concept of accessibility as
viewed by Chafe. In (3.24) it seems futile to determine whether the
referent of him was inactive or accessible at the time the sentence was
tittered. There are few reliable criteria a speaker can use to evaluate the
states of referents in the mind of an addressee. I would like to argue that
accessibility (semi-activeness) of a referent, in particular accessibility of
the "inferential” or “situational” type, does not have to entail that the
accessible referent is somehow present, indirectly or peripherally, in the
hearer's consciousness, as Chafe seems to assume. Rather what seems to
make a referent accessible is the fact that, due to the existence of certain
semantic relations within an invoked schema, due to presence in the
situational context, or due to other contextual factors, the referent is
easier to conjure up in the addressee's mind than a referent which is
entirely inactive.
Isuggest, then, that we think of cognitive accessibility as a fottntial
rather than as the state of a referent in a person's mind.
Given accessibility of a referent, a hearer will exploit this potential-by
drawing inferences or by searching the text-external or text-internal
foracttvatjon
Summary and illustration
105
world-if she is invited to do so on the basis of the presupposttional
structure of the sentence. She will not look for a referent if such an
invitation is not grammatically expressed. I believe that the main criterion
in manipulating the pragmatic states of referents in a discourse is not
whether some referent is “objectively” active or inactive in a hearer’s
mind but whether a speaker assumes that a hearer is willing and able, on
the basis of grammatical forms with particular presuppositional
structures, to draw certain inferences which are necessary to arrive at
the correct interpretation of a referent.
3.4
Summary and illustration
Even though identifiability and activation are independent cognitive
categories, one having to do with knowledge, the other with conscious­
ness, the two correlate with each other in certain predictable ways. It is
clear that a referent which is assumed to be unidentifiable to an addressee
is necessarily outside the domain of the activation parameter, since an
activation state requires the existence of a mental representation in the
addressee’s mind. To characterize such a referent, “unidentifiable” would
therefore be a sufficiently explicit label. Nevertheless, for the sake of
parallelism with other terms to be introduced below, I will sometimes
refer to an unidentifiable referent as brand-new. following Prince’s
(1981a) terminology. Still following Prince, I will distinguish within this
category between unanchored and anchored brand-new items.
The status of a referent as unidentifiable correlates with certain
formal properties of the expression coding it. Prosodically, a noun phrase
with an unidentifiable referent is necessarily prominent, since lack of
prominence is reserved for constituents with active referents In languages
which possess a grammatical category of definiteness, an unanchored
brand-new item typically appears in the form of an indefinite noun
phrase (n guy. a bus), while an anchored brand-new item is a syntactic
combination of an indefinite and a definite phrase (a guv ! work with, a
friend of mine).
The correlation between unidentifiability and formal indefiniteness,
though strong, is not absolute Certain unidentifiable referents are coded
with definite NPs, and certain identifiable ones may be expressed with
indefinite NPs. I mentioned the case of "pragmatic boot-strapping,"
where an unidentifiable referent is coded as a complex definite NP (the
daughter of a king or a king's daughter. example (3.17) and discussion).
mu
i nt mrntut repreurniumms oj discourse rejerenis
Furthermore, English noun phrases with the determiner this, which are
formally definite, may have unidentifiable referents (example (3.9) and
discussion). On the other hand, generic referents, which are always
identifiable, may be expressed via indefinite noun phrases (see (3.7) and
discussion). The lack of a one-to-one correspondence between
(un)identifiability and (in)definiteness entails that there can also be no
absolute correlation between indefiniteness and the presence of prosodic
prominence. For example, generic indefinite NPs may be unaccented
when used anaphorically.
Once a referent is assumed to be identifiable, it is necessarily in one of
the three activation states "active," “inactive,” “accessible." These
activation states have a variety of formal correlates. An active referent is
typically, but not necessarily, coded with an unaccented expression. All
unaccented referential expressions have active referents, but not all active
referents appear as unaccented expressions. Unaccented expressions are
marked for the feature “active referent" but accented expressions are
unmarked for this feature. Similarly, all pronominal expressions (free or
bound pronouns, inflectional markers, null elements) have active
referents, but not all active referents are expressed pronominally: they
may appear as lexical noun phrases, and these lexical phrases may be
definite or indefinite. Pronouns are marked as having active referents,
while lexical phrases are unmarked for the active/inactive distinction. To
designate an active referent, the label "active” is sufficient. An oftenencountered alternative label for "active" is "given," a term which I will
generally avoid because of its ambiguity.
There is an apparent exception to the one-to-one relationship between
lack of accentuation and/or pronominal coding on the one hand, and
activeness of the coded referent on the other. In the discussion of the
specific/non-specific distinction in Section 3.2.2 1 mentioned that the
anaphor to an indefinite noun phrase with a non-specific referent must be
an indefinite pronoun or lexical NP. For example we saw that sentence
(3.3) I'm looking for a book could be followed by I bound one or I found a
book. The referents of the anaphors o/ie and a book in these sentences are
unidentifiable, in the sense that the addressee is not assumed to be able to
identify the particular book the speaker has in mind. Yet the referent is
treated as active-hence necessarily as identifiable - as indicated by the
lack of accentuation on the anaphor and. in the case of one, by the use of
a pronominal form.
Summary and illustration
107
The apparent exception may be explained as follows. In uttering a<
lexical noun phrase, whether definite or indefinite, a speaker necessarily
activates the category denoted by the lexical head in addition to.
activating an individual in that category. The active status of this
category may then be reflected in an anaphoric expression, independently
of whether the addressee can identify the particular referent the speaker
has in mind or not. Expressed in different terms, while the type has
become active, the token may not be. In the competition for formal
marking, the type wins out over the token. Notice that this process of
category activation applies whether we go from one individual to another
(as in the above-mentioned I'm looking for a book. - 1 found one), from
an individual to a category (I’m looking for a book - I love books), or
from a category to an individual (Z love books; in fact I'm reading one
right NOH').
An identifiable referent which is inactive is necessarily relatively
prominent prosodically (Z saw your brother yesterday) and it is typically
coded in English as a definite lexical noun phrase, except in the case of'
generic indefinite NPs and in certain cases of deixis, where an inactive
referent can appear as an accented pronoun (e.g. I want that). (In the
latter case the referent might also be called accessible.) Even though the
label “inactive” is sufficient to designate such a referent, I will sometimes
use Prince’s more vivid term unused. This term has the advantage of
distinguishing the category "inactive” more clearly from the category
“unidentifiable” (calling an item “unused" implies more strongly that it is
already stored in the addressee's mind than calling it "inactive”).
As for the cognitive category accessible, it has no direct phonological
or morphological correlates, though it may have indirect correlates in
syntax. Accessible referents may be coded either like inactive or like
active ones, depending on various factors to be discussed below.
Accessible referents are subdivided into “textually accessible,” "situationally accessible," and “inferentially accessible.’
Let me summarize the correlations between the cognitive states of the
mental representations of discourse referents and the formal properties of
referential expressions. The most important formal contrasts are (i)
presence vs. absence of an accent; (ii) pronominal vs. lexical coding; and
(iii) in some languages definite vs indefinite marking. The relationship
between cognitive states and formal types can be looked at in two ways,
depending on whether we are describing the former in terms of the latter,
or the latter in terms ol the former. Going first from the cognitive state to
IOS
The mental representations of discourse referents
its formal expression, we notice that an active referent may be coded as
an unaccented or accented, pronominal or lexical, definite or indefinite
expression, while a non-active (identifiable or unidentifiable) referent
necessarily appears as an accented, lexical noun phrase, which may be
definite or indefinite. Thus while all formal types are compatible with the
cognitive state "active,” only a subset of formal types is compatible with
the other cognitive states. The selection of one or another formal type for
expressing an active referent depends on various discourse factors too
complex to summarize here.
Going now from formal type to cognitive state, we notice the following
correlations: 0) pronominal coding and absence of pitch prominence are
sufficient, but not necessary, conditions for activeness of a referent; (ii)
presence of an accent and lexical coding are necessary, but not sufficient,
conditions for inactiveness of a referent; and (iii) definite vs. indefinite
coding is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for either
identifiability or activation state, at least in English, even though the
tendency is strong for unidentifiable referents to be coded as indefinite
noun phrases. The tack of any necessary correlation between grammatical
definiteness and a cognitive state is consistent with the fact that
definiteness, unlike prosody and the pronoun/noun contrast, is not a
universal grammatical category (see Section 3.2.2). In sum, the only oneto-one correlation between a formal category and a cognitive state is the
one between lack of prosodic prominence and/or pronominal coding and
activeness. In other words, activeness is the only cognitive state which can
be unambiguously expressed by grammatical means in English. The
extent to which this latter statement applies to other languages is subject
to empirical verification.
The various correlations between cognitive states and formal categories
are summarized in Table 1. In Table 1, a “ + ” symbol indicates that the
category on the left is formally marked for the pragmatic feature above it.
The “[ + ]” symbol in the identifiability column indicates that the given
feature is not directly coded in the forma! category but is merely an
entailment from the ** + ” feature in the activation column. The “( + )”
symbol indicates that there exist significant exceptions to the correlation
between identifiability and grammatical definiteness, at least in English
(see the discussion of “indefinite this" example (3.9), and of "pragmatic
bootstrapping,” example (3.17)) but that this correlation is nevertheless
significant enough to deserve mention in the table.
Summary and illustration
109
Table 1. The grammatical expression of identifiability and activation
Formal category
Pragmatic category
Identifiable referent
Active referent
(+)
+
l+ )
+
Pronoun
Lexical XP
Unaccented constituent
Accented constituent
Definite NP
(+)
Indefinite NP
The various terms in the systems of identifiability and activation are
summarized in the diagram in (3.25):
unanchored (1)
0.25)
unidentifiable
anchored (2)
IDENTIFIABILITY
identifiable —► ACTIVATION
inactive (3)
textually (4)
accessible -^-sitvarionally (5
active (7)
inferentially (6
Using the numbers after each terminal label in the diagram, the
terminological conventions, including alternative terms, are summarized
in (3.26);
(3.26)
(1) unidentifiable/brand-new
(2) unidentifiable anchored/bra nd-new anchored
(3) inactive,.'unused
(4) textually accessible
(5) situationaily accessible
(6) inferentially accessible
(7) active,'given
The categories represented tn the diagram are exemplified tn the
following short (attested) text.2'1 The relevant referential expressions are
underlined. Small capitals indicate mam points of pitch prominence.
Finer pitch accent variations are ignored. I am also ignoring differences
in intonation comour, such as that between mam (rising, interrogative)
110
The menial representations of discourse referents
and aids (falling, declarative). Such intonational distinctions are not
indicators of information-structure categories in the sense of this book
but of speech-act distinctions or of differences in the speaker’s attitude
towards a proposition (see Section 5.3.1):
(3.27)
I heard something terrible last night, (el remember mark , the guy we
went hiking with (0), who's gay? His lover just died of aids.
Among the referents of the underlined expressions in (3.27), those
designated by the deictic pronouns I, o (which stands for you in the
omitted sequence do you), and we are active, given their salient presence
in the text-external world. The referents of the anaphoric pronominal
expressions o (the relativized argument in the first relative clause), who,
and his are also active, due to their anaphoric status in the text-internal
world, having been “lit up” with the previous mention of the noun Mark.
The active status of these referents is unambiguously expressed via
pronominal coding and absence of prosodic prominence. Among the
referents of the underlined lexical noun phrases, “something terrible" is
brand-new (unidentifiable) and unanchored, while “Mark" and “AIDS”
are unused (inactive). All three NPs are prosodically prominent, as
required. For expository reasons, I am ignoring the status of the complex
appositional noun phrase the guy we went hiking with, who's gay, which,
by virtue of being in apposition to the noun Mark, presumably has the
same status as the referent of that noun {hiking and gas are similar in
pitch accent and intonation contour to w.-mx). The referent of the time
expression last night is situationally accessible, being deictically anchored
with reference to the time of utterance. Due to its deictic status, it may go
unaccented (see Section 5.6.1 (p. 303)). As for the referent of the noun
phrase his lover, let us say for the moment that it is inferentially
accessible, both via its association with the frame evoked by the
previously uttered word guv and via the anaphoric Jink to the now
active referent “Mark" instantiated in the possessive determiner his.“1
However, it is not active, hence its relative prosodic prominence. I will
return to the status of the refereni of his lover shortly.
The text in (3.27) contains no example of a textually accessible referent
(i.e. of a previously active referent that became deactivated by intervening
discourse). An example of such a referent cun easily be added to (3.27) by
extending the text. For example the speaker, alter having talked for a
Summary and illustration
111
while about the person who has died of AIDS, might shift back to the
person called Mark with the sentence
(3.27*)
Mark is terribly upset.
In this modified context, the referent of the noun Mark, which is by now
textually accessible, is unlikely to appear in the form of a pronoun
because the intervening discourse has deactivated this referent, without,
however, erasing it from the current discourse register, i.e. without
returning it to the status of unused. The noun Mark may or may not be
accented, depending on the mental effort the speaker assumes is necessary
to reactivate the referent as well as on other factors to be discussed in
Chapter 5.
The reader will have noticed that in the characterization of the
discourse statuses exemplified in (3.27) and (3.27’) I have said nothing
about possible differences among the constituents that are not under­
lined. One might wonder in particular about the status of a verb'like
heard or hiking, an adjective like gay, or a preposition like with. The
reason for this omission has to do with the information-structure
distinction I drew in Section 3.1 between discourse-referential and nonotscouRSE-REFERENTiAL categories. While it seems relatively straightfor­
ward to assume that an interlocutor may have the referent of a noun
phrase like Mark or AIDS present in his consciousness or that he can
mentally access such a referent, and while I think it makes sense to say
that an interlocutor can identify the referent of such a phrase once it has
been introduced into the discourse, it is not clear what gets “activated” in
the hearer’s mind when he hears a verb, an adjective, a preposition, or
certain adverbs and what it is that can be assumed to be in,his
consciousness after he has heard it. It certainly makes no sense to apply
the category of identifiability to such words. There are no definite or
indefinite verbs or adjectives, etc. (unless, of course, they are
nominalized, i.e. made into discourse-referential expressions).
According to Chafe (1976, 1987), it is the “concept” of the verb,
adjective, adverb, or preposition that is “lit up” in the mind of the hearer,
just as it is the “concept" of “Mark” or “AIDS" that is being activated in
the mind of the speech participants during the speech act. This way of
speaking is useful in the case of certain syntactic processes in which
lexical items which are clearly understood from the context may be
omitted from verbalization. One such case is the “gapping" phenomenon
in a sentence like John went ro the movies and Mary to the restaurant,
112
The mental representations of discourse referents
where the verb form went is omitted under identity with an immediately
preceding occurrence of the same form; another is the elliptical omission
of larger sentence portions in answers to questions, as when I answer the
question Where did she go? with the prepositional phrase To the movies.
In such cases, it seems reasonable to assume that it is the identity of two
denotata which accounts for the possibility of omitting the second
occurrence?*
I see an important difference, however, between the informationstructure status of predicators like heard or gay or with on the one hand,
and that of referential argument categories like Mark or AIDS or his or
j>ou on the other. Only the latter designate entities-whether real,
possible, or imaginary-and involve the creation and interpretation of
discourse representations via lexical phrases or pronouns. This difference
in status between discourse-referential and non-discourse-referential
categories has important implications for the interpretation of the role
of prosody in information structure. While in the case of referential
categories prosodic differences may clearly indicate differences in
activation states, prosodic differences involving non-referential cat­
egories cannot, or cannot as clearly, be attributed to differences in
"concept activation." For example it would make little sense to argue
that the prosodic difference between the (relatively) unaccented verb
forms heard and went and the (relatively) accented form hiking in (3.27) is
due to a difference in the activation state of the designated concepts since
none of these verbs were mentioned previously in the discourse. This is
not to say that the cognitive states of the desígnala of predicators never
matter for their grammatical coding in the sentence (as seen in the cases
of gapping and ellipsis above), but only that they do not play the same
prominent role as referential expressions in the coding system in which
meaningful contrasts arise with variations of word order, prosody, lexical
vs. pronominal coding, etc. I will return to the issue of the relationship
between prosodic prominence and the pragmatic statuses of predicators
in Section 5-4.2.
It is necessary, then, to postulate two functionally (though not
necessarily phonetically) distinct types of prosodic contrast, one
expressing differences in the activation states of referents, the other
differences of another kind. I will argue that the existence of these two
functionally different types of accent correlates with the existence of two
different types of information-structure categories: those indicating
temporary cognitive states of discourse referents (the categories of
Identifiability. activa/ion, and /he topic-focus parameter
113
and identifjablity) and those indicating relations between
referents and propositions (the categories of topic and focus). These two
types of information-structure categories often coincide, but the
distinction is nevertheless crucial. For example, although in (3.27) the
accents fall in most cases on underlined items, i.e. discourse-referential
expressions associated with various activation states, they sometimes also
fall on non-underlined items (hiking, gay), i.e. on non-discoursereferential expressions. In the next section, 1 will discuss further
examples which show that a distinction must be drawn between the
grammatical manifestation of activation and identifiability, on the one
hand, and that of topic and focus, on the other. This distinction is of
fundamental importance for a proper understanding of the role of
prosody and morphosyntax for the informational structuring of
propositions in discourse. The difference between activation accent and
focus accent will be discussed in detail in Section 5.4. A unified functional
account of sentence accentuation will be presented in Section 5.7.
activation
3.5
Identifiability, activation, and the topic-focus parameter
Let us take another look at the status of the noun phrase his lover in
(3.27), which 1 provisionally characterized as “inferentially accessible."
Consider the following (constructed) variant of that text:
(3.28)
I just heard something terrible Remember mark, the guy we went
hiking with, who's gay? 1 ran into his lover yesterday, and he told me
he had aids
The activation status of the referent of his lover is necessarily the same in
(3.27) as in (3.28): in both examples the referent was not previously
mentioned but is to be inferred from another referent in the context. But
there is a subtle difference in the pragmatic construal of Ins lover in the
two versions. It seems as if in (3.28) the referent is given greater pragmatic
salience than in (3.27). And this greater salience correlates with the fact
that in (3.28) the NP is likely to be perceived as being prosodically more
prominent.29 The inferentially accessible status of the referent is
grammatically exploited in (3.27), where the NP is a subject, but not
in (3.28), where it occurs in a postverbal prepositional phrase. Through
its syntactic organization. (3.27) suggests that the referent is already
accessible in the discourse. But the syntactic organization of (3.28)
suggests that the referent is being evoked in the hearer's consciousness as
114
a
r
r
The menial representations of discourse referents
a previously inactive, unused, discourse referent. In fact the sentence 1 ran
into his lover yesterday (just like the preceding sentence Remember
mark?) may be seen as a type of “presentational" construction, whose
purpose it is to introduce the referent of the NF into the discourse rather
than predicating something about the subject I.30
The apparent contradiction concerning the activation status of the
referent of the phrase his lover in the two contexts is explained if we
accept my earlier suggestion to think of cognitive accessibility not as the
state of a referent in a person’s mind but as a potential for easy
activation, which may be exploited on the basis of clues from the
presuppositional structure of the sentence in which the referent is
expressed. The difference between (3.27) and (3.28) is that (3.27), by its
structure, conveys a request to the hearer to act as if the referent of the
NP were already pragmatically available, whereas (3.28) does not convey
such a request.
Facts such as these show clearly that the parameters of identifiability
and activation do not exhaustively determine the information structure of
sentences. Indeed if activation has to do with the stales of the mental
representations of discourse referents, how can the position of a noun
phrase in a sentence have an influence on our perception of the activation
state of its referent? We must conclude that the syntactic structure of
sentences and the assumed discourse representations of referents
correlate with each other and that this correlation is determined by an
independent factor. I will argue that this independent factor is the topic
and focus structure of the proposition in which the referent is an
argument. The reason why his lover in (3.27) is perceived as accessible and
why his lover in (3.28) is not so perceived has to do with the fact that in
the first case the referent plays the pragmatic role of topic, while in the
second case it is part of the focus of the utterance. This points to the
existence of a three-termed relation between accessibility, subject, and
topic on the one hand, and inactiveness, object, and focus on the other.
In languages like English, in which the pragmatic categories topic and
focus are only weakly coded at the level of morphosyntax, the need for
the topic focus distinction is perhaps most convincingly demonstrated in
situations where a given referent which is already marked for its
activation state may in addition receive a quite different marking for its
role as a topic or focus. We saw earlier that the clearest marking of the
status “active” is unaccented pronominal coding of a referent. Consider
Identifiability, activation, and the topic—focus parameter
115
the following question-answer pairs involving personal pronouns (from
Gundel 1980):
(3.29)
A:
Has Pat been called yet?
3: a. Pal said they called her twice.
b. Pat said she was called twice.
In the two answers to A’s question in (3.29), the pronouns her and she are
anaphorically linked to the antecedent Pat. Their referent is clearly active
and they show the expected lack of accent. These pronouns stand in a
topic relation to their propositions. The constituent receiving the main,
focal accent in these answers is the adverb twice. But consider now
example (3.30).
(3.30)
A:
Who did they call?
B: a. Pat said she was called,
b. Pat said they called her.
The pronouns she and her in the answers in (3.30) are as anaphoric and
their referents are as active as in (3.29), but this time they are accented,
contrasting with the low tone on the other constituents in the sentence.
They do not stand in a topic but in a focus relation to their propositions.
The distinction drawn here on the basis of the prosody of English
pronouns is particularly clear in languages in which the difference
between pronouns with topic function and pronouns with focus function
has not only intonational but also morphosyntactic correlates. This is the
case e.g. in Italian and French. Rather dramatic syntactic differences
between a discourse-active referent with topic function and one with
focus function are illustrated in these Italian and French sentences:
(3.31)
a. 10 PAGO. - MOI je PAYE.
"i’JJ pay"
b. Pago lO.-C’esl
'Til pay"
moi
qui paye.
In example (3.31a), the pre verbal pronouns io and moi are topic
expressions. Their intonation contour is rising, indicating that an
assertion is following. Example (3.31a) is appropriate in a context in
which the proposition “I pay" is construed as conveying information
about the speaker, in particular when contrasted with another
proposition expressing information about someone else (as e.g. in t'll
pay. the others may do as they please). In example (3.31b), on the other
hand, the pronouns are focus expressions, and appear either in sentence­
final position (Italian io) or in clause-final "defied" position (French
moi). Their intonation contour is falling, indicating the end of the
116
The mental representations of discourse referents
assertion. Example (3.31b) is appropriate in a situation in which it is
pragmatically presupposed that someone has to pay and in which it is
asserted that the person who is to do the paying is the speaker. (This
situation could present itself e.g. at the end of a dinner party where one
member of the party ostentatiously takes out his wallet and asks for the
check, whereupon another member protestingly utters (3.31b).) The
activation state of the referent of io and moi is obviously the same in both
cases, since the referent is one of the speech participants. What changes is
the information function of the referent as a topic or as a focus of the
proposition expressed in the sentence. I will return to this issue in Section
5.7, where I will argue that the formal contrast between accented and
non-accented constituents can in fact be entirely explained in terms of the
grammatical expression of such information functions and that the
activation states of discourse referents are only preconditions for the
expression of these functions.
Notice that while in the English glosses in (3.31) the pronoun I is
obligatory, though subject to prosodic variation, the Italian pronoun io
in (a) and (b) and the French pronoun moi in (a) are syntactically
speaking optional. Unlike English *Pay, Italian Pago and French Je paye
are complete sentences, the subject being expressed in the inflectional
suffix -o and the bound pronoun je respectively. These unaccentable,
morphologically fixed morphemes are not capable of marking the same
pragmatic contrasts as the free pronouns io and moi (and as the English
pronoun I), which can function either as topic or as focus expressions. In
Italian and French, as in many languages, the linguistic expression of a
referent can be split up, so to speak, into a pragmatically motivated part
(a pronoun of the “strong" or “independent” series io. tu, lui... or moi,
toi, lui...) and a semantically motivated part (a subject morpheme bound
to the verb). This dual coding of referents by means of functionally and
formally distinct expression types will be discussed in more detail in the
next chapter.
4
Pragmatic relations: topic
4.1
Definition of topic
4.1.1
Topic and aboutness
Let me begin with a few remarks about what I will not take “topic" to be
in this chapter. First, in keeping with the decision to restrict my research
to pragmatic phenomena with grammatical, in particular syntactic,
correlates in sentence structure (cf. Section 1.1), I will restrict my
attention to sentence topics or clause topics. I will have little to say
about the notion of discourse topic, which has more to do with discourse
understanding and text cohesion than with the grammatical form of
sentences (cf. Halliday & Hasan 1976, Ochs Keenan & Schieffelin 1976b,
van Dijk 1977, Reinhart 1982, Barnes 1985, Van Oosten 1985), although
I will sometimes informally use that term to designate a topic expression
whose referent is pragmatically salient beyond the limit of a single
sentence.
Second, I would like to emphasize from the outset that the concept of
topic developed here does not coincide with that of topic (or “theme") as
the “element which comes first in a sentence." In the framework adopted
here, sentence-initial elements may either be topics or foci, hence cannot
be identified with either of these categories. The notion of topic/theme as
the first element in the sentence is extensively discussed in Prague School
research (cf. e g. the summary in Firbas 1966a) and has been adopted eg.
by Halliday (1967) and Fries (1983). The relationship between sentence­
initial position and topic function will he discussed in Section 4.7. Finally,
my notion of topic differs from that of Givdn and other linguists (cf. e.g.
Givon 1983), who often use the term “topic” to refer to any “participant"
in a discourse and who do not draw a principled distinction between
topical and non-topical participants, a distinction which is essential in my
own approach.
117
118
Pragmatic relations: topic
The definition of topic which 1 will adopt is related to the definition of
“subject" in traditional grammar (which goes back to Aristotle). The
topic of a sentence is the thing which the proposition expressed by the
sentence is about. The definition of topic in terms of the relation of
“aboutness" between an entity and a proposition has been adopted in
one form or another by various contemporary linguists, including K.uno
(1972), Gundel (1976), Chomsky (1977), Dik (1978), Reinhart (1982).
Even though this topic definition is derived from the traditional
definition of “subject," the two notions "topic" and “subject" cannot
be conflated. Topics are not necessarily grammatical subjects, and
grammatical subjects are not necessarily topics, at least in languages like
English. For example non-subjecls may act as topics in topicalization
constructions, and subjects may act as non-topics in such accent-initial
sentences as (1 J) (A/r car broke down). The issue of non-lopical subjects
will be taken up in Section 4.2.2.
Topic has sometimes been defined as a “scene-setting" expression, or
as an element which sets “a spatial, temporal or individual framework
within which the main predication holds” (Chafe 1976). This definition of
topic applies mainly to what Chafe calls "Chinese style topics" (following
the description in Li & Thompson 1976) and to certain adverbial phrases
often found in sentence-initial position across languages. Chafe
distinguishes between topic in this sense and “subject," which he
characterizes metaphorically as the “hitching post for the new knowl­
edge."1 Chafe’s distinction between "topic" and (topical) “subject” is
motivated, I believe, by a desire to distinguish between topics which are
arguments, i.e. which are syntactically and semantically integrated into
the predicate-argument structure of a clause, and topics which are only
loosely associated with a proposition and whose relation to the
proposition is a matter of pragmatic construal (see examples (4,50) ff
and discussion). The difference between these two types of topic is drawn
explicitly by Dik, who distinguishes between “topic" and “theme," only
the former of which is "a constituent of the predication proper"
(1980:15). In the present study, 1 will use "topic” as a cover term for all
types of topic expression and 1 will make additional distinctions in
morphosyntactic rather than pragmatic terms (ct. especially Section 4.4).
Dik also distinguishes between "theme“ (a nun-argument topic to the left
of the clause) and “tail” (a non-argument topic to the right of the clause).
These two notions closely match my notions lone nr and antitopic np
(see Sections 4.4.4 and 4.7).
Definition of topic
119
What does it mean for a proposition to be about a topic? A
characterization of the notion of “aboutness" which f find helpful is
given by Strawson (1964), who writes:
Statements, or the pieces of discourse to which they belong, have
subjects, not only in the relatively precise sense of logic and grammar,
but in a vaguer sense with which 1 shall associate the words “topic" and
"about" ... Slating is not a gratuitous and random human activity. We
do not, except in social desperation, direct isolated and unconnected
pieces of information at each other, but on the contrary intend in
general to give or add information about what is a matter of standing
current interest or concern. There is great variety of possible types of
answer to the question what the topic of a statement is, what a statement
is “about" ... and not every such answer excludes every other in a given
case. (1964:97)
The principle expressed here, that statements normally are statements
about “what is a matter of standing current interest or concern," is called
the “Principle of Relevance" by Strawson. If a topic is seen as a matter of
standing interest or concern, a statement about a topic can count as
informative only if it conveys information which is relevant with respect
to this topic. The Principle of Relevance may be added to Strawson’s
previously discussed principles of the Presumption of Knowledge and the
Presumption of Ignorance (cf. Section 2.2). Taken together, the three
principles are essentia! components of a theory of linguistic information.
Strawson’s remark that “there is great variety of possible types of
answer to the question what the topic of a statement is" stresses the
inherently vague character of the notions of aboutness and relevance.
This inherent vagueness has consequences for the grammatical coding of
topics in sentences. If the topic is seen as the matter of current interest
which a statement is about and with respect to which a proposition is to
be interpreted as relevant, it is clear that one cannot always point to a
particular element in a proposition, let alone to a particular constituent
of a sentence, and determine that this element and nothing else is the
topic of the sentence. As there are degrees of relevance, there are degrees
to which elements of propositions qualify as topics. It is this fact, I
believe, which accounts for the absence of unambiguous formal marking
of the topic relation in many languages. And, as a corollary, it accounts
for the fact that in those languages which do have formal topic marking
this marking reflects only imperfectly the relative degrees of topicality of
given referents.
120
Pragmatic relations: topic
The definition of topic in terms of the pragmatic concepts of aboutness
and relevance explains that it is sometimes not possible to determine the
topic of a sentence on the basis of the syntactic structure of that sentence
alone, at least in languages like English, in which neither grammatical
relation nor Enear constituent order are reliable topic indicators. In order
to determine whether an entity is a topic in a sentence or not it is often
necessary to take into account the discourse context in which the sentence
is embedded. Consider the canonical subject-predicate structure in (4.1):
(4.1)
The children went to school.
In order to determine whether (and to what degree) the subject noun
phrase the children is the topic of, or is a topic in, this sentence, we must
know whether the proposition expressed in this sentence is to be
pragmatically construed as being about the children, i.e. whether the
children designated by the noun phrase are “a matter of standing current
interest or concern” (Strawson) and whether the proposition expressed in
(4.1) can be construed as relevant information about this matter. And to
find' out whether this is the case, we must know the context, the
communicative intentions the speaker had in making the statement, and
the state of mind of the addressee with respect to the referent in question.
1The fact that in cases like this the topic relation is not unambiguously
expressed at the syntactic level of the sentence is perhaps the main reason
for the objections often raised against recognizing topic as a category of
grammar (and sometimes against recognizing the study of information
structure as a valid theoretical enterprise; see Section 1.1). I believe such
objections are due to a failure to recognize the proper domain of
information-structure analysis. As 1 mentioned in Chapter 1, discoursepragmatic categories are often most clearly manifested in pairs of
allosentences, i.e. in the formal contrasts between alternative sentence
structures expressing the same proposition. Contrasts of this kind were
illustrated in the English, Italian, and French allosentence pairs discussed
in Sections 1.3 and 3.5. While the morphosyntactic and prosodic
Structure of individual sentences can be analyzed without recourse to
the categories of information structure, only information structure can
explain the differences between allosentences. The reluctance to
recognize pragmatic relations as categories of grammar has a parallel
in the reluctance (and often refusal) in early generative grammar to
recognize the relevance of semantic roles (Fillmore’s “case roles”) for
linguistic theory. The fact that categories like “agent" or “patient” are
Definition of topic
121
vague does not alter the fact that they are crucial in understanding a great
number of formal grammatical phenomena.
To see that even in a sentence like (4.1) the topic -comment structure is
to some extent formally (though not syntactically) expressed let us
contrast it with some possible allosentences by embedding the statement
expressed in it in different discourse contexts?
(4.2)
a. (What did the children do next?) The children went to school.
b. (Who went to school?) The children went to school.
c. (What happened?) The children went to school!
d. (John was very busy that morning.) After the children went to
school, he had to clean the house and go shopping for the party.
Only in the reply in (4.2a) can we say that the referent of the subject NP
the children is properly "what the sentence is about." hence that this NP
represents the topic of the sentence. In this context, the statement
expressed in (4.1) is intended to increase the addressee’s knowledge about
the children as a previously established set of entities. The statement
pragmatically presupposes that the children in question are a “matter of
standing current interest and concern" (Strawson) and asserts about
these children that they went to school. With traditional logic, we might
say that the predicate “went to school” expresses a property attributed to
the subject “the children.” However, the information-structure analysis
differs from the traditional one in one important respect: both the
“subject” relation and the “predicate” relation are seen not as logical
properties of the proposition expressed in the sentence but as pragmatic
properties of the sentence used in discourse. This distinction is crucial
since, as we will see. the same syntactic structure, expressing the same
logical proposition, can have a different information structure in which
the “subject-predicate” distribution is not the same as in (4.2a). Hence
the need for the terms “topic” and “comment.” To characterize a
sentence such as (4 2a) in information-structure terms, the label “topic­
comment sentence" is therefore preferable to the term “subject-predicate
sentence.”’
Formally, topic-comment sentences are minimally characterized by the
presence of a focus accent on some element of the verb phrase, at least in
languages like English (see Section 5.2.2). In (4.2a). the topic-comment
structure is expressed by the accent on the noun school and. in addition,
by low' pitch prominence on the topic noun children. (Low pitch
prominence is. however, not a necessary condmon for topic marking; see
122
.
Pragmatic relations: topic
Sections 4.4.4.2 and 5.4.2.) As I will show later on, topic -comment
sentences like (4.2a) are syntactically and prosodically
i
■
j.
’
i’
;
1
.
I
•.
<
unmarked
with
respect to their information structure, i.e. their forma) structure is
compatible with other pragmatic construals, in which the subject is not a
topic.
Let us now took at (4.2b). Here, the statement in the answer is not to
be construed as a statement about the children. Rather its communicative
function is to provide the referent solicited by the word who in the
preceding question. In context (b), the reply pragmatically presupposes
the proposition that “someone went to school” and it asserts that this
“someone" is “the children.” 1 will call sentences such as (4.2b)
iDENTiFiCATtONAL sentences, since (hey serve to identify a referent as
the missing argument in an open proposition.4 The subject NP the
children is not a topic but a particular type of focus expression (to be
called “argument focus" in Chapter 5), i.e. its referent is not in the
domain of the presupposition. The non-topic status of this subject is
formally marked by prosodic prominence on the subject noun, while the
inclusion of the rest of the proposition in the pragmatic presupposition is
marked via absence of prominence on the verb phrase. (This last
statement will be modified somewhat later on; see Section 5.4.3 on the
relationship between activation and presupposition).
If we were to look for a topic in (4.2b), the best candidate would be the
presupposed open proposition “X went to school," concerning which the
asserted proposition can be said to add a relevant new piece of
information. It is the pragmatic status of this open proposition that
has prompted linguists in the “language-psychology" tradition to call the
verb phrase in such sentences the “psychological subject" and the subject
the “psychological predicate.”5 I see, however, two reasons for not
calling the open propositions of identificafional sentences “topics” (or
“psychological subjects"), one semantic, one syntactic. First, since the
open proposition "X went to school” is semantically incomplete it cannot
be said to have a referent, therefore the asserted proposition cannot be
construed as being about its referent (see Sections 4.3 and 4.4 below).
Second, since the presupposition cannot be identified with a syntactic
constituent-the finite verb phrase went to school does not express a
complete proposition-there is no structural element which can be
identified as a topic expression. “Presupposition" and “topic" are
related, but not synonymous. I will return to this issue in Section 4,3.
I
5
j
1
Definition of topic
123
The characterization of sentences such as (4,2b) as “identificational"
does not embody the claim that the identified referent must be unique, Le.
that it must be the only one to fit the open argument position (see the
discussion of the so-called “exhaustiveness condition" in Hom 1981),
Sentence (4.2b) is compatible both with a situation in which the children
exhaust the number of individuals that went to school and with a
situation in which the children went to school among other individuals.
The former reading can be paraphrased as The ones who went to school
are the children, the latter as .Among those who went to school are the
children (this latter reading is sometimes referred to as the “listing”
reading; see Rando & Napoli 1978). The semantic distinction between the
"exhaustive" and the “listing" interpretation of identificational sentences
is syntactically expressed via two different kinds of cleft constructions in
spoken French. The exhaustive reading is expressed via the ubiquitous
c esr-cieft construction (C'est les enfants quisont alles d iecoie), while the
fisting reading is expressed via a type of avoir-cleft construction in which
the relative clause is unaccented (Ya les enfants qui soni alles d I'ecoie fit.
“There are the children that went to school"; see Lambrecht 1986b,
Section 7.2.1).
It is important to distinguish identificational sentences such as (4.2b)
from certain superficially similar topic-comment sentences with copular
predicates. The semantic difference between the two types is made
apparent in the following set of examples:
. _
(4.3)
a.
b.
c.
d
The ones who did that are my friends.
My friends did that.
It's my friends that did that.
They're my friends, the ones who did that.
Sentence (4.3a) is ambiguous between an identifications) and a topiccomment reading. In the identificational reading, the noun phrase my
friends, which identifies the missing argument tn a presupposed open
proposition, is a referring expression. Under this reading, (a) is an
instance of a WH-cleft (or “pseudocleft”) construction. As such, it is
synonymous with the subject-accented (canonical) and the it-cleft
allosentences in (4.3) (b) and (c). In the topic-comment reading, (a) is a
simple copular sentence in which the subject the ones who did that refers to
an identifiable set of individuals and in which my friends is a non-referring
predicate nominal Under this reading, (a) is not synonymous with (b)
and (c) but with the antitopic (right-detachment) construction in (d).
124
Pragmatic relations: topic
Let us now turn to example (4.2c). In this sentence, the subject NP is
also non-topical, as in (4.2b). But in contrast to the latter example, the
proposition that someone went to school is not pragmatically
presupposed here. The answer in (c) is not, or at least not primarily,
construed as conveying information about the children. Rather its
function is to inform the addressee of an event involving the children as
participants. The pragmatic function of sentences like (4.2c) will be called
event-reporting.6 In (c), the pragmatic presupposition required by the
reply is merely that something happened. Since the focus of the assertion
covers the entire proposition “The children went to school," the sentence
is contextually relatively independent and could be felicitously uttered
“out of the blue." This is not to say that the answer in (c) requires no
shared knowledge between the interlocutors. For example, the speaker
must minimally assume that the referent of the definite noun phrase the
children is identifiable to the addressee. But this assumption has no direct
bearing on the question of the topicality of the subject. From the point of
view of grammar, what counts for the information structure of the
sentence as a whole is that the reply in (4.2c) is not, or not primarily, to be
construed as a statement about the referent of the subject noun phrase.
, The non-topical status of subject NPs in event-reporting statements
such as (4.2c) is not unambiguously marked in English. In the contexts
chosen for (4.2), the subject noun in (c) is prosodically more prominent
than in the topic-comment sentence in (a), but the presence of this accent
does not in itself constitute grammatical evidence that the NP is not a
topic. Pronounced with two prosodic peaks, as indicated in (4.2c), the
sentence could still have a topic-comment reading, for example if used in
reply to the question "What did the children and the parents do?" The
reply, to the latter question could involve two subjects as "contrastive
topics” (see Section 5.4.2), as in (4,2c"):
(4.2c')
The children went to school,
and the parents went to
bed.
English sentences like (4.2c’) can therefore not be said to belong to a
formal category "event-reporting sentence.” However, in other languages
the non-topical status of the subjects of event-reporting sentences is
consistently marked, as e.g. in Japanese or spoken French. In English,
event-reporting sentences constitute a formal category only in the case of
certain intransitive sentences containing predicates such as die (Her
husband died), break down (My car broke down), cal! (john called), etc.
I
Definition of topic
125
The nature of such sentences will be discussed in some detail in Section
4.2.2 and again in Section 5.6.2.
Context (4.2d) also exemplifies a situation in which the subject the
children is not clearly the topic of the sentence. But the reason here is not
that the NP is part of the focus of the assertion, as in (b) and (c), but that
it is an argument in a proposition which itself is pragmatically
presupposed (or to be accommodated as such). As we saw in Section
2.4, most adverbial clauses are marked for expressing pragmatically
presupposed propositions. Now since in (d) the entire proposition “the
children went to school" is assumed to be already known to the
addressee, it obviously does not constitute relevant new information
about the referent of its subject. Rather, this proposition provides the
temporal background for the proposition expressed in the main clause. In
this sense, the subject the children is not a topic. Nevertheless it is a topic
in the sense that the proposition in the adverbial clause is indeed about
the children. The difference between (4.2) (d) and (a) is that in (d) this
aboutness relation is not new to the addressee; it is not asserted, but itself
presupposed. The presuppositional structure of the adverbial clause in
(4.2d) is similar to that of the restrictive relative clause in example (2.11) I
finally met the woman who moved in downstairs, whose proposition is
understood to be about the referent of the pronoun who without however
being asserted about this referent. Prosodically, (4.2) (d) is similar to (a),
the accent being assigned by default to the same constituent as in the
corresponding topic-comment structure (see Sections 5.1.2 and 5.3.3).
The pragmatic status af the subject referent in (4.2d) can go formafiy
unmarked because it is entailed by the presuppositional structure of the
entire clause, which is marked by its external syntax, i.e. by the fact that it
appears in topic position before the main clause.
Notice that in (4.2d) the entire adverbial clause after the children went
to school functions as a “scene-setting" topic for the matrix clause, whose
topic is he (i.e. “John"). Thus in (4.2d) the noun phrase the children
is a non-topical or “semi-topical" expression which appears within a
sentential scene-setting topic expression, which itself is embedded within
a matrix clause whose subject is the primary topic of the sentence. This is
a good example of the complexities of the concept of aboutness hinted at
in the quote from Strawson above.
Because of the hybrid character of the pragmatic relation between the
subject referent and the proposition in context (d). this type of
presuppositional structure is not as consistently marked across
126
Pragmatic relations: topic
languages as the other types, at least as far as the grammatical marking of
the subject NP in the adverbial clause is concerned.7 Nevertheless, some
languages do mark this difference in topicality by morphosyntacic means.
For example in Japanese the topic marker ira is normally not suffixed to
noun phrases in embedded clauses (see e.g. Kuno 1972). In spoken
French, topic marking via “left-detachment" of the topic NP is
incompatible with grammatical subordination, except in cases where
the propositional content of the subordinate clause is asserted rather than
presupposed (cf. Lambrecht 1981:58ffand 1987a). Background-provid­
ing subordinate clauses as in (4.2d) are among the rare syntactic
environments in which canonical SV(O) syntax is used in spoken French.
It is perhaps the kind of background-providing clause in (4.2d) to
which one coufd most reasonably apply the label “pragmatically
unmarked” (see Section 1.3.2), since in such sentences the topic-focus
articulation is neutralized or maximally reduced. But if we were to apply
the term “pragmatically unmarked" to such sentences, this term would
not be synonymous with “most normal" or "most frequently used." And
most importantly, it would apply to sentences which show a maximum of
pragmatic presupposition and contextual dependence, rather than a
minimum, as usually assumed in discussions of pragmatically unmarked
or "contextually neutral” structures (see e.g. Lyons 1977:503). In my own
usage, I will not apply the term “unmarked” to such sentences but rather
to the topic-comment type illustrated in (4.2a), for reasons which I will
make explicit in Section 4.2.1 and in Chapter 5.
Let me summarize the discourse functions of the four information­
structure categories illustrated in (4.2). In the topic-comment type in (a),
the purpose of the assertion is to pragmatically predicate some property
of an already established discourse referent. In the identificational type in
(b), the assertion has the purpose of establishing a relation between an
argument and a previously evoked open proposition. In the event­
reporting type in (c), the purpose of the assertion is to express a
proposition which is linked neither to an already established topic nor to
a presupposed open proposition (this characterization will be slightly
modified later on). Finally, in the background-establishing type in (d), a
pragmatically presupposed proposition serves as a scene-setting topic for
another proposition, which may itself be of any of the other three types.
With the possible exception of the last type, the examples in (4.2)
illustrate major information-structure caisgories, which tend to be
morphosyntactically or prosodicaily distinguished across languages.8 In
Definition of topic
127
Chapter 5, the types in (a), (b), and (c), which are analyzed here in terms
of their topic structure (or lack thereof), will receive a complementary
analysis in terms of their focus structure, and will be labeled “predicate­
focus”, “argument-focus”, and “sentence-focus" structures respectively.
In Lambrecht (in preparation) I will show that in spoken French these
information-structure categories are systematically distinguished via
different syntactic structures.
'i
The characterization of “topic” adopted here may be summarized‘as
follows. A referent is interpreted as the topic of a proposition if in a given
discourse the proposition is construed as being about this referent, i.e. as
expressing information which is relevant to and which increases the
addressee's knowledge of this referent. Following Reinhart (1982), we
may say that the relation “topic-of" expresses the pragmatic relation of
aboutness which holds between a referent and a proposition with respect
to a particular discourse. The term “pragmatic relation” should be
understood as meaning “relation construed within particular discourse
contexts.” Topic is a pragmatically construed sentence relation. In
what follows, I will try to make this somewhat vague characterization of
“topic” more precise.
4.1.2
Topic referents and topic expressions
It is necessary to point out a certain ambiguity in the term “topic” as I
have used it so far. Since the topic relation is a relation between a
referent and a proposition, it is natural that the term “topic" should be
understood as designating the entity which the proposition is about, i.e.
the discourse referent itself about which information is being conveyed in
a proposition. This is also one of the everyday uses of the term. To take
an example, it would be natural to say that the topic of the pmpnsitinns
we saw expressed in the sentences in (3.29) and (3.30), repeated below for
convenience, is in all cases “Pat,” i.e. the person designated with the noun
Pat and anaphorically referred to with the pronouns she and her:
(3.29)
a. Pat said they called her twice.
b. Pat said she was called twice.
(3.30)
a. Pat said she was called,
b. Pat said they called her.
To designate a topic in this sense I will use the term topic or sometimes
topic reeerent, depending on whether I am more concerned with the
"
►
<
128
Pragmatic relations: topic
pragmatic relation between the entity and the proposition or with the
entity itself. Thus in the above-mentioned sentences, the individual
named “Pat" is the topic which the different propositions are about. The
referent of the expression Pat is a topic referent.
This common use of the term topic to denote a referent with a
particular relation to a proposition should be sharply distinguished from
(he use of the term to refer to a linguistic expression designating a topic
referent in a sentence. To refer to such an expression, I will use terms like
Topic expression, topic phrase, or topic constituent, instead of the
simple “topic." When referring to particular syntactic categories with
topic function 1 will use terms like topic np or topic pronoun. In Section
4.5, an additional distinction will be drawn between lexical topic
expressions and pronominal topic expressions. To designate topic NPs
which are grammatically marked as such by their position or their form
and which cannot be identified with the grammatical relations subject or
object, I will use the category labels TOP (for left-detached topic
constituents) and A-TOP (“Antitopic,’’ for right-detached topic
Constituents). The ambiguity of the term "topic" is reminiscent of the
well-known ambiguity of the term “subject," which traditionally denotes
both a grammatical or logical relation between an argument and a
proposition and the syntactic constituent in which this relation is
instantiated in a given sentence.
If the distinction between “topic referent” and “topic expression" were
not drawn, it would be impossible, for example, to account for the
different information-structure statuses of the constituents Pat, her, and
she on the one hand and she and her on the other in (3.29) and (3.30).
The two sets of expressions refer to the same entity, namely the person
called “Pat,” who is the topic of both propositions. But while the
expressions in the first set are topic expressions, those in the second set
are not Similarly, in example (3.31)
(331)
a. iopago. —moi je pave.
b. Pago io.-Cest moi qui
paye.
it would be impossible to account for the different information-structure
statuses of the preverbal constituents ro and mi in (a) and of the
postverbal constituents io and moi in (b). All of these pronouns designate
the same individual, i.e. the speaker, but in (a) the pronoun is a topic
expression, i.e. its referent has a topic relation to the proposition, while in
’
1
1
4|
I
1
1
i
i
!
1
Definition of topic
129
(b) it is a focus expression, i.e. its referent has a focus relation to the
proposition.
A similar point is made by Reinhart (1982) in an argument against a
definition of topic in terms of “old information.” Reinhart discusses the
following simple question-answer pairs (focus marking added):
(4.4)
•
,
a. A: Who did Felix praise?
B: Felix praised max.
b. A: Who did Felix praise?
B: He praised himself.
Since B's answer in (b) can be construed as conveying information about
the previously mentioned referent “Felix,” the pronoun he in this answer,
which refers to Felix, is a topic expression. However, the reflexive
pronoun himself is not a topic expression, even though it is anaphorically
linked to the topical antecedent he. The reflexive pronoun is a focus
constituent, whose referent just happens to coincide with the referent of
the topic expression.
It often happens that a referent which is topical on the discourse level is
coded as a focus expression upon its first appearance in a sentence (for
reasons having to do with its identifiability or activation status; see
Section 4.4,4) to become a topic expression only in a subsequent clause.
This situation arises regularly in certain bi-clausal topic-introducing (or
presentational) constructions, such as the following:
(4.5)
Once upon a time there was an old king who lived in a beautiful castle.
The phrase an old king in the first clause of this sentence designates an
individual which has topic status in the discourse (the fairy tale is likely to
be at least in part about this king). However, at the point in the discourse
where this referent is first mentioned in the form of a lexical noun phrase,
this noun phrase is not a topic expression, because the clause in which it
occurs cannot be said io be about the referent of this phrase; rather the
clause introduces this referent in order to make it available as a topic for
subsequent predication. It is only with the relative pronoun who in the
relative clause that the referent enters an aboutness relation with a
proposition, making who a topic expression in that clause. (Notice that
this relative clause differs from {he one discussed in (2.11) I finally met the
woman who moved in downstairs in that its proposition is not presupposed
hut asserted.) Even though it may be natural and convenient to say that
the old king is “the topic of the sentence," insofar as that sentence is part
130
Pragmatic relations; topic
of a discourse about this individual, it must be emphasized that the NP an
old king is not a topic expression in that sentence.
A related issue arises with restrictive relative clause constructions. It
has been claimed or implied by researchers interested in the discoursepragmatic functions of relative clauses (Schachter 1973, Kuno 1976) that
the antecedents of relative clauses are topics or themes. For example,
Kuno postulates the following “Thematic Constraint on Relative
Clauses": “A relative clause must be a statement about its head noun"
(1976:420).10 However assuming for the purpose of the argument that
the topic relation is extended to non-asserted propositions-a necessary
topic relation obtains only between the proposition expressed by the
relative clause and the referent of the head noun. Only the relativized
element (which can be null) in the relative clause is necessarily a topic
expression. Both the head noun and the complex noun phrase
containing the relative clause may well be focus expressions, as e.g. in
the above-mentioned 7 finally me! the woman who moved in downstairs.
This shows that topic constituents may be embedded not only within
other topic constituents but also within focus constituents (see the
analysis of the presuppositional structure of NPs like my car, example
(1.1), or himsELF, p. 350, note 9; see also Sections 5.1.2 and 5.4.3), The
topic relation, holding within propositions, may in principle be expressed
in any syntactic domain capable of expressing a proposition.
Let me summarize the remarks made in this section. A conceptual and
terminological distinction must be drawn between "topic” as the entity or
referent which stands in a topic relation with a proposition and “topic"
as the linguistic expression which designates such an entity or referent in
a sentence. While a topic expression always necessarily designates a topic
referent, a referent which is topical in a discourse is not necessarily coded
as a topic expression in a given sentence or clause. This asymmetry is due
to the simple fact that a referent is an entity which exists independently of
its linguistic manifestation. The distinction between topic referents and
topic expressions is particularly important in the analysis of clause-level
or sentence-level constructions in which one and the same referent
appears both as a focus expression and as a topic expression. The
structural domain in which the topic status of an expression is determined
is the minimal syntactic domain coding the proposition of which the
referent of the expression is the topic, i.e the clause or phrase, not the
sentence or the discourse.
Topic and subject
131
I propose the following definitions of the pragmatic category ‘‘topic”
and the grammatical category "topic expression":
:
1
(4.6)
A referent is interpreted as the topic of a proposition if in a given
situation the proposition is construed as being about this refcren£;f.eia$
expressing information which is relevant to and which increases*the
addressee's knowledge of this referent.
topic expression: A constituent is a topic expression if. the proposition
expressed by the clause with which it is associated is pragmatically
construed as being about the referent of this constituent.
topic:
As we will see later on, for a proposition to be consumable as being about
the referent of a topic expression this referent must be pragmatically
accessible in the discourse- The somewhat vague formulation of the topic
constituent being “associated" with a clause is necessary in order.to
account for topic constituents which bear no grammatical relation io a
predicate and whose semantic relation to the proposition is determined
by principles of pragmatic construal only. Finally, by using the
expression "being about the referent” rather than "expressing- an
assertion about the referent" I am allowing in principle for the topic
relation to hold not only within asserted but also within presupposed
propositions.
4.2
Topic and subject
1
The examples in (4,2) show that, in English at least, it is not possible to
equate topic with a single grammatical category like subject. If this were
possible, no separate category “topic” would be needed. These examples
also confirm something we had noticed earlier (Section 1.3), namely that
the syntax of the English SV(O) construction is unmarked with respect to
its information structure (the "O" in "SV(O)” stands here for any non­
subject argument). Nevertheless the correlation between topic and subject
is extremely strong on the level of discourse and has important
grammatical consequences, in English as well as in other languages.
This is what I will show in the next section.
4.2.1
Subjects as unmarked topics
Evidence for the strong correlation between subject and topic in English
and across languages can be found in the way in which sentences whose
syntactic structure is unmarked with respect to information structure are
,r
132
Pragmatic relations: topic
interpreted in the absence of context. Since sentences are primarily used
J
as units of information in coherent discourse, and since information relies
on presuppositions (see Chapter 2), language users have an unconscious ”1
inclination to impose presuppositional structure on isolated sentences in □
order to be able to conceive of them as pieces of information. Now if 1
English speakers interpret canonical SVO sentences such as (4.1) in j
isolation, without contextual or prosodic clues, they are more than likely
j
to construe them as topic-comment sentences, i.e, they will unconsciously J
conjure up contexts of the kind given in (4.2a). Empirical evidence d
•supporting this observation will be provided later on.
-n
This psychological fact suggests that in English, as in other languages, d
.subjects are unmarked topics and that the topic-comment articulation is fj
■ the unmarked pragmatic sentence articulation. This is easily explained
u
if we< assume that topic-comment structures, i.e. structures which are *
used to convey information about some topic under discussion, represent
.communicatively speaking the most common type. With Strawson and 4
two thousand years of largely unchallenged grammatical tradition, I take
this assumption to be a reasonable one. It is more common for speakers
to convey information about given discourse entities than to identify
arguments in open propositions, to introduce new entities into the
discourse, or to report events out of the blue. Strong empirical evidence in
■
favor of this assumption can be found in the fact that in coherent j
discourse the overwhelming majority of subjects are unaccented
pronouns, i.e. expressions which indicate topic continuity across
"
sentences (see Prince 1981a, Chafe 1987, and the text counts in Chapter
6 of Lambrecht 1986b). The topic-comment articulation is then
1
communicatively speaking the most useful pragmatic articulation. It is
therefore the one to which speakers will most naturally resort for the
*
pragmatic construal of isolated sentences.
d
If we accept this assumption, the fact that it is the subject and not
i
some other argument that tends to be interpreted as the topic hardly
requires an explanation. Since the subject is the most common argument
a
in the sentence-most predicators have at least a subject but not
1
necessarily an object complement - it is necessarily also the argument
I
which will be most readily identified with the pragmatic role of topic.
3
This, I believe, is the primary reason for the often-postulated universal
1
correlation between subject and topic. Il is no doubt this reason which
]
has led traditional and modem grammarians to consider the subjectj
predicate (or NP-VP) sentence type the most basic one (see Section 4,5.2
j
k
Topic and subject
133
B below). Other reasons invoked in the literature to explain the subjectF topic correlation-such as the triple correspondence between subject,
L topic, and the semantic role of agent (cf. Kirsner 1973, 1976, Hawkinson
F & Hyman 1975, Comrie 1981, Lambrecht forthcoming, etc.)-are in my
L opinion secondary, though by no means unimportant.
P
There are certain well-known exceptions to the unconscious tendency of
L language users to construe the subjects of isolated sentences as topics.
Ik These exceptions have to do with the lexical nature of certain predicates,
K the propositional content expressed by the sentence, and the semantic role
f of the subject argument. In the discussion of markedness in Section 1.3,1
t
K
E
r
r
jk
l
■
y
l
L
?
f
~
J
t
( '
|
L
f
K
observed that sentences like Her father died or My car broke down tend to
be interpreted as event-reporting sentences, whose subjects will naturally
be construed as being in focus. This is due to the fact that in the minds of
speakers and hearers certain propositional con tents are strongly associated
with certain types of discourse contexts. The properties of such eventreporting sentences will be discussed in the next section. It is also wellknown that certain experiential predicates with strongly non-agentive
subjects, as well as certain types of passive constructions, favor non-topic
status of the subject. For example a sentence like A strange thought just
occurred to me is likely to be read with the focus accent on the subject noun
rather than on the verb. In many languages, the non-topical status of the
subject NTs of such sentences is marked syntactically (for example via
subject-verb inversion). Typical examples are Spanish Me gusta NP “I
like NP" and Se vende NP "NP is sold” or German Mir fällt NP ein “NP
occurs to me” and Hier wird NP verkauft "NP is sold here,” etc.
The unconscious tendency of language users to equate grammatical
subject-predicate structure with pragmatic topic-comment structure in
the absence of grammatical clues to the contrary is documented in the
following real-life example. Sentence (4.7) was written with a felt pen
across a poster protesting the war in Central America. The poster had
been partly ripped down from the wall it had been glued onto and (4.7)
was written in reaction to this presumably politically inspired attempt to
remove the poster. The sentence written by hand across the remainder of
the poster reads:
K (4.7)
i-
Nazis tear down antiwar posters
Because of the tendency to interpret the subject of a sentence as its topic,
the first interpretation of (4.7) which comes to the mind of a not overly
attentive reader is the generic interpretation, whereby the referent of the
orn ftiwiiin
134
Pragmatic relations: topic
subject noun phrase Nazis functions as a topic about which the
proposition expresses some generally accepted truth (“Nazis are people
who tear down antiwar posters"). However, given the situation in which
the sentence was read, this natural first interpretation must be rejected, as
it violates the most elementary requirement of relevance. There is no clue
whatsoever in the linguistic and extralinguistic context which would make
the referent “Nazis” in any way pragmatically accessible as a topic and
which would allow the reader to interpret the proposition expressed in
(4,7) as relevant information about this referent. Moreover the
interpretation of the sentence with Nazis as a (generic) topic would
require that the predicate phrase tear down antiwar posters be read as the
comment about this topic. But this reading conflicts with the fact that this
predicate in fact evokes the presuppositional situation in the external
world of the discourse (i.e. the fact that the poster was partly torn off).
The puzzled reader must therefore reinterpret the sentence with the
subject Nazis as a focus rather than a topic expression. This is
presumably the interpretation intended by the person who wrote the
sentence. The intended meaning of (4.7) would then be equivalent to that
of the alternative versions People who tear down antiwar posters are kaz/s
or perhaps Only Nazis tear down antiwar posters.
Another attested example of an unusual match between pragmatic
topic-comment structure and syntactic constituent structure is shown in
the following sentence at the beginning of a course description for a
linguistics class:
(4.8)
The heterogeneity of linguistic communities is the topic of this course.
Even though the notion of the “heterogeneity of linguistic communities”
is pragmatically accessible in the context of a linguistics course
announcement (depending perhaps on the university), the referent of
the subject noun phrase is clearly less topic-worthy than the predicate NP
the topic of this course. This becomes clear if we apply the question­
answer test.11
(4.8')
a. Q:
A:
b. Q:
A:
What is the helerogeneily of linguistic communities9
# The topic of this course
What is the topic of tins course1
The heterogeneity of linguistic communities.
Example (a) shows that it is difficult to construe the predicate “be the
topic of this course” as relevant information about the referent of the
Topic and subject
135
subject in (4.8); but (b) shows that no difficulty of construal arises if the
subject predicate relation is reversed, i.e. if the postverbal NP in (4.8) is
construed as the topic. The pragmatic articulation of the sentence in (4.8)
presents itself as a reversal of the one most commonly associated with the
given syntactic structure, leading to a certain increase in processing
difficulty. But unlike in the case of the highly anomalous (4.7), in which
topic-focus indeterminacy led to severely diminished interpretability, the
topic-focus reversal in (4.8) may be seen as a (more or less conventional)
violation of an information-structure principle for rhetorical purposes.
Example (4.8) is acceptable within the conventions of a written genre in
which added processing difficulty is made up for by the stylistic value of
unexpectedness.12
I would like to emphasize that the kind of topic-focus indeterminacy
manifested in (4.7) and (4.8) is not a common feature of spontaneous
spoken discourse. As far as written discourse is concerned, such
indeterminacy seems to be tolerable to different degrees in different
languages. The fact that examples such as (4.7) and (4.8) do occur in
English no doubt has to do with the previously mentioned fact that word
order in modern English is to a high degree grammatically (and not
pragmatically) controlled and that in principle both the topic and the
focus relation can be associated with the grammatical role of subject. As
the discussion in Section 1.3 showed, there is a striking difference between
modern English and modern French in this respect. In French the literal
translation of (4.7) in (4.7’)
(4.7')
# Les Nazis arrachent les afFiches anti-guerre.
would not only be puzzling, as it is in English, but downright
uninterpretable in the given context. The main reason for this is that in
French the pragmatic articulation of a proposition cannot be modified
simply by changing the prosodic structure of the sentence. To express the
semantic content of (4.7) in pragmatically acceptable form in French, a
writer would most likely resort to a cleft structure such as C'est les Nazis
qui arrachem les affiches anti-guerre (“It is Nazis who tear down antiwar
posters”) or perhaps ll n‘y a que les Nazis qui arrachem les affiches antiguerre (“Only Nazis tear down antiwar posters").
Evidence for the strong tendency of English speakers to identify subject
with topic may also be seen in certain facts of anaphora and ellipsis.
Consider the two examples in (4.9):
136
Pragmatic relations: topic
(49)
a. John married
,
b. John married
rosa, but he didn’t really love her.
rosa but didn’t really love her.
If we conceive of these sentences as answers to the question "What ever
happened to John?’ the subject constituents John and he in (a) are both
topic expressions. As sentence (b) shows, it is possible to omit the subject
pronoun he in the second clause. However, if the subject NP in the first
danse were a focus expression, omission of the topic pronoun he would
result 'in strongly diminished acceptability of the sentence. This is
demonstrated in the variant of (4.9) in (4.9”):
(4.9') .
Q: Who married Rosa?
A: a. john married her, but he didn’t really love her.
b. *?K)hn married her but didn’t really love her.
The status of John as a focus constituent in the answer makes omission of
the anaphoric pronoun he in the second clause impossible in (4.9’). The
difference between (4.9b) and (4.9'b) shows that our initial judgment
concerning the omissibility of the pronoun he in (4.9) was made under the
unconscious assumption that the subject John is the topic of that
sentence.13
The contrast between (4.9) and (4.9’) is explained if we make the
functionally reasonable assumption that for an argument to appear in
phonologically null form in English the referent of the argument must
have been established as a topic in previous discourse. The validity of this
assumption is demonstrated for Japanese by Kuno (1972), who observes
that when deleted arguments in Japanese texts are made overt via lexical
material the overt NPs must be marked with the topic particle wa and can
never be marked with ga. An analogous observation is made by Ochs
(1979) concerning argument deletion in spontaneous English discourse.
In this study, I will take the preponderance of the topic-comment
sentence type and the strong correlation between subject and topic to be
universal features of natural language.14 Across languages, the subject of
a sentence will be interpreted as its topic and the predicate as a comment
about this topic unless the sentence contains morphosyntactic, prosodic,
or semantic clues to the contrary. The subject can therefore be
characterized as the unmarked topic expression and the topic comment
structure as the unmarked presupposttional structure of a sentence.
The characterization of the subject as the unmarked topic allows for the
possibility that in some sentences the subject is not a topic. In the next
section, I will discuss one important class of sentences with marked
Topic and subject
137
presuppositions! structure, in which the subject is part of the focus of the
sentence.15
4.2.2
Non-topical subjects and the thetic-caiegorical distinction16
In the discussion of (4.2c), I characterized the statement “The children
went to school” when used to answer the question “What happened?" as
an instance of “event-reporting", and I argued that in such contexts the
focus covers the entire proposition, hence that the subject is not a topic. I
also observed that in English the difference between event-reporting and
topic-comment sentences is not unambiguously marked in sentences such
as (4.2c). However, there exists a class of sentences, in English and across
languages, in which the contrast between the two pragmatic sentence
articulations is made formally explicit.
The formal distinction which I have in mind is the one illustrated in the
pairs of allosentences discussed in Section 1.3 (examples (1.1) through
(1.3) and (I. T) through (1.3’)). Here is another set of examples, this time
including Japanese:
(4.10)
A.
a.
b.
c.
d.
What's the matter'1
My neck hurts.
Mi fa male il collo.
Tai mon coo qui me fait mal.
kubi ga itai.
B. How's your neck?
a My neck hurts.
b. Il collo mi fa male.
c. Mon con il me fait
d Kubi wa itai.
mal.
It goes without saying that under the minimal context provided here
the sentences on the right-hand side would normally not contain full
lexical subjects. Answers such as those in (4.11), which contain
pronominal or null subjects, would no doubt be more appropriate in
most situations:
(4.11)
a. It HURTS
b. Ml fa MALE.
c. II me fail mal.
d.
ITAI.
Nevertheless unaccented subject NPs are pragmatically possible in such
sentences. They may therefore be used to emphasize the formal contrast
between the two types
The relevant grammatical contrasts between the event-reporting
sentences on the left-hand side in (4.10) and the topic-comment
sentences on the right all have to do with the formal marking of the
138
Pragmatic relations: topic
NP argument designating the body part. They may be characterized as
follows: (i) accented vs. non-accenled subject NP in English; (ii)
postverbal vs. preverbal subject NP in Italian; (iii) clefted vs. detached
NP in French; and (iv) go-marked vs. wu-marked NP in Japanese. The
four grammatical structures illustrated in the left-hand examples
represent four major structural types which are attested in many
languages (see Sasse 1987). Subject accentuation without concomitant
syntactic change is found e g. in German (which also has type (ii), see
Section 5.3.3); postverbal subject position is found in Romance, Slavic,
and Chinese, etc.; cleft structures are found e.g. in Welsh and Arabic, and
special morphological marking exists e.g. in Bantu (cf. Givón 1975a).
Sasse (1984, 1987) also mentions a fifth type: subject incorporation,
which is attested e.g. in the Cushitic language Boni.
There is no established terminology concerning the sentence type
represented by the left-hand examples in (4.10). Terms which have been
used in the literature include “presentational sentences” (Bolinger and
Others), “neutral descriptions" (Kuno 1972), "news sentences" (Schmerliug 1976), "event-reporting sentences” (Lambrecht 1987b etc), and
“thetic sentences” (cf. below).17 These terms all correspond to notional
definitions of the phenomenon under analysis. In Chapter 5, I will
introduce the terms sentence-focus structure (for event-reporting
sentences) and predicate-focus structure (for topic-comment sen­
tences), two terms which emphasize the structural implications of the
categories involved.
One of the first linguists to recognize the theoretical importance of the
grammatical contrast under discussion was Mathesius (1929). In postWorld-War-II linguistics, the discussion has been pursued by numerous
European and American scholars, all of whom were more or less directly
influenced by the Prague school: Bolinger (1954 etc.) on English and
Spanish; Hatcher (1956) and Contreras (1976) on Spanish; Firbas
(1966b), Halliday (1967), Chafe (1974), Schmerhng (1976), Faber
(1987), etc. on English; Fuchs (1980) on English and German; Kuno
(1972) on English and Japanese; Wandruszka (1982) on Italian; and Wehr
(1984) on Romance. In spite of many individual differences, the analyses
presented by these scholars share the basic premise that the contrast
between the two types has to do with information structure, in particular
with the activation and identifiability state of the subject referent.
Another approach to the grammatical contrast in (4.10), which has
been less prominent in American linguistics, is the semantic approach
Topic and subject
139
inspired by the philosophical distinction between thetic and cat­
egorical statements. According to this approach, the contrast
expressed in our examples is seen as the manifestation of two different,
logical representations of the same propositional content Topiocomment sentences are logically complex, while event-reporting
sentences are logically simple. This approach is represented in work
by Kuroda (1972, 1984, 1985), it is hinted at in Dahl 1976 and Vattuone
1975, and it has more recently been taken up in work by the German,
scholars Ulrich (1985) and Sasse (1984, 1987), who have added a
pragmatic dimension to this logical approach. The proponents of the
thetic-categorical approach claim (or imply) that thetic sentences
represent a category of their own which cannot be captured with
principles of information structure.
The distinction between thetic and categorical sentences was first
proposed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Brentano and further
developed by Brentano’s student Marty as a cognitive distinction
between two types of human judgment. Reacting against the generally
accepted Aristotelian view that all judgment is categorical in nature, i.e.
consists in predicating (or denying) some property of some entity,
Brentano and Marty claimed that sentences can express two distinct types
of judgment.18 The categorical judgment, which is expressed in the
traditional subject-predicate sentence type, involves both the act of
recognition of a subject and the act of affirming or denying what is
expressed by the predicate about the subject. Since it involves these two
independent cognitive acts, it is called a “double judgment" (Doppelurieil) by Marty (1918, passim). The logical structure of the categorical
judgment can be represented as “A is B" or “A is not B." As illustrations
of sentences expressing categorical judgments Marty cites such examples
as the following:
(4.12)
a. Diese Blume isl blau. "This flower is blue."
b. Ich bin wohl. “I am (feeling) well."
c. Mein Bruder ist abgereisl “My brother left on a trip."
In contrast, the thetic judgment involves only the recognition or
rejection of some judgment material, without predicating this judgment
of some independently recognized subject. Its basic logical structure is “A
is" or “A is not." It is therefore also called a “simple judgment"
(einfaches Urieil). Marty cites the German and Latin sentences in (4.13)
below as typical examples of propositions expressing thetic judgments I
140
Pragmatic relations: topic
have grouped them into two sets, according to semantic and formal
criteria which 1 will make explicit later on:
(4,13)
a. Es regnet. / Pluit. “It is raining.”
b.Gott ist. "God exists."
Es gibt gelbe Blumen. “There are yellow flowers."
Es findet ein Markt statt. "A market is being held."
In the thetic type in (4,13a), often exemplified with weather verbs, it
seems relatively uncontroversial to assume that the propositions
expressed in such sentences are logically simple in Marty’s sense. They
do not predicate a property of some entity but they simply assert or
“pose” (hence “thetic”) a fact or state of affairs. The type in (4.13b)
corresponds to the so-called “existential” sentence type, but as we shall
see it is not restricted to existentials.
To my knowledge, the first systematic attempt to apply Brentano’s and
Marty’s logical dichotomy to linguistic theory was made by Kuroda
(1972). According to Kuroda, the logical distinction between thetic and
categorical judgments is empirically confirmed in Japanese grammar in
the formal distinction between the particles wo and ga. For example, the
difference between the two sentences in (4.14)
(4.14)
a. Inn ga hasitte iru. “The dog is running."
b. Inu wa hasitte ini. "The dog is running."
is analyzed by Kuroda as follows. Example (4.14a), which contains a gomarked NP, is a thetic sentence. It represents “the fact that an event of
running ... is taking place, involving necessarily one ... participant in the
event” The speaker’s intention is directed in (a) toward the entity
participating in the event, i.e. the dog, “just insofar as it is a constituent
of an event” In the categorical sentence in (b) however, which contains
wa, “the speaker’s interest is primarily directed towards the entity...and
the reason why he wants to give an expression to the fact that he
recognizes the happening of the event... is precisely that he wants to
relate the occurrence of the event to this entity" (1972:162ff). The entity
to which an event is related by the speaker in this way is referred to by
Knroda as the “subject,” which is grammatically manifested in Japanese
asawa-marked NP. Thetic sentences such as (4.14a), on the other hand,
in winch the entity is only a necessary participant in an event, are called
“subjectless” by Kuroda.
It is clear that Kuroda’s notion of "subject" is closely related to the
information-structure notion of “topic” or "theme.” even though
Topic and subject
141
Kuroda explicitly rejects the explanation of wa as a topic marker. I will
take Kuroda’s notion of a “subjectless” sentence to be equivalent to that
of a "topicless" sentence, or, more accurately, to that of a sentence in
which the subject is not a topic. It is equally clear that Kuroda s semantic
analysis of the thetic-categorical contrast is related to my pragmatic
analysis of the contrast between topic-comment utterances and event­
reporting utterances. In what follows, I will argue that an information
structure approach to the thetic-categorical contrast, which is based on
pragmatic, not logical, categories, is better suited to capture the nature of
thetic sentences than a logico-semantic approach.19
As I mentioned before, the German and Latin sentences Es regnet and
Piuit in (4.13a) are cited by Marty as typical examples of thetic sentences,
expressing logically simple judgments. Notice, however, that these
sentences are formally indistinguishable from subject-predicate
(topic-comment) sentences with pronominal or inflectional subjects.
For example in (4,1 5) there is no morphosyntactic or prosodic difference
between the thetic sentence in (a) and the categorical sentence in (b):
(4.15)
a. It is raining,
b. It is leaking.
In (b), the property of "leaking” is predicated of the argument expressed
in the subject pronoun tt (for example a pot or a waler pipe). Thus in (a),
a subject-predicate structure is used to express a proposition which
logically speaking has no subject (hence no predicate). This possibility of
expressing a thetic judgment with a structure which is normally reserved
for categorical judgments is possible because of the earlier-mentioned fact
that the topic-comment structure is unmarked.
Marty’s logical distinction between thetic and categorical judgments is
thus not necessarily translated into corresponding grammatical distinc­
tions, a fact which Marty himself pointed out. Notice, however, that the
use of subject-predicate (or categorical) structures for non-predicating
(thetic) propositions is possible only under one condition: the subject
cannot be a full lexical noun phrase. For example in those languages
(like Japanese or Russian) in which the meaning of (4.15a) is expressed by
saying something like "Rain falls” or “Goes rain,” the lexical noun
meaning "rain" must be grammatically marked as a non-topic, via
accentuation, postverbal position,,ga-marking, etc. In other words, among
the sentences expressing thetic judgments only those which contain full
lexical subject NPs constitute a distinct formal category. Only they can,
3
142
Pragmatic relations: topic
at least in principle, be paired with categorical allosentences, allowing for
grammatical contrasts such as those illustrated in (4.10).
The fact that only thetic sentences with full lexical subject NPs form a
grammatical category is clearly demonstrated in the following example:
(4.16)
a. Her father
b. He died.
c. #he died.
died.
In (4.16), both (a) and (b) can be interpreted as reports of some striking
event and can be used as answers to the question “What happened?" But
the sentence cannot be grammatically marked as expressing a thetic
proposition if the subject is a referential pronoun. The sentence in (4.16c),
in which a pronominal subject carries prosodic prominence, can only be
construed as an identificational or “argument-focus" sentence, in which
the proposition that someone died is pragmatically presupposed.
Another (attested) example, illustrating the same contrast, is (4.17).
The sentences in (4.17) were uttered independently of one another and at
different times by two waitresses in a restaurant when each passed near
the door to the kitchen:
(4.17)
Waitress A: Something's burning!
Waitress B: The toast's burning!
The situation of utterance is virtually identical but the prosodic form of
the two sentences is radically different. In the first sentence, in which the
subject is an indefinite pronoun, the main accent is on the predicate; in the
second sentence, in which the subject is a lexical noun phrase, the accent is
on the subject. If the first sentence were pronounced with an accent on the
subject (i.e. something's burning), it could again only be construed as an
identificational sentence, as in (4.16c). It appears, then, that there exists a
direct correlation between the grammatical marking of lheticity and the
presence of an overt accented lexical NP in the sentence.20
What is the reason for this correlation? The answer must have to do
with the functional difference between lexical and pronominal coding of
referents. As we saw in Chapter 3, full accented NP coding is a necessary
(though not a sufficient) condition for the expression of a referent which
is new in a discourse, i.e. which is either unidentifiable or inactive. It
follows that the grammatical marking ol theticily is restricted to
discourse contexts in which the referent ot the NP has not yet been
pragmatically activated. This is tantamount tn saying that such sentences
Topic and subject
143
are inherently presentational, i.e. that they serve to introduce not-yet
activated referents into a discourse (see Section 4.4.4.1 below). This is
confirmed by the fact that in many languages certain constructions
expressing thetic propositions are restricted to, or at least strongly
preferred for, “indefinite" NPs, i.e. NPs with unidentifiable referents
(English “existential” rAere-sentences, Chinese inverted word order, etc.).
In contrast, topiccomment sentences have a strong tendency to tolerate
only “definite" NPs (cf. Section 4.4 below). For example, Kuroda
observes that a ga-marked NP in Japanese can translate either as an
indefinite or as a definite NP in English, while a wa-marked NP can only
correspond to a definite (or a generic indefinite) NP in English.
There is thus a direct link between theticity of a proposition and
presentational discourse function. Kono (1912), in his functionally
oriented analysis of the wa/ga-contrast, observes that ga-sentences of
the kind discussed here, which he calls "neutral description" sentences,
tend to be intransitive, containing predicates indicating the existence or
coming into existence of some referent, or the appearance of a referent in
the external or internal world of the discourse.21 It is well known that
these are among the verbs found in presentational clauses across
languages. Examples of presentational sentences in English, Italian,
French, and Japanese are listed in (4.18):
(4.18)
a. john arrived.
b. E arnvato Giovanni.
c. Y’a jean qui est arrive.
d. john ga kita.
The utterances in (4.18) could be used by a speaker to introduce the
referent “John" into the discourse, from which point on it could be
anaphorically referred to in (unaccented) pronominal or null form,
depending on the language (see Section 4.4.4.1). The presentational
interpretation is particularly obvious in the bi-clausal French construc­
tion, which consists of a presentational (“existential“) clause followed by
a relative clause in which the referent is coded as active via the
unaccented anaphoric pronoun qui.
Let me illustrate the formal similarity between event-reporting
sentences and presentational sentences with another example, illustrat­
ing a common utterance type:
(4,19)
a. The phone’s ringing!
b. Squilla >1 telefono!
(subject accentuation)
(subject-verb inversion)
*
•fl
144
Pragmatic relations: topic
c. Y'a le telephone qui sonne!
d. denwa ga natte iru yo!
(y ’o-clefting)
(ga-marking)
The sentences in (4.19) are not strictly presentational, in the sense that
they do not serve to introduce the telephone as a referent into the
discourse. Rather they serve to announce an event of ringing, in which
the telephone is merely a necessary participant. Nevertheless, in each
Sentence the non-topical status of the NP is indicated with the same
prosodic and/or morphosyntactic features as the "presented” NP in
(4.18).
I suggest the following explanation for the fact that the same
grammatical category is used to express both the presentational and
the event-reporting function. What both functions have in common is
that the sentence expressing the thetic proposition introduces a new
element into the discourse without linking this element either to an
already established topic or to some presupposed proposition. The thetic
sentence thus has an “all-new” character which distinguishes it both from
the categorical (or topic-comment) and from the identificational sentence
type. The difference between the presentational and the event-reporting
type is that in presentational sentences proper the newly introduced
element is an entity (a discourse referent) while in event-reporting
sentences it is an event, which necessarily involves an entity. (Even the
events of raining or snowing involve entities, i.e. rain or snow.) I will use
the term “thetic sentence" (i.e. sentence expressing a thetic proposition)
to designate a superordinate information-structure category which
includes the categories “event-reporting sentence" and “presentational
sentence," the latter including a deictic and an existential subtype.
Following Sasse (1987), I will sometimes also refer to event-reporting
sentences as “event-central" and to presentational sentences as “entitycentral" thetic sentences.
1 would like to emphasize that the format contrast between the marked
category of thetic sentences and the unmarked category of topiccomment (or categorical) sentences crucially involves the grammatical
relation subject (or “distinguished argument”; sec p. 350, note 14). It is
nbt the absence of any topic relation that characterizes thetic sentences
but the absence of a topic relation between the proposition and that
argument which functions as the topic in the categorical counterpart. As
we saw in Section 4.2.1, in the unmarked case this categorical topic
argument is the subject. It is in principle possible for non-subject
Topic and subject
145
constituents to have topic status in thetic sentences, in particular
unaccented pronominal arguments and constituents below the phrasal
level. For example, we saw that the possessive determiner my in (4.10a)
My neck hurts is topical, even though the subject NP of which it is part is
a focus constituent. The same is true of the determiner in example (1.1)
My cse broke down, a sentence which we can now categorize as an eventcentral thetic sentence. Examples of pronominal topic expressions in
thetic sentences are the Italian pronoun mi in (4.10b) or (1.2) and the
French pronoun je in the bi-clausal construction illustrated in (4.10c) or
(1.3). (Recall that this bi-clausal French construction expresses a single
proposition, in which the subject is not a topic; see Section 1.3 above and
further discussion in Lambrecht 19R6b, Section 7.2.2.) Similarly, in the
second clause of the reply in example (4.20)
(4 20)
1
f
I
kl
Q: What happened to Mary?
A: She lost her job. and then her
hvsbano
left her.
both the possessive determiner and the homophonous object pronoun her
are topic expressions Thetic sentences may also contain locative topics,
such as the prepositional phrase in my simp in the sentence There were
three sues in my soup, whose topic status is expressed via lack of prosodic
prominence (see Section 5.3.3) What counts for the definition of the
formal category “thetic sentence" is that the constituent which would
appear as the subject (or distinguished argument) NP in a corresponding
categorical allosentence gets formally marked as a non topic, resulting in
a departure from the unmarked pragmatic articulation in which the
subject is the topic and the predicate the comment As with other
information-structure categories, the formal identification of this
category is made on the basis of the contrast with a possible
allosentence. 1 will return to the formal distinction between thetic and
categorical sentences in the disussmn of focus structure in Chapter 5
(especially Sections 5.2.4 and 5 6.2).
An apparent problem for the definition of thetic sentences in terms of
the grammatical manifestation of the subject NP are thetic -categorical
pairs which involve no grammatical subject at all. as in this Czech
example, which parallels the examples in <4.10) ;(4 Iff )
a V za’dech me boli
My back m pti
in back-1. OC me-A< < huri-’wg
b. Boli me v za dech
Mi iw k hurls '
146
Pragmatic relations: topic
The information-structure contrast between (4.10’) (a) and (b) is exactly
the same as that between the allosentence pairs in (4.10), but there is one
structural difference; what is a subject in English appears as a locative
prepositional phrase in Czech. (The locative case marking is semantically
motivated by the fact that the body part argument is the "locus” of the
pain.) Even though this prepositional phrase does not have the typical
coding properties (case marking, agreement) we expect of a subject, it
nevertheless has the required relational properties; like the subject in the
corresponding English sentence, it has the semantic role of the locus of
the pain and it bears the logical subject relation to the predicate boli
"hurts.” Moreover, it appears in the positions we expect, given the Italian
model (preverbal in the categorical version, postverbal in the thetic
version). The prepositional phrase has the distinguished argument
properties of a subject. (4.10’b) can therefore be subsumed under the
category "thetic sentence.”
4.2.3
Topical non-subjects and multiple-topic sentences
The analysis of thetic sentences in the preceding section has confirmed
that subjects are not necessarily topics. 1 will now show that topics are
not necessarily subjects. An example of a topic expression which is not a
subject was found in the thetic example (4.20) above. Another example
was shown in the sentence pair in (3.29), which 1 repeat here for
convenience:
(3.29)
a. Pat said she was called twice.
b. Pat said they called her twice.
Since these two sentences are (approximately) synonymous-they are
both about “Pat" and they may be used under (approximately) the same
discourse circumstances-the object pronoun her in the second example
must be as much a topic expression as the subject pronoun she in the first.
A third example illustrating a non-subject topic expression is Jespersen’s
sentence peter said it (answering the question ll'ho said that?), in which
the subject is the focus and the object the topic, corresponding to the
pronoun that of the question
That non-subjects can be topics is also evident from the fact that the
subject arguments of certain verbs in one language sometimes appear as
object arguments in another language. To use an already mentioned
example, in the English verb like the expericncer argument is a subject,
Topic and subject
147
but in the corresponding Spanish verb gustar it is an object (see (4.21a)).
The same situation holds for the English predicate to be missing sift, and
the French verb manquer (see (4.21b)):
(4.21)
a. Q:
A:
b. Q:
A:
What kinds of things do you like?
I like wine.-Me gusta el vino,
What's the matter?
I’m missing a page.-I1 me manque une
page.
Since topic is presumably a universal pragmatic category, it would be
absurd to claim that in the answers in (4.21) only the English Subject
pronouns, but not the Spanish and French object pronouns, are topic
expressions, given that the relevant sentences may be used under the same •
discourse circumstances. Finally, we can mention the case of the
topicalization construction, in which a non-subject constituent is
"topicalized," i.e. marked as a topic expression by being placed in the
sentence-initial position normally occupied by the topical subject.
The topicalization construction allows us to settle another issue, i.e. the
question whether a sentence can contain more than one topic. The fact
that in topicalization a non-subject becomes a topic does not entail that
the subject must lose its topic status in the process. Therefore such, a
sentence may have two topic expressions. To see this, let us look at the
following attested example:
(4.22)
Why am 1 in an up mood? Mostly H’s a sense of relief of having finished
a first draft of my thesis and feeling OK at least about the lime 1 spent
writing this The product I feel less good about.
The last sentence in this text can be said to have two topics and two
corresponding topic expressions: the topicalized object NP the product
and the subject 1. Both are formally marked as such (non-canonical
position of the lexical NP, lack of accent on the pronoun). The subject I is
topical because the whole passage in (4.22), including the last sentence, is
about the letter-writer and his feelings. We may call it the primary topic.
But the last sentence, in addition to conveying information about the
writer, is also intended to convey information about the “product" (i.e.
the thesis) in relation to the writer. The reader learns as a fact about the
product that the writer is not happy with it. We may call the thesis a
secondary topic.
Now since both the writer and the product are presupposed to be
topics under discussion at the time the sentence is uttered, the two
referents can be expected to stand in a certain relation to each other in the
14S
Pragmatie relations: topic
sentence. We can therefore say that the point of the utterance is to inform
the addressee of the nature of the relation between the referents as
arguments in the proposition. The situation in (4.22) can be loosely
paraphrased as follows: given the writer and the thesis as topics under
discussion, the reader is informed that the relation between the two is that
between the subject (or experience!) and the object (or theme) of the
predicate feel less good about. Thus a sentence containing two (or more)
topics, in addition to conveying information about the topic referents,
conveys information about the relation that holds between them as
arguments in the proposition. The reason the proposition can be said to
be about this relation is because the existence of some relation between
two (or more) topics is already established before the sentence is uttered.
The assertion in such a sentence is then the statement of the nature of the
relation.23
One might object to the view of there being more than one topic per
clause or sentence by saying that it makes the concept of topic vacuous or
near-vacuous. Do we want to say, for example, that in the answer
sentence in (4.23) (a variant of (4.9))
(4.23)
Q: What ever became of John?
A: He married Rosa, but he didn't really love her.
both he and her are topic expressions? No doubt the answer in (4.23) is
intended primarily as information about John, therefore the two
occurrences of the pronoun he must be topic expressions. But this does
not entail that the unaccented pronoun her is not a topic expression as
well. Although the sentence primarily adds to our knowledge of John
(John being the primary topic), it also has the effect of increasing our
knowledge of Rosa, by informing us that she was not loved by her
husband. Both John and Rosa are under discussion at the time the clause
he didn't really love her is uttered. The communicative point of uttering
this clause is to inform the addressee of the nature of the relation between
the two topic referents.
Notice that while the clause he didn 't really lore her may be said to be
ABOUT the relation between the two arguments, the same is not true of the
clause He married Rosa, in which Rosa is mentioned for the first time. In
the latter clause, Rosa does not bear a topic but a focus relation to the
proposition (see Section 5.1). The pragmatic di fie rente between the two
clauses is morphosyntacticallv marked: the two topic expressions are
unaccented pronominals, while the focus expression is an accented lexical
Topic and subject
>
■
149
noun phrase in canonical object position. The formal difference between
the focal and the topical object argument is particularly clear in a
language like French. In French the object argument appears after the
verb when it bears a focus relation to the proposition {Il a epouse Rosa)
but before the verb, together with the subject, when it has a topic relation
Imais il ne I'aimail pas vraiment).1*
That it is possible and natural to pragmatically construe the clause he
didnt really love her as conveying information about the referent of her as
well as that of he is shown by the fact that it may appear in the contexts in
(4.24):
(4.24)
a. As for Rosa, John didn't really love her.
b. John said about Rosa that he didn't really love her.
In these versions, the status of her as a topic expression is made explicit
via the first part of the two sentences, whose grammatical purpose is to
mark the following propositions as being about “Rosa." The use of the
as-for construction and the about construction to test the topic status of
an expression will be further discussed in the next section.
The claim that a sentence can have more than one topic is explicitly
rejected by Reinhart (1982). Reinhart argues that even though, when
talking about a given topic, it is obviously possible to mention individuals
who were mentioned in previous discourse or who are otherwise
pragmatically available in the context, only one expression can be the
topic of a given sentence. To demonstrate this, Reinhart discusses a short
text example from a recorded conversation (Shimanoff, transcription
quoted by Ochs 1979:63):
(4.25)
A Jewish Grandfather (G) has been talking about the fact that his
grandson is difficult to please. He gives one example-oatmeal:
G: And it’s uh got ta good taste, its good And the cereal - grandma e
don't like cereal but she finished to the last (dish) and I enjoy - I like it
too. It's tasty' And 1 uh (1.2) He didn’t want the cereal, doesn't eat. I
said, “Todd, st wouldn't kill ya, taste it’”...
Reinhart argues that in each of the beginning sentences, up to the
parenthesis indicating the pause length, the topic is the cereal and that
after the pause the topic of all sentences is the grandson. In the second
part, the cereal, even though it is still vividly present in the interlocutors"
awareness and even though it is mentioned several times, is no longer the
topic: "While before it was the properties of the cereal that the speaker
150
Pragmatic relations: topic
was concerned with (e.g. how everybody likes it) here he is concerned
with the properties of the grandson (his rejection of the outstanding
cereal)" (Reinhart 1982).
As far as 1 can see, there is no grammatical evidence supporting
Reinhart’s claim. It seems to me that the difference Reinhart is trying to
capture on the basis of this text is a difference in the pragmatic salience
of the various topic referents at given points in the discourse, not the
difference between topics and non-topics. It seems clear that the cereal is
more salient in the first part of the text and that the grandson is more
salient in the second part. And this difference in salience is reflected in the
fact that the more salient topic tends to be coded more often (though not
exclusively) as a subject. But it is not clear on what grounds topic status
of e.g. the pronoun it in it wouldn't kill ya can be excluded. By the same
token, there does not seem to be any principled reason besides pragmatic
salience to exclude the NPs grandma and 1 from topic status in the
sentences grandma e don't like cereal but she finished and I like it too. All
sentences containing two topic expressions have in common that the
referents of both expressions can be considered to be "under discussion”
at the time of utterance and that some relationship is known to exist
between them. The sentences then convey information about the nature
of this relationship.
4.3
Topic, presupposition, and semantic interpretation
The definition of topic in terms of aboutness and contextual relevance
entails that there is an inherent relationship between topic and pragmatic
presupposition. Since the topic is the already established “matter of
current concern” about which new information is added in an utterance,
for a proposition to be construable as being about a topic referent this
referent must evidently be part of the pragmatic presupposition, i.e. it
must already be “under discussion” or otherwise available from the
context. We can say that the proposition “X is under discussion" or “X is
to be predicated something of" is a relevance presupposition of a
sentence containing x as a topic (see Section 2.3 )/5
It is this relationship between topic and presupposition that motivates
the use of the question-answer test as a way of determining the topic of a
sentence. For example in (4.2u) we were able to determine that the subject
NP of the sentence The children went to sihm.il was a topic expression by
construing this sentence as an answer to a question inquiring about the
Topic, presupposition, and semantic interpretation
151
referent of this NP. Since the referent was touched upon in the question,
it was possible to construe it as an element of the pragmatic
presupposition required by the answer. The proposition “The children
are under discussion" or “The children are to be predicated something
of" is evoked by the presuppositional structure of the answer sentence in
(4.2a). Notice that this is not equivalent to saying that the referent of the
subject NP is active in the discourse. The topichood of the referent is the
pragmatic relation it bears to the asserted proposition; the activeness of
its referent is a feature of the communicative setting. That the pragmatic
relation is not identical to the pragmatic property follows from the fact
that an active referent may also enter into a focus relation with a
proposition (cf. Section 3.5). The relationship between topic and
activation will be further discussed in Section 4.4.
It is no doubt the inherent relationship between topic and pragmatic
presupposition that has led to the widespread terminological habit of
calling the topic of a sentence “presupposed." This habit is as misleading
as that of calling a definite noun phrase, or even its referent,
“presupposed" (cf. Section 2.3, example (2.12) and discussion). Any­
thing presupposed is propositional in nature (such as some shared belief
or knowledge), but topic referents are for the most part not propositions
but entities. Moreover, even propositional topics are not predicates but
arguments of, or adjuncts to, predicates. The fact that topic and
presupposition cannot be identified with each other was mentioned
earlier, in the discussion of example (4.2b). What is presupposed in a
topic-comment relation is not the topic itself, nor its referent, but the fact
that the topic referent can be expected to play a role in a given
proposition, due to its status as a center of interest or matter of concern
in the conversation. It is this property that most clearly distinguishes
topic arguments from focus arguments, whose role in the proposition is
always unpredictable at the time of utterance (see Section 5.1.1). One
therefore ought not to say that a topic referent “is presupposed" but that,
given its discourse status, it is presupposed to play a role in a given
proposition. To indicate the fact that an item is in the domain of the
presupposition, or belongs to the presupposition, I will say that it is in
the presupposition. The expression “in the presupposition” is the analog
of the expression “in focus” which I will introduce in Section 5.1.1.
The correlation between topic and presupposition is what has
motivated the use of the above-mentioned as-for construction (cf. Kuno
1972, Gundel 1976) and about construction (Reinhart 1982) as tests for
nwrTmrr
152
Pragmatic relations: topic
determining the topic status of an expression. In the as-for test, the
referent of the putative topic expression is first coded in pre-sentential
position as the complement of the expression as for and then repeated in
pronominal form in the sentence, typically—but not necessarily, as shown
in example (4.24)-as its subject. The as-for construction is thus a subtype
of the detachment or dislocation construction (see Section 4.4.4.2 below).
Applied to (4.1), application of the as-for test results in the structure in
(4-1’):
(4.1’)
As for the children, they went to school.
In the about test, the sentence containing the putative topic expression is
embedded under a matrix containing the preposition about, whose
complement is the putative topic NP, as in (4.1”):
(4.1 ”)
He said about the children that they went to school.
Both in the as-for test and the about test, the topic referent is formally
marked as being in the presupposition by being coded in a portion of the
sentence which precedes the clause expressing the proposition about it.
Notice that the phrase as for NP (as well as similar phrases in other
languages) can be appropriately used only if the NP referent is already a
potential topic in the discourse at the time the phrase is used, i.e. if the
referent is contextually accessible (cf. Ochs Keenan & Schieffelin 1976b).
Not only would it be impossible to use the as-for construction for a
brand-new referent (*/ts for a strange guy, I saw him last night) but it
would be highly inappropriate to use it with an inactive referent as well.
An utterance like As for your brother. I saw him last night is appropriate
only if the brother belongs to the set of referents under discussion. It is
worth observing, in this context, that the as-for phrase can only be used
in this topic-establishing function, as witnessed by the unacceptability of
sentences like
for whom did they go to school? or *They went to school
asfor the children. As far as I know, as for is the only phrasal constituent
in English which may not function as a focus expression.
By acknowledging the inherent relationship (but not identity) between
topic and pragmatic presupposition we are in a position to understand
certain correlations between the topic status of a sentence constituent and
the semantic interpretation of the sentence containing this constituent. In
Section 2.3, I mentioned that the truth of a pragmatically presupposed
proposition cannot be affected by an element of negation or modality,
because the content of presupposed propositions is necessarily "taken for
Topic, presupposition, and semantic interpretation
*
153
1
granted" by the interlocutors. Since the topic is an element of the
|
pragmatic presupposition evoked by the sentence, there is a sense in
;
J
which the topic itself must be taken for granted, hence must be outside
the scope of negation or modality in an assertion.
In a description of different types of negation, Payne (J 985.199fT)
observes that the way we understand sentential negation depends on the
“contextual articulation" of the sentence:
As the contextual articulation of the sentence varies, so does the
apparent scope of negation, and in such a way that what is negated is the
contextually free information. In sentential negation, the negative
element stands semantically therefore at the boundary between
contextually bound and contextually free elements.
=.
s
,
i
I
*
j
Payne's concept of “contextual articulation” is closely related to what is
called “focus structure" in Chapter 5 and his term “contextually bound"
may be considered the equivalent of my “in the presupposition." As a
diagnostic for negation scope, Payne suggests a performative paraphrase
of the type I say of X that it is not true that
"where X contains the
bound elements, Y contains the free elements, and the negative relates the
two." In the case where the whole sentence is contextually free, X may be
zero.
With Payne’s diagnostic in mind, let us consider the following negative
counterparts of the answer sentences in (4.2) (a), (b), and (c):
(4.26)
a. The children didn't go to school
b. The children didn't go to school.
c The children didn't go to school!
For the topic-comment sentence m (4.26a), the performative paraphrase
is "I say of the children that it is not true that they went to school." The
subject NP, as the contextually bound topic element, is outside the scope
of the negation. For the identifications! sentence in (4.26b), the
paraphrase is “I say of x going to school that it is not true that the
children are x" (the unnaturalness of this paraphrase is due to the earliermentioned fact that a presupposed open proposition is not a topic about
which something can be properly asserted). Here the subject NP is in the
scope of the negation. As for the event-reporting (thetic) sentence in
(4.26c), its paraphrase is “1 say that it is not true that the children went to
school." The bound element X is zero here since this sentence contains
neither a topic nor a presupposed open proposition. In (4.26c) the subject
is in the scope of the negation together with the rest of the proposition.
154
Pragmatic relations: topic
Notice, incidentally, that this semantic analysis is consistent with Marty’s
definition of thetic statements as expressing "logically simple" judg­
ments.26
The fact that topics are outside the scope of negation is syntactically
reflected e.g. in the behavior of topicalized noun phrases in German.
Consider the examples in (4.27);
(4.27)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Er ist kein arzt. "He isn’t a doctor/He is no doctor."
Ein Arzt ist er nicht. “A doctor he’s not."
*Kein Arzt ist er. "No doctor he is.”
Kein Arzt kann dir helfen. "No doctor can help you."
Ein Arzt kann dir nicht helfen. "A doctor can’t help you."
When the noun Arzt is in predicate (or comment) position, as in (4.27a),
the negative morpheme must be fused with the indefinite article ein into
the negative determiner kein. This sentence can be paraphrased as “I say
of him that it is not true that he is a doctor.” If it is topicalized, as in (b),
resulting in postverbal position of the topical subject er, the negative
morpheme remains in predicate position, in the form nicht, and the
topicalized constituent appears as a regular (generic) indefinite noun
phrase. Sentence (4.27b), which has two topics, could be paraphrased as
"I say of the relationship between him and being a doctor that it does not
exist.” As example (c) shows, it is impossible to topicalize the negative
NP kein Arzt in (a), i.e. to use it in a structure in which its topic status is
marked. Example (d) shows that it is not the position of the NP which
makes (c) ungrammatical but indeed the fact that negation scope and
topic status are incompatible. Sentence (d) is grammatical because in
German (as in English) subjects are unmarked for the topic-focus
distinction. The meaning of (d) is similar to that of the bi~clausal
sequence There ts no doctor who can help you, in which doctor is a focus
constituent. Finally, sentence (e) illustrates the unmarked topic-comment
structure in which the (generic) topical subject precedes the negative
morpheme nicht. This sentence is paraphrasable as “1 say of the
relationship between a doctor and you that it is not true that one can
help you.”
From the fact that topics must be m the presupposition, i.e. taken for
granted as elements of the pragmatic presupposition evoked by a
sentence, it follows that the referents of topic expressions are necessarily
presupposed to exist. Therefore, to the extent that subjects are topics, the
referents of subject NPs must be presupposed to exist. However, no such
Topic, presupposition, and semantic interpretation
155
presupposition is attached to noun phrases in predicate, i.e. unmarked
focus, position. This has interesting consequences for the semantic
interpretation of negated topic-comment sentences. Consider, the? two
examples in (4.28):
' c.
' r’
(4.28) a. John isn’t my friend.
b. My friend isn’t John.
Sentence (a) presupposes semantically that a certain individual named
"John" exists (and it presupposes pragmatically that this individual is
identifiable to the addressee and that it is a topic under discussion); But-it
does not presuppose that the speaker has a friend. This sentence could be
truthfully uttered by someone who has no friends. Sentence (b), on the
other hand, presupposes that the speaker indeed has a friend and could
not be uttered felicitously if this presupposition didn't hold. It is certainly
possible to cancel the presupposition evoked in (b) via a metalinguistic
speech act, by saying for example, with special intonation. My friend isn't
John; I don "t have any friends. But this simply means that the speaker feels
the need to correct a wrong assumption on the part of the addressee. It'
does not invalidate my claim that the topic-comment structure of the
sentence requires that presupposition.27
■ >
I believe that the requirement of existential presupposition (see Section
3.2.1) for topic expressions is best explained pragmatically, in terms of
the discourse function of topics. It is obvious that for a proposition to be
about some topic, and for this topic to be a matter of concern in the
discourse, there must exist an entity or set of entities which can be
designated by the topic expression. However, what counts from the point
of view of information structure is not that the entity simply exists but
that it is PART OF THE UNIVERSEOF DISCOURSE OF THE INTERLOCUTORS. A topic
expression must not only be referential; it must designate a discourse
referent. The difference between expressions which designate discourse
referents and expressions which don’t is well demonstrated in this
minimal pair cited by Karttunen (1969):
(4.29)
a. Bill has a car It is black
b. Bill doesn’t have a car. • It is black.
Unlike m (a), in sentence (b) the NP a car is not a referential expression in
the given discourse. As Karttunen observes, an indefinite NP establishes
a discourse referent only if the NP justifies an anaphoric pronoun. The
pronoun tt in (4.29b) is inappropriate because no entity has been
156
Pragmatic relations, topic
previously established in the discourse which can be anaphorically
referred to with this pronoun.
The requirement that topic expressions designate discourse referents
entails that only referring expressions can be topics. For example such
unaccentable expressions as the it in It is raining or the “existential" there
in There's nobody in the room cannot be topic expressions. Application of
one of the above-mentioned topic tests will easily prove this point. (In
contrast, the accentable deictic adverb there in There is John! is a topic
expression.) The restriction against non-referring expressions applies also
to so-called “indefinite pronouns" and other quantified expressions, like
nobody, everybody, many people, etc. This explains why in example (4.27c)
the NP kein Arzt “no doctor, not a doctor” could not be topicalized, i.e.
could not occur in a position in which its topic status is marked, while it
was acceptable in the unmarked subject position (cf. (4.27d)). However,
universally quantified noun phrases can sometimes be topics, provided
that their referents are coextensive with the entire class designated by the
NP (cf. Reinhart, 1982). Thus one can imagine a sentence beginning with
As for all his friends, they... but hardly *As for some people, they... This
also explains why the generic indefinite ein Arzt in (4.27e) is a possible
topic expression.
Thus the referents of topic expressions must be discourse referents, i.e.
they must have a certain pragmatic reality for the interlocutors. This, I
believe, is the point of Keenan’s (1974) analysis of what he calls the
“Functional Principle." Keenan is not concerned with topics and
pragmatic relations but with subjects and the semantics of sentences,
but his observations can easily be recast in information-structure terms.
Taking the subject (phrase) of a sentence to be an argument expression
and the predicate (phrase) to denote a function, Keenan states as part of
his Functional Principle that the reference of an argument expression
must be determinable independently of the meaning or reference of a
function symbol. He then concludes:
(The function) associates with the referents of the subject a sentence­
meaning (say a truth value in a state of affairs). So to evaluate the truth
of a simple sentence we must mentally identify the referent of the subject
and then determine whether the predicate holds of it or not. (1974:299)
One cannot assess the truth value of a proposition if one cannot identify
the entity of which the predicate is said to hold Tn pragmatic terms: one
cannot assess the information value and the relevance of a statement
.. .....
>-•' mr~
i
ii . ........ .....
...... ..............
r
।
Topic, presupposition, and semantic interpretation
157
about a topic if one doesn’t know what the topic is. Sentences whose
topic referents have an insufficient degree of pragmatic reality for the
<
interlocutor are therefore difficult or impossible to interpret.
A famous example of such a sentence is The present King of France is
bald, which was first discussed by Russell (1905) in connection with the
„
problem it poses to logicians. Since I am not concerned with the meaning
and truth conditions of sentences but with the information value of
k
utterances, 1 will not enter the debate over the so-called “truth-gap" issue
j
arising with this and similar sentences. Instead I will look at the sentence
from the point of view of information structure. In one of his
(contributions to the debate, Strawson (1964) makes the following
observation:
(
i
*
.■
f
t
1
k
■
'
■
Assessments of statements as true or untrue are commonly, though not
only, topic-centred in the same way as the statements assessed; and
when, as commonly, this is so, we may say that the statement is assessed
as putative information about its topic. (1964:97)
Strawson's observation is related to the observation I made earlier about
the way language users unconsciously provide isolated sentences with
discourse contexts which allow them to interpret subjects as topics.
Following Strawson’s analysis (with minor terminological adjustments), I
interpret the difficulty we experience in assessing the truth of Russell's
sentence as a consequence of the fact that the sentence, whose
presuppositional structure is syntactically unmarked, insinuates as a
topic a referent which, in the absence of context, does not have a
sufficient degree of pragmatic salience to be considered a possible subject
of discussion. In this sense, Russell’s sentence is comparable to the
example of the tom-down antiwar poster in (4.7).
Nevertheless, it is not impossible to imagine a discourse situation in
which the present King of France is indeed a topic. It is sufficient to
imagine that the discourse participants believe, or act as if they believe,
that the individual designated by this phrase actually exists. In such a
situation, we would have no difficulty interpreting the statement “The
present King of France is bald" as a statement about this individual. As a
consequence, the sentence would cease to be semantically and
pragmatically anomalous,"
I would like to mention, in this connection, that in a language like
(spoken) French, in which differences in information structure tend to be
marked syntactically, the logical puzzle associated with Russell’s sentence
158
Pragmatic relunons: topic
could hardly arise. If the phrase I'actuel Roi de France "the present King
of France” were to be construed as a topic expression, it would likely
appear in right-detached or left-detached position, i.e. the sentence would
be Le Roi de France il est chauve or II est chauve. le Roi de France. As
shown in Lambrecht 1981, both of these topic-marking constructions can
be used felicitously only in discourse situations in which the referent of
the NP is pragmatically accessible. In such a situation, the truth value of
the sentence could be normally assessed. If, on the other hand, the
sentence were uttered "out of the blue," without the King of France
being an accessible topic referent, this lack of accessibility would also
have to be expressed syntactically and the proposition would be likely to
appear in the form of the thelic sentence It y a le Roi de France qui est
chauve (literally “There is the King of France who is bald"), in which the
referent is formally marked as a non-topic. In this case, it again seems
possible to assign a truth value to the sentence, by determining whether
the “event" announced by that sentence is taking place or not.
It is worth pointing out that the bi-clausal, clefted, structure of this
spoken French sentence, with its initial existential (or presentational)
clause Il y a le Roi de France, is remarkably similar to the logical structure
originally proposed by Russell to account for the semantic problem posed
by the English sentence. Expressed in plain English (with one minor
simplification concerning the uniqueness of the referent) Russell’s logical
structure is: “There is a King of France, and he is bald." The important
difference between Russell’s structure and the spoken French sentence is
that in French the noun phrase le Roi de France is definite, indicating
that its referent is treated as an identifiable entity in the discourse. This
entails that the existence of the referent is pragmatically taken for
granted. What counts for the proper use of this thelic sentence
construction is the activation state of the referent in the discourse (see
Lambrecht 1988a).
That an expression must not only have a referem in order to serve as a
topic but that this referent must be pragmatically established in the
universe of discourse of the interlocutors is demonstrated in the following
real-life example of a telephone exchange. Speaker A has dialed a wrong
number and is asking to speak to a pcr>on unknown to speaker B who
receives the phone call.
Topic, presupposition, and semantic interpretation
(4.30)
159
A: Is Alice there?
B: a. There is no Alice here.
b. #Alice isn’t here.
c. #She isn’t here.
d. #No.
What is remarkable in this exchange is that even though the individual
named Alice was mentioned in speaker A’s utterance, i.e. even though thie
referent would normally count as having been pragmatically established
after its first mention (and hence as being discourse-active for the purpose
of pronominal anaphora), speaker B can refer to this individual neither
with an anaphoric topic pronoun nor with a lexical topic NP. Rather, for
the sentence to be understood in the intended meaning, the NP Alice must
appear in postverbal focus position, as the subject of a thetic sentence, as
in reply (a). This is so because the required pragmatic presupposition
which would allow the individual “Alice" to serve as a topic is lacking in
the conversational exchange. Even though the noun Alice is a-referring
expression, it cannot serve as a topic because it does not designate a
discourse referent in the speaker’s universe of discourse.
Particularly important for the present discussion is the fact that
answers (b) through (d) in (4.30) are inappropriate and misleading even
though they express true statements (speaker B can truthfully say that
the individual in question is not in his house even without knowing the
individual). The inappropriateness of these replies is reminiscent of that
of example (3.23) Where is he? in the discourse situation described there.
As I have emphasized in Chapter 2, what counts for the information
structure of a sentence is not the truth value of the proposition expressed
by it but its information value in a particular discourse. This
information value depends not only on the meaning of the sentence but
also on the presuppositional situation in which the sentence is uttered.
One might object to this analysis by saying that the kind of
inappropriateness illustrated in (4.30) is not a matter of information
structure, i.e. of grammar, but of conversational implicature: answering
A’s question with “No" would be saying too little in the given situation,
i.e. it would be a violation of the maxim of quantity. I believe such an
interpretation is misguided, because it puts the cart before the horse.
Indeed the reason the answer constitutes a violation of a conversational
maxim is precisely because of the information structure of the
understood sentence Alice is not here in which Alice is a topic
160
Pragmatic relations: topic
expression. If the syntax of the sentence did not insinuate topic status of
the NP, no violation would be perceived.
4.4
Topic and the mental representations of referents
Topic relation and activation state
The definition of a topic as a referent which stands in a certain relation
to a proposition makes the topic concept intrinsically different from the
concepts of identifiability and activation, which have to do with the
properties of (the representations of) discourse referents in the
interlocutors" minds at given points in a conversation. The distinction
between the mental representations of referents and the pragmatic
relations which these referents enter into as elements of propositions is
related to the distinction between “old/new referents" and “old/new
information” discussed in Section 2.2. And like that distinction, it has
often been neglected in the discourse-pragmatic literature.
As a case in point, let us look at Prince’s (1983) analysis of the English
topicalization construction. According to Prince, one of the two
discourse functions of topicalization is that it “marks the entity
represented by the NP as being either already evoked in the discourse
or else in a salient set relation to something already evoked or inferable
from the discourse” (1983:4). Among several other attested examples of
topicalization on which she bases this characterization, Prince cites the
following (the topicalized NPs are in italics):
(431)
( = Prince’s 22a) [I graduated from high school as] an average sudent.
My initiative didn’t carry me any further than average. History I
found to be dry. Math courses 1 was never good at. I enjoyed
sciences ... Football was my bag (Terkel 1974:590)
(432)
( = Prince's 22b) Sunday I was taking paper and pasting it together and
finding a method of how to drop spoons, a fork, a napkin, and a straw
into one package. The napkin feeder I got. The straw feeder we made
already. That leaves us the spoon and the fork. (Terkel 1974:516)
The referents of the topicalized NPs in these examples exhibit what I have
termed the activation states of textual and inferential accessibility
(Section 33.1). According to Pnnce. the referent of the NP history “is
inferable, via a set-to-element inference, from a set that is not mentioned
but that is itself saliently inferable from the high school 'frame’"
r
■
>
J.
)
:
‘
>
■
i
I
Topic and the mental representations of referents
161
(1983:6). Similar activation states can be attributed to the other
topicalized expressions in (4.31) and (4.32).
Even though I think that this characterization of the activation
properties of topicalized noun phrases in English is correct and
illuminating, I believe that the general definition of the discourse
function of topicalization proposed by Prince is flawed in one crucial
respect. It seems misleading to characterize as one of the functions of
topicalization that of “marking” an entity represented by an NP “as
being” in a particular activation state. If one of the functions of
topicalization were to mark a referent as inferable (or otherwise
accessible), we would not be able to explain the status of the nontopicalized NPs sciences in (4.31) and the spoon and the fork in (4.32). The
referents of these NPs have exactly the same activation properties as
those of the topicalized constituents, but instead of being fronted, they
occupy canonical object position in their sentences. All of the relevant
NPs in these texts, whether topicalized or not, have referents which the
speaker can assume to be in one way or another accessible in the hearer’s
mind. The cognitive state of these referents is a (temporary) property
which they have in the particular discourse context, independently of the
relations they enter into as elements of a proposition.
As I see it, the relevant function of topicalization is not to mark an
activation state of a referent but to mark the referent of an NP as a
(particular kind of) topic in the proposition in which it is an argument
and, as a corollary, to mark the proposition as being about the referent of
this topic. Such syntactic marking is necessary because in sentences with
unmarked presupposilional structure accented object NPs are not topics
but focus constituents. (In English, topical object NPs may also appear as
unaccented NPs in canonical postverbal position, but being unaccented
they lack the “contrastive” or "referent-establishing” value of fronted
constituents', see the discussions in Sections 5.5 and 5.7.)
Here is another attested example of multiple topicalizations which
shows that the discourse function of this construction cannot be
described in terms of activation states alone. The example in (4.33) was
uttered by my six-year-old daughter who was showing me a number of
recent additions to her sticker album
(4.33)
This one we traded, this one we traded, this one she let me have, this one
she lei me have, this one we traded, she let me have this one. this one we
traded
162
Pragmatic relations: topic
All occurrences of the phrase this one in this text have referents which are
highly accessible in the speech situation (the pictures were displayed on
the table in front of us and pointed to during the conversation) and all
but one are topicalized. It is clear that the difference between the
topicalized phrases and the canonical occurrence cannot be explained
here in terms of the cognitive states of the respective referents. Rather it
has to do with the nature of the relation between the referent and the
proposition. By leaving the object NP this one in canonical position in the
second-to-last clause the speaker marks the referent as having not a topic
but a focus relation to the proposition, i.e. as being an unpredictable
element within the proposition, thereby drawing special attention to it.
(In this particular case, the switch from the topic to the focus relation
may have been motivated by the desire to exploit the unexpectedness
inherent in the focus relation for rhetorical purposes.)
In insisting on the distinction between pragmatic relations and
pragmatic properties I am not denying the existence of a correlation
between the topic function of a referent and its cognitive activation state.
Indeed in order to make a referent interpretable as the topic of a
proposition and in order to make the proposition interpretable as
presenting relevant information about this topic, the topic referent must
have certain activation properties, which, in the case of the English
topicalization construction, are precisely the properties pointed out by
Prince. Prince claims-correctly I believe-that the sentences in (4.31) and
(4.32) could not be processed effectively if the hearer were incapabie of
making the necessary inferences concerning the status of the topicalized
NP referents in the discourse. But the reason these sentences could not be
processed effectively is that a topic relation between a referent and a
proposition can be effectively construed only if the topic referent has a
certain degree of pragmatic accessibility. By its presuppositional
structure, the topicalization construction acts as an invitation to the
hearer to exploit the cognitive accessibility of a particular noun phrase in
a particular syntactic configuration. (Recall that pragmatic accessibility is
seen here not as the cognitive state of a referent in a person's mind but as
a potential for activation; cf. Sections 3.3 and 3.4.)
I believe that it is the condition of interpretability that provides the best
explanation for the relationship between topic I unction on the one hand
and the activation and identifiabiht\ properties ol topic relerents on the
other. In selecting a topic ior a sentence, a speaker makes a
communicative decision as to the "point oi departure" for the new
Topic and the menial representations of referents ■ 16J
information, i.e. as to the entity that she wishes to convey information
about. But before making this communicative decision, the speaker must
make certain hypotheses concerning the status of the referent of the topic
in the mind of the addressee at the time of the utterance. On thej>asis'of
these hypotheses, the speaker then decides upon the form of .the sentence
in which the topic is to be coded. However, the fact that a particular
referent has the activation properties required for topic function-inra
sentence does not entail that it must be coded as a.topic. Cogmtjiffi.
accessibility is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for the use of a
construction such as topicalization. This important point was emphasized
in the preceding chapter in the discussion of the two syntactic codings of
the NP his lover in examples (3.27) and (3.28) and it is clearly illustrated
in the cognitive similarity of the topicalized and the non-topicalized NPs
in (4.31) through (4.33) above.
The indirect but necessary relationship between topic function on the
one hand and the temporary cognitive states of referents on the other has
a revealing parallel in the area of semantics. In semantic analysis it is
necessary to distinguish the semantic case roles associated with, the
arguments of a predicate, such as "agent," “experiencer,” “patient,’’ etc.,
from the inherent semantic properties of the noun phrases used for these
roles, such as the property of animacy. However, there is a necessary
relationship between semantic role and semantic property. The nature of
this relationship is well explained by Comrie (1981) in the following
passage. Interpreting the case roles "agent," "force,” "instrument,”
"experiencer," and “patient" not as a set of discrete semantic roles butas
various points on what he calls a “continuum of control," Comrie writes
(emphasis added):
It might seem that the continuum of control and the distinction of
experiencer from patient are concerned with animacy, but in fact it is
crucial to keep these two parameters apart. Notions like control and
experiencer refer to a relation between the PREDICATE AND ONE OF ns
arguments. The scale of animacy, however ... is concerned with an
inherent property of the noun phrase, irrfspective of their role within a
particular construction. Thus the noun phrase the man is always high in
animacy, although it may vary in degree of control, having high control
in the man deliberately hit me. minimal control in / hit the man, and
either high or low control in the man roiled down the hill, depending on
the particular interpretation assigned ... More generally: a high degree
of animacy is necessary for a noun phrase to be interpreted as having a
IM
Pragmatic relations: topic
high degree of control or as an experiencer, but is
condition. (Comrie 1981:550
not a sufficient
Comric's distinction of the semantic relations between predicates and
arguments on the one hand and the inherent semantic properties of noun
phrases on the other clearly parallels my distinction between pragmatic
relations and pragmatic properties of referents. Just as a degree of
animacy is a necessary condition for a high degree of control, a degree of
activeness or at least accessibility is a necessary condition for a referent to
be interpreted as having a high degree of topicality. But just as animacy is
’’not sufficient to guarantee a high degree of control, activeness or
:accessibility are not sufficient conditions for topic function of a referent
in a proposition. An active or accessible referent may appear either as a
topic or as a focus expression, depending on the pragmatic role it is
meant to play in the proposition.
- The fact that it is necessary for a referent to have a degree of
accessibility in order to be interpretable as a topic follows from the very
definition of topic in terms of pragmatic aboutness and relevance. For a
statement to count as information about some topic, the speaker must
assume that the hearer finds this statement relevant with respect to this
topic in the context of the speech situation. But for a statement to be
relevant with respect to a topic, this topic itself must be of current
interest. Now for some topic to be of current interest, it must obviously
be assumed to be “current,” i.e. it must either be already established in
the discourse or it must be easily relatable to one that is already
established. Of course, the extent to which a topic may be considered
current ultimately depends on the speech participants, and under certain
conditions topics may be interpretable as current even though they
haven't been brought up in the current discourse. Thus the requirement
of cognitive accessibility follows from the very definition of topic in terms
of the relation of aboutness. One cannot “add” information about a
referent unless this referent is in some important sense already available
in the discourse as a starting point.
To conclude this section on the relationship between topic and the
cognitive states of referents, I would like to emphasize again the
following points. Given the fact that linguistic expressions with "old”
referents can be either topics or foci in a sentence, there can be no one-toone correspondence between pragmatic relations and pragmatic proper­
ties of referents. Therefore to assert, as is often done in discussions of
Topic and the mental representations of referents
165
topic, that the topic of a sentence is “the old information" is, to say the
least, misleading. However, it is equally misleading to assert that there is
no necessary relationship at all between the two parameters. This is what
I will demonstrate in the next section.
4.4.2 The Topic Acceptability Scale
From the requirement that topic referents have a degree of pragmatic
accessibility it follows that sentences with insufficiently accessible topic
referents must pose certain difficulties of interpretation, hence will tend
to be perceived as ill-formed. Such difficulties of interpretation can be
accounted for by postulating a general correlation between the activation
and identifiability states of topic referents and the pragmatic acceptability
of sentences. This correlation can be expressed in the form of a scale of
acceptability. Allowing for a certain amount of cross-language
variation, we can measure the degree of pragmatic well-formedness of
a sentence containing a topic expression by the position of the topic
referent on the following scale:
(4.34)
THE TOPIC ACCEPTABILITY SCALE
active
accessible
unused
brand-new anchored
brand-new unanchored
most acceptable
least acceptable
The most easily processed and therefore cognitively speaking most
acceptable sentences are those whose topics are highest on the scale, i.e.
whose topic referents are active in the discourse. Such referents are the
preferred topics because the mental effort necessary to process sentences
containing them is not increased by the additional (ask of assessing the
topic referent, by retrieving it from long-term memory or by drawing
inferences leading to its assessment. Chafe (19R7) calls the cognitive effort
necessary to interpret a discourse-active referent a “low cost" effort.
Since active referents are normally unaccented and pronominal (cf.
Section 3.3), the preferred topic expression is an unaccented pronominal
(or inflectional or zero) morpheme. It is this cognitive preference for
active topic referents that accounts e.g. for the preferred clause type in
spoken French, which has a bound pronoun rather than a lexical NP in
initial subject position (see Lambrecht 1986b. Chapter 61.
166
Pragmatic relations: topic
Less easily interpretable but still acceptable and indeed frequently
occurring topic expressions are those with accessible referents. In the
case of accessible topic referents, the mental effort necessary to interpret
the proposition which expresses the new information about the topic
must be performed simultaneously with another processing task, the task
of remembering, inferring, or otherwise determining the referent of the
topic expression. I will argue later on that these two cognitive tasks, that
of interpreting the information conveyed by a proposition and that of
determining the referent about which the information is conveyed, are
best carried out separately, i.e. not within the same clausal processing
unit (see Section 4.5.1). In spoken (and to a certain extent in written)
language, the separation of these two tasks is often reflected in the syntax
of the sentence.
A borderline case of pragmatic acceptability arises when new
information is expressed about an unused (i.e. identifiable yet inactive)
topic referent. The acceptability of sentences containing topic expressions
with unused referents varies widely with the language, the type of
discourse, and the speech situation. The cognitive effort required in this
case is of relative “high cost" because, in addition to processing
propositional information about some topic, the interpreter must
determine the referent of the topic itself, which was not previously
made available in the discourse. Of course, some unused referents may be
easier to access for an interlocutor than others, and the acceptability of
the sentence will vary accordingly.
Clearly unacceptable as topics are brand-new referents, i.e. referents
which are unidentifiable for the hearer at the time the new information is
conveyed about them. This type of unacceptability is easily accounted for
in terms of Keenan’s Functional Principle. If a hearer cannot mentally
identify the referent of the topic, she cannot determine whether the
predicate is true of this referent or not. This is but a fancy way of saying
that the hearer cannot make sense of the piece of propositional
information she is presented with. Sentences containing such topics are
in a sense incomplete pieces of information. A sentence with an
unidentifiable topic referent forces a hearer to “put the predication on
hold," so to speak, until she finds out what she is receiving information
about. This explains why many languages have grammatical constraints
against indefinite NPs in initial subject ti.e. unmarked topic) position.
In some cases, the pragmatic-semantic unacceptability resulting from
insufficient recoverability of a topic referent can lead to perceived til-
(
J
A
V
Topic and the menial representations of referents
162'
formedness on the sentence level, even in a language like English. It haff
been observed (Perlmutter 1970, Kuno 1972) that in English a subject NP
with an indefinite article cannot occur with certain stative predicates..
Perlmutter cites this example:
; 'lao
■ .■ j m
(4.35) ( = Perlmutter's (25)) * A boy is tall
■J trf5
1 believe the reason for the unacceptability of this sentence lies in. the faqlj
that it is difficult to imagine a context in which it would be informative to,
predicate tallness of an unidentified subject referent. Such sentences
violate the most elementary condition of relevance. The uninterpnef-
ability of (4.35) is aggravated by the fact that the indefinite noun phrase a
boy cannot easily be construed as having a generic (and therefore
identifiable) referent, which could then be interpreted as the topic of a
gnomic statement. If the referent were interpretable as generic, the
sentence would become acceptable, even with a stative predicate.
Sentences like A boy is a boy or even A boy wants to be tall do riot
pose the same difficulties of interpretation as (4.35).
""
That the unacceptability of (4.35) is indeed due to the pragmatic
indeterminacy of the topic referent, i.e. to a difficulty of interpretation,
and not, as originally claimed by Perlmutter and others, to some
semantic, let alone syntactic, incompatibility between indefinite noun'
phrases and certain types of stative predicates becomes clear if we
compare (4.35) with the following modified version:
j
(4.36)
A boy in my class is real tall.
Example (4.36), with its anchored brand-new referent (see Section 3.2.1),
is clearly more acceptable in isolation than (4.35), even though its subject
noun phrase (a boy in my class) is still formally indefinite, and even
though its predicate is still stative. The difference in acceptability between
(4.35) and (4.36) is predicted by the Topic Acceptability Scale. By adding
the phrase in my class to the indefinite noun phrase a boy, the unspecified
set of all boys in the universe of discourse of the speech participants is
reduced to the much smaller set of all boys in the speaker’s class, i.e. a set
which is referentially linked (or anchored) to the identity of the speaker
herself. As a member of this set, the referent becomes more identifiable,
hence more easily interpretable as a topic. The pragmatic-semantic
difference between the two indefinite noun phrases in (4.35) and in (4.36),
and the difference in acceptability it entails, is another piece of evidence
■
*2
168
Pragmatic relations: topic
for the need to distinguish the cognitive category of identifiability from 1
the more language-specific category of definiteness (cf. Section 3.2).
J
Notice that the Topic Acceptability Scale in (4.34) is meant to account fl
only for differences in sentence acceptability which are due to differences
in the mental representations of topic referents in a discourse. It does not
account for certain other factors which have been shown to influence the
choice of topics in discourse, such as the animacy hierachy discussed in
Comrie (1981), the natural topic hierarchy discussed by Hawkinson and
Hyman (1975), the case hierarchy discussed by Givon (1976), etc. These
hierarchies, which have to do with the inherent semantic properties of1
fl
.fl
fl
NPs, account primarily for the likelihood of a referent’s becoming a topic
in a discourse. They do not account for the different degrees of sentence
acceptability captured in (4.34).
|
1
i
It is important to keep in mind that the constraints expressed in the
Topic Acceptability Scale are only meant to account for those sentences
which contain topic expressions. They do not hold for NPs whose
j
J
1
referents are not topics. With respect to non-topical NPs, (4.34) makes a'
different prediction, which is a corollary of the prediction on topic
acceptability, if a constituent has a referent which is clearly not accessible
in the context, in particular one that is unidentifiable, and if the sentence
is nevertheless of normal acceptability, there is a good chance that the
constituent is not a topic expression in the sentence. This prediction is of
particular interest in the case of subject NPs, because of their unmarked
topic status.
1
j
1
4
|
1
1
‘
Instances of acceptable sentences whose subjects have unidentifiable or
otherwise highly inaccessible referents are commonly found in thetic
sentences, in particular those of the presentational type. Given the
discourse function of presentational sentences, the occurrence of
unidentifiable subject referents needs no explanation. An example of an
acceptable sentence with an initial subject NP whose referent is brandnew is the fragment in (4.37):
i
I
<
'
a
i
(437)
... and then a boy
came in ...
In (4.37), the NP a boy is not a topic because the communicative purpose
of the sentence is not to convey information about some boy. but to
introduce an individual into the text-internal world.30 As in other
examples we have analyzed, the non-topical status of the subject is
expressed prosodically (see Section 5.6.2).
3
J
fl
fl
Topic and the mental representations of referents
169
Instances of acceptable sentences with brand-new subject referents may
also be found in thetic sentences of the event-reporting type. While the
scale in (4.34) predicts the low acceptability of sentences such as (4.35)
(♦,4 boy is tall), it does not not make the same prediction for utterances
such as the following:
(4.38)
A
boy
was run over by a car!
The greater acceptability of this sentence compared to (4.35), at least
when considered in isolation, is due to the fact that a dynamic predicate
such as be run over is more readily interpreted as expressing an event than
a stative predicate like be tall. The subject NP in (4.38) is not construed as
a topic but as a participant in an event. Since no aboutness relation is
intended in this sentence, the interpreter of the sentence does not feel the
need to mentally identify the referent of the subject NP in order to assess
the relevance of the information expressed in the predicate. Hence the
greater naturalness of the sentence.
The acceptability of sentences with initial indefinite subject NPs, such
as the English examples in (4.37) or (4.38), varies from language to
language. The more a language associates topic function with subject role
and initial position, the less acceptable such sentences will be. For
example in those Romance languages which permit subject-verb
inversion, the non-topical subject NPs of thetic sentences must appear
in post-verbal position (cf. e.g. Hatcher 1956 and Contreras 1976 for
Spanish, Wandruszka 1981 for Italian, and Wehr 1984 for Romance in
general). In French, where subject-verb inversion is syntactically
constrained, the bi-ciausal avoir-construction is often used instead (see
Section 1.3), in which the non-topic NP appears post-verbally in the first
clause. Notice that in all these languages the position after the verb is the
position normally reserved for objects, which are the unmarked focus
constituents. Marking a subject NP syntactically as non-topical is thus
tantamount to stripping it of its most important unmarked-topic feature,
which is preverbal position, by providing it with morphosyntactic and
prosodic features normally found on objects (see Lambrecht 1987c).
Even though (4.37) and (4.38) illustrate perfectly acceptable English
utterances, there is a tendency even in English to mark the non-topical
status of brand-new subject referents by syntactic as well as prosodic
means. The grammatical constructions perhaps most frequently used in
English for introducing brand-new referents are the deictic and existential
rlieri’-construction and the deictic here-construction. in which the subject
170
Pragmatic relations: topic
NP appears after, rather than before, the verb, the preverbal position
being filled by a locative element. 1 will return to such constructions in
the discussion of presentational sentences in Section 4.4.4.1. For unused
referents, English may also resort to locative inversion constructions
involving verbs of motion, such as Here comes the sun or In hopped the
rabbit (see e.g. Bolinger 1977, Van Oosten 1978, Green 1980), although
such sentences tend to be stylistically marked.
There is a natural restriction on the number of unidentifiable or
inaccessible non-topical referents which can be introduced within one
sentence or clause. In Section 2.2, I quoted the sentence A clergyman's
opened a betting shop on an airliner (example (2.10)), in which all three
arguments are indefinite NPs with brand-new referents. Such sentences
are pragmatically so anomalous that they can be used only in special
contexts (see p. 345, note 17). In spontaneous discourse, sentences with
non-topical subjects strongly tend to be intransitive, as in (4.37) and in
the examples of thetic sentences discussed in Section 4.2.2.
In many languages this cognitive constraint on the number of
inaccessible referents per clause is grammaticalized. For example spoken
French has a constraint on event-reporting sentences such that one NP
argument (the subject of the corresponding canonical sentence) must
appear in a clause of its own. Any additional NP must be an argument of
a subsequent clause. In Italian and Spanish inversion sentences of the
event-reporting type no lexical direct or indirect object NP may cooccur
with the postverbal subject (see Wandruszka 1981, Lambrecht 1987c).31
The same restriction holds for the thetic constructions involving
“impersonal" es and il in German and French and for the English
inversion constructions mentioned above. For VS constructions, the
constraint against cooccurring NPs with inactive referents can be
explained structurally, as a result of the fact that the language in
question does not tolerate the sequence V-NP-NP. There is no
contradiction between such a structural account and the pragmatic
account presented here. Notice however that ;r pragmatic explanation is
needed to account for the fact that pronominal NPs, i.e. NPs with active
referents, often cooccur more freely with non-topical postverbal subjects
than lexical NPs (see example (4.20) and discussion, and Lambrecht
1987c). A purely syntactic account of the uiucceplability of V-NP-NP
sequences is also unable to account for the fact that such sequences are
acceptable if the second NP is an adjunct rather than a complement of the
verb. For example, while the French sentence *// a mange un garpon une
Topic and the mental representations of referents
171
banane “There ate a boy a banana” is ungrammatical, the structurally
identical II est arrive un garpon ce matin “There amved a boy this
morning” is unobjectionable.
In those English constructions in which the non-topical status of th$
subject NP is expressed via prosody alone, the constraint against,
simultaneous introduction of two or more NPs with inactive referents
is also to some extent grammaticalized. As we noticed earlier (Section,
4.2.2), formally unambiguous thetic marking is possible only with certain
intransitive predicates (see also Section 5.6.2 below). Example <4.39)
lists a number of attested English utterances containing intransitive
event-reporting sentences with brand-new or unused (inactive or
accessible) subject referents:
,
(4.39)
a. Every time I went over to his house a major catastrophe happened,
b. I had a problem with my car. The battery went dead.
c. (Sitting at a computer terminal:) Oh shit’ The screen's going dead.
d. If you was back East and you saw a sky like that you’d know snow
was coming.
If the sentence has a direct object (other than an unaccented pronoun),
and if the subject is a definite NP, the sentence becomes ambiguous
between the event-reporting and the unmarked topic comment reading
(The aor is chasing the cat again). In those cases where more than one
lexical NP carrying a focus accent occurs in an event-reporting clause, the
second NP is typically in a prepositional phrase (as in example (4.38)), in
particular one with a locative case role. Some attested examples are
quoted in (4.40):
(4,40)
a. Mommy, mommy! Diego’s shoe lace is stuck in his bike!
b. You know Tim redid the storefront? A car went through the window.
c. back light's out, on right hand sire!
(Sentence (4.40c) was shouted by a bus driver to the driver of another bus
he had been following.) Notice that in these examples the locative focus
expression could be omitted and the result would still be a possible thetic
sentence. The natural occurrence of such two-accent sentences is a feature
distinguishing English, whose constituent organization is to a high degree
grammatically controlled, from a language like (spoken) French, in which
sentences with preverbal focal subjects do not naturally occur.
174
Pragmalie relations: topic
information about the individuals who did the calling but only about the
person who received the call. The interpretation of they as non-topical is
confinn cd in the approximately synonymous passive version in (3.29b)
Pat said she was called twice, in which the agent doing the calling is left
unexpressed because it is unknown or unimportant. Sentences (3.29a) and
(3.29b) are semantically equivalent in a way in which the members of the
structurally similar pair John called Mary and Mary was called are not.
' To find examples of unaccented pronominals which could be topics by
the semantics of the predicate but which cannot be topical because of the
presuppositional structure of the clause in which they occur we may again
turn to tbetic sentences. Such sentences may contain unaccented subject
pronominals even though their lexical subject NPs are not topics. For
example in the Spanish VS sentence Lleg-6 juan “juan arrived," the NP
Juan is not a topic constituent; therefore the third person suffix -o, which
counts as an unaccented pronominal in my analysis, has no topic referent
to refer to, hence itself cannot be a topic expression. The same
observation applies to the inflectional suffix -a in the Italian eventreporting sentence Squill-a il telefono in (4.19b).
Such apparent counterexamples to my claim that unaccented
pronominals are the preferred topic expressions can be accounted for
by interpreting the subject pronominals in such sentences as default
morphemes which are required by the grammatical system of the
language. Most linguists would agree that the subject pronouns of
weather verbs in English, French, or German are required not for
semantic or pragmatic but for structural reasons. The reason for the
presence of the subject pronoun in It's cold is not the same when this
sentence is used to describe a meteorological condition as when it is used
to describe the temperature of someone’s hand, even though the position
arid the morphology of the pronoun are the same in the two situations. A
similar situation obtains with sentence-initial there in English, which may
function either as a subject place-holder {There arrived three soldiers) or
ias a locative argument expression (There is your brother).
Whatever explanation is used to account for the dual function of such
morphemes will in my opinion also account for the dual function of the
person-number morphemes in inflectional languages The default status
Of'the unaccented pronominals in the above-quoted thetic sentences is
consistent with my analysis of subjects as unmarked topics (Section
4.2.1). In sentences with unmarked presuppositional structure, i.e. in
topic-comment sentences, these unaccented subject-marking morphemes
Topic and the menial representations of referents
Y15
are topic expressions; in marked presuppositional structures, they appear
by default. The dual function of subject morphemes is no doubt
explainable in terms of very general principles of coding economy (or
“grammatical ecology,” as it is now sometimes called). It is more
economical for the grammatical system to use the same morpheme for
two functions than to have a different morpheme for each function. This
does of course not entail that there cannot be languages in which the
distinction is formally marked.32
The problem of the functional ambiguity of unaccented pronominals
also arises with object pronouns. Consider the two superficially similar
French sentences in (4.42):
(4.42)
a. Je t'ai vu toi “1 saw you.”
b. Je t’ai vu, toi. "I saw you.”
Example (4.42a) can be thought of as answering the question “Who did
you see?”, while (4.42b) might follow the command “Stop hiding!" In
sentence (a), the unaccented object pronoun t" (te) cooccurs with a
strong pronominal focus NP which occupies the position of direct object
of the verb voir. Given the function of the sentence, and given that the
English gloss of (a) contains no overt or covert unaccented pronominal in
the second person, it would seem misleading to interpret the pronoun T
as a topic expression. Instead, /’ functions here as an agreement marker
of sorts, the object argument being toi. In sentence (b) on the other hand,
the same unaccented pronoun, occupying the same position, is itself the
direct object argument, while the post-focal strong pronoun toi is a
syntactically optional antitopic NP. In (b), t' is thus a topic pronoun of
the preferred type.
The status of unaccented pronominals, in particular inflectional
morphemes and bound pronouns, as either non-argumental agreement
markers or fully argumenial pronominal morphemes, or as both, has
been the topic of some debate in generative syntax (see in particular the
analyses in Van Valin 1985, Jelinek 1984, and Bresnan & Mchombo 1987,
which try to overcome certain shortcomings in earlier formal analyses in
which unaccented pronominals were not considered argument expres­
sions). It seems to me that a satisfactory7 explanation for the inherent
functional ambiguity of such morphemes is possible only within a
theoretical framework which does not force the linguist to decide on
formal grounds alone whether an unaccented pronominal is an
agreement-marker or a pronominal argument but which takes into
1?6
Pragmatic relations: topic
account semantic and information-structure factors. The markedness
approach suggested above makes an explanation of the status of such
pronominals possible to the extent that it can account for the inherently
vague or “ambifunctional” nature of unaccented subject pronominals by
treating them as unmarked topic expressions. Without pursuing this
complex issue any further here, I will assume that unaccented
pronominals are normally topic expressions and that exceptions to
this general tendency can be accounted for in a principled way.
The above observations regarding the argument or non-argument
status of “agreement” pronouns leave open the question of whether
bound pronouns which cooccur and “corefer" with an argument NP in a
single clause are referential expressions or not. This question is relevant
with regard to the theoretical problem of whether a single semantic
argument can be instantiated twice in a single clause by referential
constituents. Without being able to go into the necessary detail here, I
would like to suggest that the answer to his question may be “yes.” The
cooccurrence of two coreferential pronominal expressions in examples like
(4.42a) could be explained in terms of the model of two discourse worlds
sketched in Section 2.1. For example, the bound pronoun T in (4.42a)
could be seen as representing the referent in one discourse world while the
free pronoun toi would represent it in another. Both expressions would
refer to the same individual, but by virtue of its role in two different
discourse worlds. Hence the need for two referential expressions in the
same clause.
4.4.4
Topic promotion
The view of unaccented pronominals as the cognitively preferred topic
expressions makes it possible to interpret a number of crosslinguistically
widely attested grammatical construction types as pragmatically
motivated structural devices whose basic function is to promote
referents on the Topic Acceptability Scale from non-active (i.e. brandnew, unused, or accessible) to active state in the discourse and hence from
lexical to unaccented pronominal coding in the sentence. By promoting
the state of a referent in this way, these constructions make it possible for
speakers to adhere to the preferred unaccented pronominal topic type.
Their grammatical function is to match the requirements of syntactic
structure and information structure in cases where the two do not
naturally coincide.
Topic and the menial representations of referents
177
Two such topic-promoting constructions are the previously discussed
construction and the construction often called (left»»afld
right-) detachment or dislocation. Both constructions are illustrated in
the following text example, which was originally used by Givón (1976)40
his discussion of the diachronic rise of grammatical agreement. Tits
italicized expressions indicate the referent whose activation state is being
promoted from non-active to active state:
><■
presentational
(4,43)
Once there was a wizard. He was very wise, rich, and was married to a
beautiful witch. They had two sons. The first was tall and brooding, he
spent his days in the forest hunting snails, and his mother was afraid of
him. The second was short and vivacious, a bit crazy but always game.
Now the wizard, he lived in Africa.
.
The first sentence in this text, Once there was a wizard, is a
sentence. The last sentence, Now the wizard, he lived in
Africa, is an example of left-detachment. I will start with the discussion
of the presentational construction type.
presentational
;
4.4.4.1 Presentational constructions
As I observed earlier (Section 4.4 2), the propositions expressed in
presentational sentences are thetic. The basic communicative function of
such sentences is not to predicate a property of an argument but to
introduce a referent into a discourse, often (but not always) with the
purpose of making it available for predication in subsequent discourse,
The basic discourse function of presentational sentences is defined by
Hetzron (¡975) as that of
calling special attention to one element of the sentence for recall in the
subsequent discourse or situation. This recall may be needed because the
element is going to be used, directly or indirectly, in the ensuing
discourse, because what is going to be said later has some connection
with the element in question, -or because that element is relevant to
what is going to happen or be done in the reality. (Hetzron 1975:374)
Hetzron does not make use of the concepts of activation and referent
promotion, but his notion of "recall in the subsequent discourse" is
clearly related to these concepts. The reason why the referent of the NP a
wizard in (4.43) can be expressed at the begriming of the second sentence
in the preferred topic form he is that this referent was lexically expressed,
'and thereby pragmatically activated, in the immediately preceding
sentence. The purpose of the first sentence in the text is thus to
178
Pragmatic relations: topic
introduce, or “present,” the previously inactive, brand-new referent “a
wizard" in the text-internal world and thereby to make it discourse-active
and ready for recall in subsequent sentences.
It is an empirical fact of natural language use that sequences consisting
of a presentational clause followed by another clause expressing
information about the newly introduced referent are strongly preferred
over such syntactically well-formed sentences as the following, in which
an inactive topic referent appears directly as the subject NP of the
sentence:
(4.44)
A wizard
once was very wise, rich, and married to a beautiful witch.
The strangeness of (4.44) follows from the fact that topic expressions with
unidentifiable referents are least acceptable on the Topic Acceptability
Scale in (4.34). If the sentence is not perceived as ill-formed, especially if
the word once is removed, this is due to the fact that the scale in question
measures pragmatic, not necessarily syntactic acceptability. Moreover, as
we will see later on, it is possible to pragmatically accommodate
unidentifiable referents to some extent.31
Because of the discourse function of presentational clauses, which is to
promote brand-new or unused referents to active status, the expressions
used to code the “presented” referents are indefinite or definite accented
Lexical noun phrases. Presentational NPs may not normally be
pronouns, since the referents of pronouns are already active.34 In some
languages, presentational clauses are used exclusively or with strong
preference for the introduction of brand-new (i.e. unidentifiable)
referents. For example in the so-called “inverted word order” construc­
tion in Chinese, in the English existential i/iere-construction, and in those
German and French presentational constructions which involve the
dummy subject markers es/i/, only or mainly NPs with brand-new
ftferents may occur. (For the French //-construction see Section 3.2,
example (3.18) and Lambrecht 1986b, Section 7.4.4.) In the case of
English, German, and French, this entails that mainly indefinite NPs are
tolerated in these constructions. This kind of quasi-grammatical
constraint is directly explainable in terms of the Topic Acceptability
Scale. Given that brand-new topic referents are lowest on the scale, the
need to avoid sentences having such topics is greatest. Therefore
grammaticalization is most likely to arise in those cases
■ One common account of the meaning of presentational clauses is that
they assert the existence of the referent of the pristxcrbal NP icf. the
Topic and the mental representations of referents
179
discussions of existential presupposition in Sections 3.2.1 and 4.3). Under
this account, the communicative function of the sentence Once there was
ff wizard would be to assert that a particular wizard once existed. Such
sentences are therefore often referred to as "existential” sentences. From
the point of view of information-structure analysis, the label "existential"
is somewhat misleading. Mere assertion of the existence of some entity is
a rather special kind of speech act which is of limited use in everyday
communication. It is difficult (though not impossible) to conjure up a
situation in which a statement like “There are cockroaches” would be
made with the unique purpose of stating the existence of such creatures.
Such a statement would be most naturally used in situations where the
existence of cockroaches may already be taken for granted and where the
purpose of the speech act is to introduce the NP referent into the
discourse world of the interlocutors by asserting its presence in a given
location (“Don’t go into the kitchen. There are cockroaches”). From the
discourse-pragmatic point of view, it is therefore preferable to interpret
the function of such sentences as that of presenting or introducing a
referent into the “place" or "scene" of the discourse and thereby of
raising tt into the addressee’s consciousness, rather than of asserting its
mere existence
This interpretation has the additional advantage of explaining the
formal similarity between the existential construction and the deictic
presentational construction discussed in Section 2.1 Both constructions,
the deictic and the existential, are presentational in that both serve to
introduce previously unidentifiable or inactive referents into a discourse.
The main pragmatic difference between the iwo is that deictic there points
to a referent in the text-EXTFRN\i world, whereas existential there
introduces a referent into the internal world of the text. This
interpretation of both constructions as presentational is consistent with
the already mentioned fact that in some languages le.g. spoken French)
the “presented NP” of an existential construction can be a definite
description and even a proper name. i.e. an expression whose referent is
not only presupposed to exist but also to be known to the addressee. In
such cases, mere assertion of the existence of the refereni would be a kind
of tautology. It is also well-known that existential clauses often begin
with a place adverbial, such as English there. German da. French r. etc.
making the claim even more compelling lhat the presentational, locationoriented function of the construction is in fact the fundamental
communicative function of existential sentences '''
180
Pragmatic relations: topic
Often (he grammatical relationship between the presentational clause
and the subsequent clause in which the referent just introduced appears
as an unaccented pronominal topic expression is one of syntactic
dependency, the second clause being grammatically subordinated to the
first. One common construction type illustrating this phenomenon is
shown in this variant of our fairy-tale beginning:
।
(
(4.43") Once there was a wizard who was very wise and nch.
(see also example (4.5) above). Unlike the beginning of (4.43), where the
two clauses are juxtaposed, in (4.43") the second clause is grammatically
subordinated to the first and appears in the form of a relative clause
whose antecedent is the presented NP. The preferred topic expression is
Dow the relative pronoun who in the second clause. I will refer to the
complex construction illustrated in (4.43") as the bi-clausal presenta­
tional construction. The relative clause in this construction, even
though it is grammatically marked as dependent, exhibits a number of
syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features which characterize it as a <
special type which could perhaps be characterized as "dependent main ।
clause" (see the formal analyses in Lambrecht 1988b for English and in
Section 7.3 of Lambrecht 1986b for French). These features characterize
the two-clause structure in (4.43") as a grammatical construction which is
uniquely dedicated to avoiding violations of the Topic Acceptability
Scale. In English, bi-clausal presentational constructions may also
involve non-finite (participial) clauses, as in There was a dag running
down the street or There was a man arrested by the police. In Chinese, a
serial verb construction is used whose first verb is the existential predicate
you (see Li & Thompson 1981:61 Iff, LaPolla 1990:11511).
(
The most common and grammatically most clearly marked presenta­
tional clause type is characterized across languages by the presence of a
limited set of predicates whose arguments have a highly non-agentive and (
often locative case-role, such as “be”, "beat,’’ "LfVE,” “arrive," “have,” .
"see,” etc. (see Section 4.2.2, example (4.18) and discussion).37 The
crosslinguistic predominance of such predicates is a natural consequence
of the basic discourse function which all presentational sentences,
whether deictic or existential, have in common: they do not predicate
some property of the NP referent but they assert the presence of the
referent in the (external or internal) text world. The newly introduced
referent, rather than being depicted as participating in some action, event
■
■
,
'
Tapie and the mental representations of referents
181
or state, is merely made available for predication in subsequent clauses by
being raised into the addressee's consciousness.
Presentational sentences sometimes contain intransitive predicates (or
transitive predicates with unexpressed object arguments) whose subject
arguments can be said to be agentive to a certain degree. In such cases,
the agentivity of the predicate is subordinated to the presentational
function of the proposition and the predicate is in fact pragmatically
construed as non-agentive. As an example of such a "pseudo-agentive"
presentational sentence consider the Italian inversion sentence (4.45):
(4.45)
Ha telefónalo giovanni, "giovanni called."
This sentence could be uttered for example to inform an addressee that in
her absence the person named Giovanni tried to reach her. The utterance
is a way of introducing “Giovanni’’ into the universe of discourse by way
of mentioning the fact that he called. Example (4.45) does not have the
purpose of conveying information about the caller as an agent involved in
some action. If such information were intended, the utterance would have
to be of the topic-comment type and would likely be of the form
(4.4Ó)
Giovanni ha
telefowato.
or perhaps
(4.47)
Ha
teiefonato,
Giovanni.
(with the lexical NP in antitopic position). Notice that there is a limit to
the degree of agentivity a predicate can have to be exploitable as
presentational and thus to be able to appear with presentational syntax
or prosody. This upper limit is hard to define, but it clearly exists. For
example while the gloss john called in (4.45) may be understood as
presentational in the sense described, a transitive sentence with subject
focus such as John called his wife cannot be so construed but can only be
understood as an identifications! sentence, with john as an “argument
focus" (Section 5.2.3) and the rest of the proposition pragmatically
presupposed?8
4.4.4,2 Detachment constructions
In order to promote the representation of a referent from non-active to
active stale in the addressee’s mind and thus to allow a speaker to code
the referent as a preferred topic expression, it is not always necessary to
introduce it in a presentational clause of its own. From a certain degree of
J
i
i
182
Pragmatic relations: topic
pragmatic accessibility on, it is possible in many languages to code a not- afl
yet-active topic rererent in the form of a lexical noun phrase which is Jfl
placed in a syntactically autonomous or “detached” position to the left ^B
or, less commonly, to the right of the clause which contains the ^B
propositional information about the topic referent. The semantic role of IB
the referent of such a lexical noun phrase as an argument in the ifl
proposition is usually indicated via an intra-clausal “resumptive’) flfl
pronoun or other unaccented pronominal which is construed as fl
coreferential with the detached lexical constituent. This intra-clausal
pronominal morpheme is of the preferred unaccented pronominal topic ^B
type (see Section 4.4.3), while the extra-clausal lexical NP is a marked fl
type of topic expression. Traditionally, this syntactic construction has fl
been referred to as left and right detachment (or dislocation).39
j fl
Detachment constructions are common in the world's languages, even
in languages whose typological properties would seem to make NP
detachment difficult. For example Japanese and Turkish have well;
developed right-detachment constructions, even though they are strict
SOV languages, whose verb strongly marks the right clause boundary
(see Kuno 1978 for Japanese, and Erguvanli 1984 and Zimmer 1986 for
Turkish). Detachment constructions are often considered substandard of
at least inappropriate in formal registers. This is no doubt a consequence
of the fact that the canonical sentence type, in which the subject is a full
lexical NP in argument position, has traditionally served as the basic
model of sentence structure (see below). In order to accommodate the
functional need for NP detachment, written languages often resort to
constructions of the as-for type (see Section 4.3 above), which are
detachment constructions in disguise. Interestingly, the markers introducing such standard constructions are often both syntactically irregular
and semantically opaque (cf. English as for NP. French quant a NP or
pour ce qui est de NP, or German war NP anbetrifft, all of which are noncompositional). As is often the case in normative grammar, syntactic
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
irregularity and semantic opacity are more readily tolerated than
transparent violations of canonical structures.
An example of a detachment construction not involving the as-for
marker was presented at the end of the short text in (4.43): A'ow the
wizard, he lived in Africa. The text in (4.43) is a good illustration of what I
take to be the basic pragmatic difference between the detachment
construction and the presentational construction In both constructions,
a referent is promoted from non-active to active status, and both
1
|
J
!
<
Topic and the mental representations of referents
183
constructions serve to establish a new topic.40 But while in the
presentational sequence the referent of the NP is brand-new or at least
unused, in the detachment case it is usually cognitively accessible. (In
(4.43) the textually accessible status of the detached NP referent is due to
“deactivation” [Chafe 1987] from its previous active state, caused by the
activation of other referents in the context, in our case the beautiful witch
and the two sons.) The detachment or marked topic construction can
then be defined pragmatically as a grammatical device used Io promote a
referent on the Topic Acceptability Scale from accessible to active status,
from which point on it can be coded as a preferred topic expression, i.e.
as an unaccented pronominal.
It must be emphasized that this pragmatic characterization accounts
only for what I take to be the basic discourse function of the detachment
construction. As we saw in Chapter 3, it is not always possible to explain
variations in the morphosyntactic coding of referents directly in terms of
corresponding variations in their activation or identifiability states. It
often happens that already active referents are coded in the form of
lexical noun phrases rather than unaccented pronomtnals, for example
when it is necessary to avoid the ambiguity created by the presence of two
or more competing active referents (cf. Section 3.3). Thus the left­
detachment construction is often used to mark a shift in attention from
one to another of two or more already active topic referents. This
explains the frequent occurrence of pronominal NPs in detached
positions (Me, J'm hungry, Mai fai faim). Such detached lexical or
pronominal NPs often have a “contrastive" function, in which case they
may be referred to as contrastive topic NPs (see example (3.20) and the
discussion in Section 5.5 2 below). As for the right-detachment
construction (He lived in Africa, the »izard), it is also often used for
already active or quasi-active referents, but it can never be used in a
contrastive function. The difference between left-detached and rightdetached constituents will be further discussed in Section 4 7
Sometimes active referents are coded as detached lexical noun phrases
even when no ambiguity arises and when unaccented pronominal coding
w-ould be sufficient to identify the referent. One such case of NP
detachment involving an already active referent is discussed by Eng
(1986). Using the same text 1 quoted in |4.43). Eng observes that this text
can he changed in such a wav that a left-detachment construction
becomes appropriate even without am intervening text that would
deactivate the topic referent Here is En< s van,mi oi (monk text.
184
(4.48)
i
i
M r
h
Pragmatic relations: topic
Once there was a wizard. He was very wise, rich, and was
married to a beautiful witch He lived in a magnificent mansion by the
lake, had forty-nine servants, and owned an impressive collection of rare
books.
topic shift: Now the wizard, he was very ambitious. He had been
planning for years to conquer the world and finally he was ready.
context:
According to Eny, the detachment construction is appropriate in (4.48)
because it signals a shift in what she calls the “topic of discourse,” here a
change from the general description of the wizard to his plans to conquer
the world. Em; here follows the approach of other linguists who define
“discourse topic” in propositional terms 42
Such subtle variations in the cognitive state of the referents of detached
NPs do not affect the basic pragmatic distinction between the
presentational and the detachment construction. Despite some possible
overlap, especially in the shady area of accessibility, the two construc­
tions are in complementary distribution as far as referents at the extreme
ends of the Topic Acceptability Scale are concerned: active referents may
not occur in presentational clauses, and brand-new referents may not
occur in detachment constructions. This distributional difference is
formally reflected in the fact that presentational NPs may not normally
be pronouns and that detached NPs may not normally be indefinite.
4.5
Implications for syntactic theory
The above analysis of the relationship between topic and the mental
representations of discourse referents has certain implications for the
study of syntax. In the present section I would like to discuss, in rather
general terms, some of these implications.
4.5.Í
The Principle of the Separation tf Reference and Role
As I observed earlier, the bi-clausal presentational construction and the
detachment construction have in common that they cause a referential
noun phrase to appear elsewhere than in the position assigned to it by the
canonical sentence model, in which al! arguments of a predicate appear as
grammatical arguments at the level ol clause structure. These noncanonical configurations thus allow speakers to separate the referring
function of noun phrases from the kel mional role their denotata play as
arguments in a proposition, d lie lcxic.il constituent, instead of being part
Implications for syntactic theory
185
(4.49)
H'e, are the party of the new ideas, H'ej are the party of the future. WVi
are the party whose philosophy is vigorous and dynamic. The old
stereotype of the kind of pudgy, stolid, negative Repubhcanj-there may
be a few cartoonists} around whoy still want to portray us, as that2, but
lheyfre lying through rhetr, teeth if thews do.
Of special interest here is a comment by the author of the newspaper
article concerning the portion of the text starting with the words The old
stereotype ... , which is the portion I am concerned with: "Somewhat
snappishly, the President departed from his prepared speech to add ...”
This comment indicates that this portion of the text is an example of
n
character of written discourse makes such processing requirements less
stringent.
An example of spontaneous manifestation of the Principle of the
Separation of Reference and Role is shown in the following fragment
from an election campaign speech by Ronald Reagan (San Francisco
Chronicle, August 25, 1984). The constituents expressing the relevant
referents are italicized and indexed with subscripts:
lOTTOTrt
of the relational network of the clause, appears either in a special,
intransitive clause of its own (as in the presentational construction) or is
placed in a non-relational position altogether (as in the case of NP
detachment).
I will call the grammatical principle whereby the lexical representation
of a topic referent takes place separately from the designation of the
referent’s role as an argument in a proposition the principle OF THE
separation of reference and role (PSRR) for topic expressions. The
communicative motivation of this principle can be captured in the form
of a simple pragmatic maxim: "Do not introduce a referent and talk
about it in the same clause.” There are two processing reasons for
adhering to this maxim, one speaker-oriented, one hearer-oriented. From
the speaker’s point of view, it is easier to construct a complex sentence if
the lexical introduction of a non-active topic referent is done
independently of the syntactic expression of the proposition about the
referent. (This is particularly evident in example (4.49) below.) From the
hearer’s point of view, it is easier to decode a message about a topic if the
task of assessing the topic referent can be performed independently of the
task of interpreting the proposition in which the topic is an argument.
These processing reasons may explain why detachment constructions are
so often restricted to the domain of spoken language. Indeed, the planned
i
*
i
!
y
»
’
ji
!.
1
1
H1
i
186
Pragmatic relations: topic
(relatively) spontaneous speech, compared to the planned rhetorical
clichés at the beginning of the quote.
. fl
In (4.49) the first topic referent (and the discourse topic) is “the fl
Republican Party." This referent is coded in the form of the preferred
topic expression we throughout the first three sentences. The second topic
referent, introduced in the detached NP the old stereotype of the kind of
pudgy, stolid, negative Republican is an inferentialiy accessible referent,
whose inferable status is due to the relationship of polar opposition
between it and the preceding concepts “new ideas,” “future," “vigorous,"
and “dynamic.” It is because of this inferable relationship that this topic
can be expressed in the form of a detached NP constituent. The third
topical referent in this text, first introduced in the NP a few cartoonists, is
entirely new to the discourse. Accordingly, it is first expressed as the focus
NP of a presentational /here-construction, after which it is coded with the
unaccented pronominals who, they, and their. Notice that presentational
structure and topic-comment structure are combined here in a single
construction, in which the presentational /tere-construction expresses a
comment about the referent of the left-detached topic NP (see the
remarks in Section 5.2.5).
,
I interpret the use of the two pragmatically motivated grammatical
constructions illustrated in this short text as a manifestation of the
Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role: those topic referents in
(4.49) which are not yet active, and which therefore cannot be directly
coded as preferred topic expressions, appear as lexical NPs outside the
clauses which express the propositional information about them. In the
presentational construction, the not-yet-active referent is introduced as
the postverbal focus NP of a separate clause {there may be a few
cartoonists around)’, in the detachment construction, the referent (the old
stereotype of the kind of pudgy, stolid, negative Republican) appears in a
syntactically autonomous, non-argument position to the left of the
clause. In my analysis of spoken French (Lambrecht in preparation) I will
show that the Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role, along
with the formal distinction between topic and focus, is a major factor
determining the shape of the French sentence.
.The formulation of the Principle of the Separation of Reference and
Role makes it possible, and indeed necessary, to draw a theoretical
distinction between two grammatically quite different strategies whereby
a referent in the universe of discourse may be coded as a topic expression
in a sentence. In the first case, the topic expression samps the topic
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
fl
S
1
\
i
1
1
fl
’
?
implications for syntactic theory
187
referent, by means of a lexical phrase, whose distribution and constituent
structure is that of a noun phrase. Such lexical topic expressions are
reference-oriented expression types. Their semantic role in a proposi­
tion is often not recognizable from their form or their position in the
sentence. In the second case, the topic expression designates the topic
referent anaphorically or deictically. via a pronominal expression.
Such pronominal topic expressions are role-oriented expressions. They
serve as grammatical links between the topic referent and the proposition,
by indicating the semantic role of the referent as an argument, i.e. as a
participant in the action, event, or stale expressed by the proposition.
Syntactically, such pronominal topic expressions are often not noun
phrases but bound morphemes attached to another constituent of the
clause.
With the above distinction in mind, let us consider again the
detachment construction in our model discourse (4.43). In this
discourse, the detached NP the wizard merely names the referent about
which the following proposition conveys some new information. The
pronominal topic expression he on the other hand represents the referent
as an argument in a proposition. Similarly, in the Reagan text in (4.49)
the lexica) topic the old stereotype of the kind of pudgy, stolid, negative
Republican establishes the topic referent by naming it, thereby making it
available for predication in subsequent clauses. The role played by this
referent as an argument in a proposition is indicated via the pronominal
topic expression that in the clause who portray us as that.
The difference between the two topic expression types is reflected in a
number of differences in grammatical form and behavior. To mention
but two here, it is reflected in the fact that a lexical topic can occur at a
certain distance from the clause expressing the proposition about its
referent (see example (4.49) above), while an unaccented pronominal
topic is necessarily a constituent of the clause; across languages,
unaccented pronominals tend to be morphosyntacticaily integrated into
the predicate portion of a sentence (see Section 4.7 below). Il is also
reflected in the well-known fact that pronouns tend to be morphologi­
cally case-marked across languages while lexical NPs often go without
case marking (cf. Greenberg 1963:96). This difference in morphosyntactic
behavior is consistent with my analysis Since the main function of a
detached lexica) NP is to establish the topic referent in the discourse by
naming it, and since the mam function of a pronominal topic expression
is to indicate the role of the topic ax an argument in a proposition, the
188
Pragmatic relations: topic
positional and case-marking differences can be seen as natural
consequences of the above-mentioned principle.
The above-made distinction between two kinds of topic expressions
requires a terminological proviso. Since a detached lexical topic
constituent does not occupy an argument position in a clause, it is
strictly speaking not with the lexical topic NP but with the anaphoric
pronominal topic expression that the pragmatic aboutness relation
between the referent and the proposition is expressed (cf. the ;
terminological observations in Section 4.1.2 above). It is therefore '
slightly inconsistent to call such a detached lexical constituent a “topic j
NP." Rather it is a “topic-announcing” NP. However, I will continue to 1
follow the terminological convention (to whose establishment I have 1
contributed), referring to detached constituents as topic NPs, i.e. NPs J
which appear in special syntactic positions, labeled TOP (left-detached I
NPs) and A-TOP (right-detached NPs) in the present framework.
j
There is a striking analogy between the pragmatic principle postulated I
here and the logical claim underlying the distinction between categorical 1
and thetic sentences postulated by Brentano and Marty (see Section I
4.2.2). Recall that according to Marty the categorical judgment of the 1
subject- predicate sentence involves both the act of recognition of a 1
subject and the act of affirming or denying what is expressed by the 1
predicate about the subject. Since it involves these two independent I
judgments or cognitive acts, Marty calls it a "double judgment." The fl
thetic judgment, on the other hand, involves only the recognition or 1
rejection of some judgment material, without predicating this judgment 1
of some independently recognized subject. We can easily translate fl
Marty’s logical argument into the present cognitive-pragmatic argument 1
by saying that the “act of recognition of a subject" (Marty) corresponds 1
to the act of establishing a topic referent in the discourse and that this act fl
and the "act of affirming or denying what is expressed by the predicate 1
about the subject" (Marty) are two cognitive tasks which for processing fl
reasons are best carried out separately, i.e. not within the same minimal I
clausal unit. Hence the emergence of presentational and detachment fl
constructions in natural languages. The preferred topic expressions, fl
which indicate the semantic role of the topic argument in the proposition, fl
are unaccented pronominals, i.e. expressions for which the “act of J
recognition” of the subject is reduced to a minimum.
' fl
implications for syntactic theory
4.5.2
t
;
I
189
The PSRR and the canonical sentence model
There is an old and respectable grammatico-philosophical tradition
according to which certain types of sentences are better suited as models
of grammatical and logical analysis than others. The preferred sentence
model in this tradition is one in which all arguments of the verb are full
referential lexical noun phrases. The tradition based on this descriptive
model goes back to Greek, Latin, and Medieval grammatical theory.
From Plato on, the preferred sentence type of grammatical analysis has
been the type Socrates currit “Socrates is running.” This type was called
by Latin grammarians the “oratio perfecta," the sentence which expresses
a “complete thought."43 The reason why the oratio perfecta came to be
the preferred sentence model has no doubt to do with the fact that the
study of grammar was essentially the study of the laws of thought rather
than of the formal properties of sentences. It is clear that the meaning and
the truth conditions of a sentence like Socrates currit are easier to state,
without context, than the meaning and truth conditions of a sentence like
Currit “he/she/it is running,” which has no lexical subject. In the
“subjectless” version, the act of running is predicated of an entity which
is not named within the sentence. We therefore cannot tell, from the
sentence alone, whether the judgment expressed by it is true or false.
Lexically explicit sentences of the type mentioned above have typically
been used also in modern linguistic and philosophical argumentations.
Archetypal examples are Russell’s The present King of France is bald
(1905), which I discussed in Section 4.3, Chomsky’s The man hit the ball
(1957), or Sapir’s The farmer kills the duckling (1921:Ch.V). Sapir
explicitly called his model "a typical English sentence.” It is characteristic
of the preoccupation with form in twentieth-century linguistics that a
great linguist should choose as a grammatical model a sentence which
blatantly violates our intuitions concerning ordinary language use. It is
difficult (though of course not impossible) to imagine a situation in which
this sentence could be uttered felicitously. It is no doubt for this reason
that linguists tend to misquote Sapir’s example as The farmer killed the
duckling, with the verb in the past tense, in an unconscious attempt to
bring grammar and the real world a little closer together 44
I will refer to such sentences, in which all argument positions of the
verb, in particular the subject position, are filled with lexica) NPs, and in
which these NPs appear in their unmarked position, as canonical
sentences. In languages like French or English they may also be
190
Pragmatic relations: topic
referred to as SV(O) sentences, if “S" and “O" are- as usualunderstood as FULL LEXICAL NOUN phrases (see Greenberg 1963). The
term “canonical sentence” is used here in a way which differs slightly
from the way in which I have been using it until now, especially in Section
1.3.2, where "canonical” was a quasi-synonym of “unmarked.” In both
uses, the adjective "canonical" evokes the notion of a norm (Greek kandn
“straight line, ruler, rule, law”). But while in one use the norm is provided
by the grammatical system itself, in the other use it is metagrammaticai,
i.e. decided upon by the grammarian for the purposes of grammatical and
logical analysis. The ambiguity is reminiscent of the well-known
ambiguity of the notion “rule of grammar."
From the point of view of the Principle of the Separation of Reference
and Role and of the dichotomy of topic expression types postulated in tfie
preceding section, the occurrence of canonical sentences with topical
subject NPs constitutes an anomaly. Indeed such lexical subject
expressions combine the two semantic functions-the reference-oriented
and the role-oriented function-which the Principle of the Separation of
Reference and Role strives to separate. They are in a sense aggregate
expressions. Now it is precisely such aggregate expressions that are taken
as basic sentence components in syntactic theories built on the canonical
sentence model. Since in such theories the structural subject position is
occupied by a full lexical NP, and since this NP is taken to be a necessary
component of the sentence, languages whose syntax does not require the
presence of a subject NP tend to be interpreted as languages whose
surface structure lacks an important element.
To cite one example, which has figured prominently in recent syntactic
discussions, the postulation of the so-called '‘Pro-Drop Parameter" in the
Govemment-and-Binding theory of syntax can be seen as a direct
consequence of the assumption that a sentence must have a subject NP at
some level of analysis. Languages like Spanish or Italian, which do not
require a subject NP, are called Pro-Drop languages because they may
“drop" an element from a position in which it is assumed to be normally
present. Within the present approach, which is based on the assumption
that grammatical structure and information structure are interdependent,
the postulation of a Pro-Drop parameter represents a theoretical
disadvantage since it ignores the issue of why the element in question is
not present in the first place (see example (3 31) and discussion, and
Section 5.5.2 below). The postulation of the Pro-Drop parameter lakes as
Implications for syntactic theory
191
the rule what the information-structure-based approach takes as an
exception.
I do not regard it as an embarrassment for my analysis that the
Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role conflicts with a wellestablished descriptive convention as well as a fundamental theoretical
assumption of many syntactic frameworks. As 1 observed, the canonical
sentence model was established according to logical rather than syntactic
criteria, therefore a departure from this model does not entail a departure
from the scientific methods of structural analysis but only from certain
pretheoretical assumptions. Moreover, there is statistical evidence that
languages which require a subject NP are a small minority among the
languages of the world. For example, Gilligan (1987) demonstrates that
“Pro-Drop languages" represent the vast majority of the world’s
languages. Gilligan shows that of a sample of one hundred widely
diverse languages only seven do not allow "null subjects" in finite clauses.
That the occurrence of lexical subject NPs is indeed a relative anomaly
across languages (compared to the occurrence of “detached" NPs) is
confirmed by the fact that there exist languages in which lexical NPs
never function as subject arguments (Van Valin 1985, Jelinek 1984,
Mithun 1986). On the other hand, languages which prohibit NP
detachment do not seem to exist. Languages which lack the category
“subject NP” (but not necessarily the category "subject") are called
“pronominal argument" languages by Jelinek Such languages are of
course excellent evidence in support of the validity of the Principle of the
Separation of Reference and Role. Moreover, it has been repeatedly
observed-and it is strongly confirmed for spoken French in Lambrecht
1986b- that even in "non-Pro-Drop" languages canonical sentences with
lexical topic NPs are rare, hence "statistically anomalous." in
spontaneous discourse. Finally, as we saw earlier, the use of lexical
NPs is often motivated not by lack of activeness of the NP referent but by
other factors such as disambiguation among two or more active referents.
Many naturally occurring lexical argument topics have pragmatically a
"quasi-pronominal" character. The existence of such topic NPs therefore
does not invalidate the general dichotomy of topic expression types which
I am postulating.
192
4.5.3
Pragmatic relations: topic
The syntactic status of detached constituents
It has often been argued by linguists interested in the relationship
between language change and language typology (see e.g. Wartburg 1943,
Hyman 1975, Givon 1976, Harris 1976) that the frequent use of NP
detachment constructions in a language is a sign of the rise of a new verbagreement paradigm in which a resumptive pronoun is reinterpreted as a
grammatical agreement marker and in which the detached NP is
becoming an inira-clausal subject NP. While the diachronic reanalysis
of detached NPs as subjects seems to be a solidly attested historical fact,
it is important to acknowledge that there is no necessary link between the
regular use of NP detachment and the rise of a new verb-agreement
paradigm, even though language change may lead to increased frequency
of use. There are many languages, such as German or Turkish, which
have fully functional systems of subject-verb agreement but which
nevertheless make frequent use of NP detachment. In such languages
there is no evidence that the detached topic NP is being reinterpreted as a
subject NP. Indeed, reinterpretation of Turkish right-detached NPs as
subjects would be a rather surprising typological event, given the strong
SOV character of this language.
I would like to emphasize, against what seems to be a widespread
assumption, that the grammatical topic-marking construction referred to
as NP “detachment" or “dislocation” is not some kind of structural
anomaly which tends to develop under the pressure of historical change
and which grammars strive to eliminate by absorbing it into the canonical
sentence model in which all semantic arguments of a predicate appear as
syntactic arguments in a clause.45 Within the present framework, in
which the clause is analyzed as a processsing unit for spontaneous speech,
the opposite view is closer to the truth: it is the reinterpretation of
detached NPs as “regular” subjects that constitutes the anomaly. Ils
generalization across languages would contradict the functional motiva­
tion for the detachment construction, which is precisely to keep lexical
topic constituents outside the clauses in which their referents play the
semantic and syntactic role of arguments.
I would like to present here some observations, both cross-linguistic
and language-specific, which confinn the view that, in some languages at
least, the detached topic NP cannot be a constituent - whether argument
or adjunct-of the clause with which it is pragmatically associated.
Rather it must be analyzed as a syntactically autonomous, extra-clausal
Implications for syntactic theory
193
element, whose relationship with the clause is not the grammatical
relation of subject or object but the pragmatic relation of aboutness and
relevance (see Gundel 1976, Dik 1978). More specific arguments in favor
of the position that topic NPs do not occupy argument positions are
presented in Lambrecht 1985b for spoken French.46
The first argument involves a construction which I call the unlinked
topic construction. In the languages with which I am familiar, this
construction occurs frequently in spontaneous spoken language but is not
considered acceptable in writing. It involves detached lexical noun
phrases which have no anaphoric link with a pronominal topic expression
inside the clause. Here are a few examples from English conversations
(for convenience, I have separated the unlinked topic NP with a comma
from the clause with which it is associated; this comma does not
necessarily indicate a pause):
(4.50)
(Six year old girl, explaining why the African elephant has bigger ears
than the Asian elephant}
The African elephant, it’s so hot there, so he can fan himself.
(4.51)
(From an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a wealthy town in
Dade County, Florida, becoming a "fort against crime")
“What we are trying to do here is keep this community what it is, a
beautiful, safe place to live," said police chief Dick de Stefani. “Dade
County, you just can’t believe the rise in crime."47
1
(4.52)
(From a TV interview about the availability of child care)
That isn't the typical family anymore. The typical family today, the
husband and the wife both work.
'i; I
}
'■ i
(4.53)
(Talking about how to grow flowers)
Tulips, you have to plant new bulbs every year?
(4.54)
(Lecturer in an introductory linguistics course)
Other languages, you don't just have straight tones like that.
In ail these examples, the referent of the detached NP in the relevant
sentences is to be interpreted as a topic since one or several of the
following propositions can be construed as conveying information about
it. Moreover, in all cases the referent of the topic NP has the required
property of pragmatic accessibility. But, with the exception of the second
clause in (4.50), the topic NP is not anaphorically linked to an argument,
whether overt or null, in any of the propositions about the topic. It
follows that the topic phrase cannot be an argument in the clause with
which it is associated. Now since the unlinked topic NP appears in the
i
’ t
i
ISM
Pragmatic relations: topic
same position as the linked one, it follows that the latter does not have to .1
be an argument NP within the clause.
. , j
The second piece of evidence for the extra-clausal, non-argument 1
status of detached lexical topics comes from the syntax of German. It is
well known that in German the finite verb of a main clause is always the
second constituent. Therefore any phrase which precedes the verb must
be a single syntactic constituent. If a constituent other than the subject
appears in initial position, the subject must follow the verb. Consider now
the following examples:
*
(4.55)
a. Hans isst den Apfel. “Hans eats the apple"
b. Den Apfel isst Hans.
c. *Den Apfel Hans isst.
d. Den isst Hans. "Hans eats it”
e. Den Apfel den isst Hans. “The apple Hans eats it"
f. *Den Apfel isst Hans den.
g. Jetzt isst den Hans. “Now Hans eats it”
h. *Jetzt den isst Hans.
(SVO)
■
(OVS)
!l'
(OSV)
(OVS)
■!
(TOVS) >f
(TVSO)
(AdvVOS).■
(AdvOVS)
As the comparison of (4.55) (a) or (b) with (c) shows, the verb must
occupy second position in its clause in order for the sentence to W
grammatical. However, in (e) two constituents appear before the verb
and nevertheless that sentence is grammatical. It follows that only the
second constituent (i.e. the topicalized object pronoun den) can be a
constituent of the clause, as it is in (d). The contrast between (g) and (h)
shows that the detached topic NP does not have the status of an adjunct
to the predicate like the adverb jetzt ‘‘now’, which does occupy intraclausal position. The detached constituent den Apfel is therefore an extraclausal lexical topic NP.
The reader may have noticed that in example (4.55e) both the lexical
NP and the topicalized pronoun have accusative case marking. This case­
marking is optional on the lexical NP but obligatory on the pronoun.
This phenomenon of dual case marking is reminiscent of the dual case­
marking pattern described by Jelinek 1984 for Warlpiri, except that in
Warlpiri the lexical NP has ergative-absolutive marking while the intraclausal “agreement” marking is nominative-accusative Whatever
explanation is given for the accusative marking on the NP in (e), it
does not affect the syntactic argument that the lexical topic constituent
cannot be a constituent of the same clause as the pronoun.
The German examples just examined raise a problem which I cannot
discuss here in any depth. This is the problem of the pragmatic difference
.
<
,
j
'
Topic and pragmatic accommodation
195
between the topicalized object NP den Apfel in (b) or den in (d) and (e) on
the one hand, and the detached topic NP den Apfel in (e) on the other.
Both the topicalization and the detachment construction mark an NP
grammatically as a topic, but only the detached topic falls clearly under
the Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role. 1 am not aware of
any language-independent functional explanation which would account
for the difference between the two construction types and which would
allow us to assign to each of them its own invariable informationstructure properties. The difference seems to be at least in part one in the
cognitive accessibility state of the NP referent. Topicalization generally
seems to require a higher degree of accessibility than left detachment, but
much empirical research is necessary before any substantive claims can be
made to this effect.4®
Whatever the exact differences between the various lexical topic-coding
strategies may turn out to be, such differences will not affect our general
empirical observation: languages with an apparently well-established
SVO or other canonical constituent pattern have a strong tendency to
violate this pattern under specific pragmatic conditions by placing lexical
topic NPs, especially potential subjects, outside the clause. This tendency
is not due to historical pressure but to a fundamental functional need. In
certain languages, including spoken French, this tendency is so strong
that the canonical pattern is hardly ever used in spontaneous speech.
Such languages, in which the basic or canonical pattern has restricted
distribution in language use, are of great theoretical interest for wordorder typologies and for syntactic theory in general. They pose in
particularly acute terms the general problem of the relationship between
abstract models of grammar and actual sentence structures.
4.6
Topic and pragmatic accommodation
The point of the preceding sections has been to demonstrate the existence
of a systematic, though flexible, correlation between the topic status of an
expression and the presumed cognitive state of the topic referent in the
hearer's mind at the time of an utterance. 1 have tried to account for this
correlation with the Topic Acceptability Scale in (4.34) and I have
observed that a number of syntactic constructions found across
languages have the function of promoting referents on this scale,
allowing speakers to preserve as much as possible the cognitively
preferred topic type, which is expressed as an unaccented pronominal.
196
Pragmatic relations: topic
The claim that a degree of pragmatic accessibility is a necessary
condition for topic function has been rejected by some linguists. An
explicit rejection of this claim is found in Reinhart (1982).49 Although
Reinhart concedes that topics strongly tend to represent “old informa­
tion," she argues that this tendency has nothing to do with the nature of
topic. To substantiate her claim, she quotes examples from English texts
in which topical subject noun phrases have referents which are not
accessible in any clear sense (they occur at the beginning of newspaper
articles). Here are two of Reinhart s examples (the relevant topic
expressions are italicized):
(4.56)
(4.57)
(-Reinhart's 21a) Because they wanted to know more about the
ocean’s current, students in the science club al Mark Twain Junior High
School of Coney Island gave ten bottles with return address cards inside
to crewmen of one of New York’s sludge barges. (The New York Times)
( = Reinhart's 21b) When she was five years old, a child of my
a theory that she was inhabited by rabbits.
acquaintance announced
(The New York Times}
The exceptions mentioned by Reinhart happen to be restricted to certain
types of written discourse and therefore do not directly affect my
argument, as they do not pertain to the domain of spontaneous spoken
language which is considered the basic language use in this study.
However, by observing that an exception is genre-specific we have not
explained the exception, nor have we explained why some (written)
genres are more tolerant of exceptions than spoken language. To the
extent that the Topic Acceptability Scale is an expression of a general
cognitive constraint on information processing in natural language, any
violation must in principle be accountable for on general, genre­
independent, cognitive grounds.
I believe that violations of the Topic Acceptability Scale such as those
in (4.56) and (4.57) can be explained as genre-specific instances of the
principle of the pragmatic accommodation of presuppositional structure
(see Section 2.4). Notice that Reinhart’s examples of topic noun phrases
with brand-new referents contain unaccented anaphoric pronouns that
occur before the topic NPs which they refer to. Without these pronouns,
the sentences could in fact be construed as event-reporting sentences,
comparable to the journalistic sentence in (2.10) (.4 clergyman's opened a
betting shop on an airliner), in which case the subject NPs would not be
topics. The pronouns they in (4.56) and she in (4.57) refer cataphorically
Topic and pragmatic accommodation
197
to the indefinite subject phrases students in the science club at Mark Twain
Junior High School of Coney Island and a child of my acquaintance
respectively. This kind of cataphoric reference to pragmatically nonaccessible items is a rhetorical convention, which is based on the rule of
accommodation for pragmatic presuppositions. Because of the nature of
the reading situation, readers can more readily accommodate as active
(or accessible) certain referents which are in fact new in the discourse
context.
This common phenomenon whereby a writer introduces a referent via
a linguistic expression or grammatical construction which normally
requires the presupposition that the referent is already introduced is
discussed by Clark & Haviland (1977) under the name of “addition.” For
example if a reader finds the sentence The old woman died at the
beginning of a story, she knows, consciously or unconsciously, that she is
dealing with an intentional violation of a principle of information
structure. Such a violation is acceptable because the author of the story
can expect the reader to act cooperatively as if the referent of the NP the
old woman were already present in the reader’s awareness by constructing
an antecedent for the NP which then can be “added” to the text world of
the story. In the case of (4.56) and (4.57), the cooperative effort necessary
on the part of the reader to interpret these sentences is accomplished all
the more easily since the referents of the subject noun phrases are
pragmatically anchored (Section 3.3) in the modifying prepositional
phrases in the science club at ... and of my acquaintance. Notice that the
acceptability of the two sentences would be severely diminished if these
prepositional phrases were missing (cf. examples (4.35), (4.36) and
discussion). I therefore do not think that examples such as these can be
invoked as arguments against the postulated inherent connection between
topic function and cognitive accessibility of the topic referent. Rather the
conventionalized character of these exceptions indirectly confirms this
connection. Such exceptions are interpretable precisely against the
background of the presuppositional structure conventionally associated
with topic-comment sentences.50
■ It is interesting to observe that the pragmatic accommodation of an
unidentifiable referent is easier when the referent is grammatically
marked as a topic than when it is marked as a focus constituent. While
the above-quoted story opening The old woman died, which has topic­
comment structure, is rather conventional, the corresponding opening
involving the thetic sentence The old woman died would be rather
1
i
i
I
¡1
198
Pragmatic relations: topic
unusual. At first glance, this difference seems surprising. Given that topic
referents must be accessible while focus referents have no such
requirement (see Section 5.4.1), we might expect the second version to
be more natural. That it is not is due to the nature of subjects as
unmarked topics (Section 4.2.1). Since a subject is expected to be a topic,
and since topics must be pragmatically accessible, the invitation for
accommodation is more strongly expressed - hence more readily followed
by the reader-in the topic-comment version than in the thetic version.
This fact also shows, incidentally, that the often-made claim that
presentational sentences are typically found at discourse beginnings is
unwarranted.
Here is another striking example of a violation of the topic accessibility
constraint which I think is best explained as such a rhetorically motivated
deviation from normal usage. Consider the following passage from a
newspaper article on the problem of US army registration (the relevant
topic expression is again italicized):
(4.58)
Of equal importance is the fact that objecting registrants can say they
oppose the policy of registration and will not cooperate with a draft. The
letter of protest 1 sent to the Selective Service at the time I handed my
registration card to the post office clerk
Californian, September 1982)
stated exactly that.
(The Daily
The prime candidate for topic function in the second sentence is the
sentence-final pronoun that, whose referent is the propositional content
of the last two clauses in the first sentence, a referent which is discourse­
active at the time the pronoun occurs. Nevertheless that is not a topic
expression because of its association with the “rhematizing" adverb
exactly and the ensuing (implicit) focal accent. Without this adverb, the
sentence could have been formulated as That was stated in the letter ... or
I Stated that in the letter ... The intended topic in (4.58) must therefore be
the italicized complex subject noun phrase. This phrase is stylistically
peculiar in that it requires the pragmatic accommodation of at least four
presuppositions', (i) the presupposition evoked by the definite article, i.e.
that the reader knows of and can identify a certain letter written by the
author of the article (the letter was not mentioned earlier in the article);
(ii) the presupposition evoked by the proposition expressed in the
restrictive relative clause starting with / sent, i.e. that the writer protested
the draft by sending a certain letter to the Selective Service at a certain
time; (iii) the presupposition that the writer handed his registration card
i
I
’
Topic and word order
199
to the clerk; and (iv) the presupposition evoked by the topic-comment
structure of the sentence as a whole, i.e. that this letter is a topic under
discussion in the text. By its presuppositional structure, the sentence
containing this complex subject phrase conveys a request to the reader to
cooperatively act, for the purposes of rapid communication, as if the
referent in question were indeed retrievable from the discourse. The
sentence is a rhetorically motivated shortcut for some more explicit
version, such as I sent a letter ofprotest to the Selective Service at the time
I handed my registration card to the post office clerk, and in this letter J
staled exactly that. A certain processing difficulty arising in the
interpretation of the sentence may be an indication that in this case the
cooperative effort necessary on the part of the reader to understand this
sentence is greater than it ought to be. Be that as it may, the violation of
the topic accessibility constraint in this sentence, as in the previously
discussed examples, can be seen as a confirmation of, rather than as
evidence against, the existence of this constraint.
4,7
Topic and word order
The theoretical distinction drawn in Section 4.5.2 between two categories
of topic expressions, one role-oriented and one reference-oriented, allows
us to clarify a much debated issue: that of the position of topic
expressions in the sentence. It has often been claimed that there is a
universal principle, or at least a strong crosslinguistic tendency, for topic
expressions to be the first constituents in a sentence (see Section 4.1.1).
The issue is as old as the traditional debate over the position of the
subject, since subjects and topics were equated in traditional grammar. It
goes back at least as far as the eighteenth-century debate over what the
“best" word order is in universal grammar. For example, in Rivarol’s
1784 “Discours sur I’universalile de la langue frangaise" (quoted in
Grevisse 1959) the SVO order of French is taken to be the ideal word
order because it is a direct expression of logical thought. In nineteenthcentury linguistics, the debate was continued in connection with the issue
of the position of the "psychological subject" (as opposed to the
grammatical subject) in the sentence.51 In the twentieth century, the
importance of initial position for topics has been emphasized in
particular by scholars of the Prague School and by linguists influenced
by this school (cf. the summary in Firbas 1966a) Indeed, evidence for
such a tendency is particularly abundant in so-called "tree word order”
200
Pragmatic relations: topic
languages, like Russian or Czech, in which any constituent can be placed
in sentence-initial position, without causing the resulting sentence
structure to be marked in the way a sentence with a topicalized object
is marked in English. For such languages, convincing arguments have
been made that sentence-initial position of a constituent normally marks
this constituent as the topic of that sentence
The putative universality of the “topic-first principle" has been
questioned by various scholars, and for various reasons. One reason is
the existence of VOS or VSO languages, i.e. languages in which it is the
verb that occupies the first position in what seems to be the unmarked or
basic sentence type. A theory according to which sentence-initial position
is a natural, cognitively based, requirement for topic NPs would not be
able to account for the fact that such languages normally require a
naturally non-topical constituent, i.e. the verb, to appear in initial
position. This problem would persist even if it could be shown that all
verb-initial languages have a topicalization rule which allows noun
phrases to occur before the verb. Indeed application of such a rule would
presumably result in a marked construction; however, the topic-first
principle is meant to account for the most general case of topic
placement.
A second argument against the universality of the topic-first principle
can be made on the basis of languages like English or German, in which
focus constituents can freely occur as sentence-initial subjects and in
which topical non-subject constituents may appear in canonical argument
position after the verb, i.e. without any concomitant syntactic
markedness of the construction, the information structure of such
sentences being only marked prosodically (see Section 5.3.3 below).52
Recall the various examples of thetic sentences discussed in Section 4.2.2.
Or consider a sentence such as Jespersen’s peter said it (Section 2.2), in
which the subject is a focus constituent and in which the clause-final
pronoun it is a topic expression. Notice that topic constituents in
postverbal argument position do not have to be pronouns, as in
Jespersen’s example. It is easy to substitute a lexical phrase for the
pronoun, as in peter made that remark. Such unaccented lexical topic
constituents have an important property in common with pronouns: their
referents must be active or quasi-activc in the discourse. In some
languages, unaccented topic NPs in object position are avoided, as in
spoken French, where such NPs typically appear in right-detached
position (see Section 5.3.3 below) Finally, the claim has been made
Topic and word order
'
|
|
L
|
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
L
k
t
I
*
I
I
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
B
■
H
■
■
■
■
■
K
E
■
is
201
(Mithun 1987) that in certain languages the very notion of “basic word
order” is not applicable. According to Mithun, in such languages no
known pragmatic principle governs the choice of the various alternative
word order possibilities offered by the syntax. If this claim is correct, the
topic-first principle does not apply to such languages.
The occurrence of focus-initial sentences such as the one mentioned
above leads us back to the discussion concerning the relationship between
syntactic structure and information structure (see Section 1.4.2). Given
that sentence-initial position is cognitively speaking an eminently salient
position, it would be a priori surprising if the prominence associated with
this position could only be exploited for a single function, such as the
marking of the topic relation. As I observed earlier, in English, German,
and French, and no doubt in many other languages, it is possible to use
the construction traditionally referred to as "topicalization” both for
“topicalizing” and for "focalizing” the fronted non-subject NP, the
difference being marked only via accent placement. It has also been
observed by Prague Schoo! scholars that even in Slavic languages nonthematic constituents may occur sentence-initially for reasons having to
do with "emphasis” (see e.g. Firbas 1966a).
Without going into much detail here, 1 would like to point out that
some of the apparent differences among languages with respect to the
adherence to, or disregard for, the topic-first principle disappear if we
make the suggested categorial distinction between lexical and pronominal
topic expressions. From my characterization of the preferred topic
expression as an unaccented pronominal argument, whose function is to
express the grammatical and semantic role played by a pragmatically
already established topic referent in a clause it follows that the position
of such a pronominal expression is functionally speaking irrelevant.
Once a topic referent is pragmatically established, i.e. once the function
of the topic expression is no longer to announce the topic referent but to
mark its role as an argument in a proposition, there is no longer any
functional reason for (he topic to appear at the beginning of the sentence.
For the preferred-topic expression it is functionally speaking more
important to be in close association with the predicate than to appear in
sentence-initial position, since it is the predicate that governs the semantic
and syntactic relations in the clause. Unaccented pronominal topics
therefore tend to occur in or near the position in which the verb itself
occurs, i.e. towards the beginning of the sentence in verb-initial or verb­
second languages and towards the end in verb-final languages.53 When
202
Pragmatic relations: topic
unaccented pronouns develop diachronically into bound pronominal and
inflectional morphemes, they tend to be affixed to the verb or an auxiliary
of the verb, rather than to some other constituent of the sentence. As the
semantic center of the clause which serves as a point of reference for
argument constituents, the tensed predicate is fixed in its position. As a
result, the position of unaccented pronominal« will also tend to be fixed
within the sentence, contrasting with the relative positional freedom of
phrasal constituents such as NPs, PPs, and adverbial phrases. Now, as I
emphasized in Chapter 1, a fundamental requirement for any pragmatic
word order analysis must be the potential for contrasts between
alternative ordering possibilities, i.e. the possible occurrence of
allosentences. Since the position of unaccented pronominal« in the
sentence is essentially fixed, this fundamental pragmatic criterion is not
satisfied with such expressions. Therefore no functional claims about
sentence-initial position should be made in the case of the preferred topic
expressions.
The situation is quite different with accented topic expressions,
whether lexical or pronominal. Only with these expressions can-and
should-the case for initial topic position be made. Since they have the
primary function of announcing a new topic or of marking a shift from
one topic to another, it is cognitively speaking important for such topic
expressions to occur at the beginning of, or preferably before, the
sentence which expresses the information about their referents. It is
difficult to imagine an effective topic-coding strategy whereby the
pragmatic establishment of a topic referent would always take place
simultaneously with, or subsequent to, the conveying of information
about this referent. Such a strategy would run counter to the Principle of
the Separation of Reference and Role. 1 conclude that the topic-first
principle can be maintained as a universal ordering tendency, as long as it
is only applied to accented lexical and pronominal topic expressions with
a topic-announcing function.
It is necessary to mention here one apparent exception to this revised
and severely restricted version of the topic-first principle. This exception,
for which there is ample cross-linguistic evidence, is the earlier-mentioned
RIGHT-DETACHMENT or ANTtTOPic construction, in which a lexical topic NP
is positioned at the end of the clause containing the information about
the topic referent. This construction has been variously referred to in the
literature as "epexegesis" (a term from classical grammar), "inverted
word order” (a translation of the term lA’vnk ciimle used by Turkish
Topic and word order
203
scholars;' see Erguvanii 1984), “extraposition” (Jespersen 1933/1964:
154ff.), and “right dislocation." The detached constituent itself has been
referred to as “de-focused NP,” "afterthought NP," “post-predicate
constituent," "tail” (Dik 1980, Vallduvi 1990b), and "antitopic" (Chafe
1976). It is the last term, “antitopic,” that I have adopted for my own use.
Curiously, this important construction has received little attention in
generative syntactic theory.54 The antitopic construction is illustrated in
this English example:
(4.59)
I
i
,
He is a nice
guy.
your brother.
In this sentence, the intra-ciausal unaccented pronominal topic expres­
sion he precedes the lexical topic expression your brother, which is placed
in post-focal position. Notice that this antitopic NP is itself unaccented.
What makes the antitopic construction pragmatically peculiar is that by
the time the referent of the antitopic expression is mentioned in its lexical
form, it has already been referred io in unaccented pronominal form
inside the clause which expresses the proposition about the referent.
It is important to realize that the detached constituent in the antitopic
construction does not express an afterthought in the proper sense of
this word, as has often been claimed 5_ Right detachment is a fully
conventionalized grammatical construction which permits speakers to
adhere to the Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role under
specific discourse circumstances. A speaker who uses an antitopic
construction is normally fully "aware" that the mere mention of the
unmarked topic pronoun in the clause is insufficient for the hearer to
understand who or what the proposition is about. Since, under normal
cooperative conditions, the use of an unaccented pronominal is
appropriate only if its referent is active, the antitopic construction, once
conventionalized, can be used as an implicit request from the speaker to
the hearer to put the propositional information "on hold" until the
antitopic is uttered The presuppositional structure ol the antitopic
construction involves a signal that the not-yct acme topic referent is
going to be named al the end of the sentence. The request for temporary
"holding" of the proposition is of course easiest to comply with if the
referent is already quasi-active or at least highly accessible. This explains
why high accessibility of the referent is a general condition for
appropriate use of the antitopic construction across languages (see
Lambrecht 1986b, Chapter 8, on the situation in spoken French.) In
contrast with left-detachment, the lexical (or independent-pronominal)
I
204
Pragmatic relations: topic
topic expression in right-detached position cannot indicate a new topic
or a topic shift. Given that antitopic constituents are always unaccented,
any contrasting function is excluded. Since my revised topic-first
principle is meant to account precisely for new topics or topic shifts,
the antitopic construction does not contradict my general claim about the
position of topic NPs.
The crosslinguistic tendency for right-detachment constructions to be
used in discourse contexts in which the topic referent is already highly
salient, and for left-detachment constructions to be reserved for topic­
announcing or topic-shifting contexts, has grammatical reflexes in
German. German has two sets of personal pronouns in the third
person, the set er, sie, es, sie and the set der, die, das, die, both meaning
“he, she, it, they.” Both sets may be accented, although accentuation is
more common with the der-series. As a general rule, pronouns of the erseries are used when a referent is active and already topical, while those
of the der-series are used when a referent is active but not yet an
established topic. Therefore in most anaphoric contexts, only the er-series
can be used, as shown in example (4.60):
(4.60)
L'lfl *
¡J»;
Wenn er/der isst, macht er/’der so komische Geräusche. "When he eats
he makes kind of funny noises."
Assuming coreferentialily with the subject of the subordinate clause, use
of the pronoun der in the main clause is prohibited. (The sentence is
grammatical if the second der indicates a topic shift.) Now consider the
following examples involving left and right detachment:
(4.61)
(4.62)
a. Die Müllers, die wohnen im dritten Stock. "The Müller’s (they)
live on the third floor."
b. *?Die Müllers, sie wohnen im dritten Stock.
a. Die wohnen im dritten Stock, die Müllers.
b. Sie wohnen im dritten Stock, die Müllers.
।
‘
!
As (4.61) shows, left-detachment requires an anaphoric topic pronoun of
the der-series, i.e. a pronoun marking the referent as active but not yet <
established as a topic.56 No such constraint, however, is imposed on the 1
right-detachment construction, as shown in (4.62). The German data thus J
confirm the existence of a genera) information-structure principle g
according to which right detachment requires greater pragmatic salience 1
of the topic referent than left detachment, the latter being used mainly for I
referents whose topic status is not yet established in the discourse context, j
Topic and word order
205
The earlier-mentioned processing implications of the antitopic
construction have consequences for its syntactic structure. In many
languages, the antitopic constituent must immediately follow the clause
which contains the coreferential pronominal topic expression, i.e. it is
syntactically marked as belonging to the clause containing the anaphoric
pronoun?7 Herein, the antitopic construction differs markedly from the
left-detachment construction, in which the lexical topic constituent can
appear at any distance from the associated proposition and in which the
anaphoric pronoun can appear in a clause of indefinite depth of
embedding. In French, the tight connection of the antitopic constituent
with the proposition is also reflected in the fact that the antitopic NP
must agree in case with the pronominal topic, while this sort of agreement
is not required with sentence-initial topics (see Lambrecht 1981). A
similar situation obtains in German.
The processing constraints associated with the antitopic construction
may also explain why subject-final languages, i.e. languages in which the
unmarked topic occurs at the end of the clause, are so rarely attested
among the languages of the world (see Greenberg 1963, Universal # 1).
An explanation along these lines is suggested by Keenan (1978.‘303ff), on
the basis of his analysis of Malagasy (a VOS language). Even though I
find Keenan's cognitive explanation for the scarcity of subject-final
languages highly suggestive, I would hesitate to draw general conclusions
of this sort. A problem with many proposed explanations involving
universal word-order typology is that they do not take into account
information-structure distinctions of the sort discussed in this study
(pronominal vs. lexical coding, topic vs. focus, etc.). Until such
fundamental distinctions are carefully drawn and until it is firmly
established what the final subject constituent in VOS languages actually
codes in discourse, any speculation concerning the cognitive status of the
subject in subject-final languages seems premature.58
5
Pragmatic relations: focus
5.1
Definition of focus
5.1.1
Focus, presupposition, and assertion
In Chapter 4,1 used the term "focus" as a convenient shorthand to refer
to the status of certain sentence constituents which systematically differed
from topic expressions in their pragmatic function and in their formal
expression. It would therefore seem natural to define focus as the
"complement of topic.” The complementarity of the two notions is
suggested e.g. by the alternative concept pair theme/rheme, whose
members are often seen as complementing each other. Using Chafe’s
characterization of the (topical) subject as the “hitching post for the new
knowledge" (cf. Section 4.1.1), we might then say that the focus of a
sentence is the "new knowledge hitched to the topic post," i.e. the new
information conveyed about a topic.
Within the present framework, there are at least two reasons for not
adopting such a definition. First, if we assume-as I do-that focus has to
do with the conveying of new information, and that alt sentences convey
new information (Section 2.3), all sentences must have a focus. However,
not all sentences have a topic (see Sections 4.2.2 and 4.4.4.1). Therefore
focus cannot simply be defined as the complement of topic, Second, in the
present framework the terms “new knowledge" or “new information" are
loose equivalents for the term “pragmatic assertion," which I defined in
Chapter 2 as a proposition that is superimposed on and that includes the
pragmatic presupposition (see Section 2.3). The focus of a sentence,
however, is generally seen as an element of information which is added
TO, rather than superimposed on, the pragmatic presupposition. Just as a
topic is included in the presupposition without being identical to it (see
Sections 4.1.1 and 4.3), a focus is part of an assertion wiihout coinciding
with it.
206
Definition offocus
|
I
I
I
I
[
[
|
1
L
|
207
Within the framework developed here, the focus of a sentence, or, more
precisely, the focus of the proposition expressed by a sentence in a given
utterance context, is seen as the element of information whereby the
presupposition and the assertion differ from each other. The focus is
that portion of a proposition which cannot be taken for granted at the
time of speech. It is the unpredictable or pragmatically non-recov.
erable element in an utterance. The focus is what makes an utterance
into an assertion.
This notion of focus is implicit in much previous work on focus and
related phenomena. For example it is implied in Bolinger’s early
definition of what he calls the “information point" of a sentence:
We can say that the prosodic stress ... marks the "point" of the
sentence, where there is the greatest concentration of information, that
which the hearer would be least likely to infer without being told.
(1954:152)
More explicitly the notion is expressed tn Halliday’s (1967) definition of
focus:
Information focus is one kind of emphasis, that whereby the speaker
marks out a part (which may be the whole) of a message block as that
which he wishes to be interpreted as informative. What is focal is "new"
information; not in the sense that it cannot have been previously
mentioned, although it is often the case that it has not been, but in (he
sense that the speaker presents it as not being recoverable from the
preceding discourse ... The focus of the message, it is suggested, is that
which is represented by the speaker as being new. textually land
situationally) non-derwable information. (Halliday 19^7:20^1 J
The concept of focus as the element of information in a sentence whereby
shared and not-yet-shared knowledge differ from each other is also
closely related to the one used by Jackendoff (1972). Jackendoff. whose
analysis builds on those of Halliday and Chomsky (1970). defines the
"presupposition of a sentence" as "the information in lhe sentence that is
assumed by the speaker to be shared by him and the hearer" and the
“focus of a sentence" as "the information in the sentence that is assumed
by the speaker not to be shared by him and (he hearer" (1972:230). For
Jackendoff, lhe focus is thus the coxipi i-mem of the presupposition in a
sentence.
The concept of "focus" 1 will adopt is in many respects similar to
that used by mv predecessors But while Chomsky. Jackendoff and
others have applied this focus notion mainly to so-called "focus
208
Pragmatic relations: focus
presupposition" sentences, i.e. to sentences in which the focus
corresponds to a variable in a presupposed open proposition, I will
generalize it to all types of presuppositional structure, building on the
theoretical concepts developed in the preceding chapters, especially
the concepts of activation and topic. I will also show that “the pre­
supposition” in the Chomsky-Jackendofif tradition is in fact only one
particular subtype of pragmatic presupposition and that the accent rules
proposed by these authors are insufficient to account for the focuspresupposition relation in general (Section 5.4.3).
Finally, I will emphasize that certain prosodic phenomena which have
been subsumed under the general rubric “focus” are in fact not related to
focus in the sense defined here but to the marking of different activation
states of discourse referents, which in turn serve to indicate certain topic
discontinuities in the discourse. What has been categorized and analyzed
as phonological focus marking in the generative literature is seen here
only as one instance of a more general phenomenon: the marking of a
pragmatically construed semantic domain by means of prosodic
prominence. At the end of this chapter (Section 5.7), I will argue that
the overriding purpose of sentence accentuation is not to mark foci but to
mark the establishment of relations between various kinds of denotata
and the propositions to which they belong. The interpretation of a given
activated denotatum as focal or topical is typically determined by
morphosynlactic rather than phonological criteria. To the extent that the
present chapter is concerned with accent placement it will be useful for
the reader to keep in mind that accent placement and focus marking are
not to be equated.
Many of the approaches to focus in the literature are characterizedconceptually or at least terminologically-by what 1 referred to earlier as
the “segmentation” view of information (see Section 2.2). Recall that in
this view the information conveyed by a sentence is thought to be
segmentable into “old" and “new" portions, which can be directly
identified with syntactic constituents, in such a way that some
constituents express “old,” and others “new," information. The function
of focus prosody is then taken to be that of marking sentence constituents
as “new.” For example, for Jackcndoff (1972:240) the focus of a sentence
is "the semantic material associated with surface structure nodes
dominated by F," where F stands for "non-shared information.” For
Selkirk (1984:2060 “a focused constituent [i.e. a constituent to which a
pitch accent is assigned] contributes “new information” to the discourse,
Definition offocus
209
while a non-focused constituent is understood to be “old information.”
While I agree that correlations must be established between phrasal
accents and the statuses of the denotata of such phrases in the minds of
the interlocutors, the simple equation between accent and new
information is inadequate, especially if the concept of "new informa­
tion" is used as an unanalyzed primitive.1
The approach to focus based on the segmentation view of information
conflicts with the analysis which I presented in Chapter 2. As I argued
there, information is not conveyed by lexical items or individual sentence
constituents but only by establishing relations between denotata and
propositions. Consequently, if focus has to do with the conveying of
information, the function of grammatical focus marking must be to
express such relations rather than to attribute the property “new” to the
denotata of individual sentence constituents. Here, as in many other
cases, it is crucial to distinguish between pragmatic relations and
pragmatic properties. Focus, like topic, is a relational pragmatic
category. Grammatical devices which serve the purpose of indicating
pragmatic properties of the denotata of individual sentence constituents
(such as the property of being “new" in the discourse) are by definition
devices for marking differences in the identifiability and activation
states of discourse referents, not differences in the relations between
denotata and propositions. The specific issue of the relationship between
focus and the activation states of referents will be discussed in Section
B 5-4-
Let us look again at example (2.7), which I repeat here for convenience
as (5.1):
^R (5.1)
Q. Where did you go last night?
A: 1 went to the movies.
^R In some intuitive sense, we are no doubt justified in saying, with Bolinger,
M that the word movies, or perhaps the phrase ihe movies, in the answer
^R indicates the point “where there is the greatest concentration of
information," or, with Halliday, that this word is the element “whereby
the speaker marks out [the] part ... of [the] message block which he
wishes to be interpreted as informative.” Nevertheless, it would be
inaccurate to say that this word, or this phrase, “is the focus," if focus is
identified with new information. The expression (the) movies in (5.1) can
^R have information value only as an element of the proposition expressed
^R by the entire sentence. What is “new" is not the constituent, nor its
I
210
Pragmatic relations: focus
designaturn, but its role as the second argument of the predicate "go-to”
in the pragmatically presupposed open proposition “speaker went to x."
Equally inaccurate would be the claim that the new information is
expressed in the prepositional phrase to the movies, since the directional
meaning of the preposition to is recoverable from the word where in the
question.
The information conveyed by the answer in (5.1) is neither “movies,”
nor “the movies,” nor "to the movies” but the abstract proposition “The
place I went to last night was the movies." It is only as the predicate of
this abstract proposition that the expression the movies-at rather its
denotatum-may be said to be the focus in (5.1). Thus when we say that
the phrase the movies is the focus of the answer in (5.1) what we mean is
that the denotatum of this phrase stands in a pragmatically construed
relation to the proposition such that its addition makes the utterance of
the sentence a piece of new information. This pragmatic relation between
a denotatum and a proposition will be called focus relation. In the reply
in (5.1) it is the establishment of such a focus relation between the
denotatum the movies and the rest of the proposition that creates the new
state of information in the addressee’s mind. The function of focus
marking is then not to mark a constituent as new but to signal a focus
relation between an element of a proposition and the proposition as a
whole. In those cases where no such relation exists, i.e. where the focus
element coincides with the entire proposition, the function of focus
marking is to indicate the absence of a focus-presupposition contrast (see
Section 5.7.2).
The intuitive appeal and terminological convenience of the notions
“old information" and “new information" are such that these terms are
often misleadingly used even in carefully worked-out analyses. Consider
the question-answer pair used by Jackendoff (1972:229) to illustrate the
concepts of focus and presupposition:
(5.2)
a. Is it John who writes poetry? (JackendofTs (6.1))
b. No, it is bill who writes poetry. (JackendoiTs (6.2))
According to Jackendoff, in the question in (5.2a) "the presupposition is
that someone writes poetry. John is the focus." In the answer in (5.2b),
“the presupposition is also that someone writes poetry, and Bill is the
focus, the new information being conveyed" (1972:230). To understand
why it is misleading to call the focus constituent Bill in this answer "the
Definition offocus
211
new information" let us consider another, more natural, answer to the
question in (5.2a), i.e. (5.2’).
(5.2’)
No,
BILL.
The new information conveyed in this answer, as in the answer in (5.2b),
is clearly not the noun or constituent Bill. What makes uttering the word
Bill informative is the fact that the hearer establishes a relationship
between the individual Bill and the subject argument in the understood
proposition “someone writes poetry" or. more technically, between the
referent of the noun Bill and the propositional function “x writes
poetry," where "Bill" replaces the variable x. In the present case, where
the “focused” word and the semantic domain of the focus coincide, my
criticism may be no more than a terminological quibble. However, as we
shall see later on, the relationship between a focus accent and the
semantic domain which it symbolizes is often extremely indirect. In such
cases, the equation of “focused element" with “new information” stands
in the way of a proper understanding of the mechanism of focus marking.
Earlier I used the somewhat vague terms “unpredictable” and “nonrecoverable" to characterize the pragmatic relation between the focus
element and the proposition Though vague, these terms seem to capture
the nature of the focus relation better than the term "new." Consider the
variant of (5.11 in (5.1'):
(5.1’)
Q: Where d>d you go last night, to the movies or to the restaurant''
A: We went to the restaurant.
In the answer in (5.1”) the denotatum of the NP the restaurant can safely
be assumed to be discourse-active at the time of utterance since it was
mentioned in the immediately preceding question. It is "old," not "new."
in the sense that it does not need to be activated in order to be efficiently
processed as an argument in the proposition. Nevertheless this
denotatum has a focus relation to the proposition, hence the constituent
coding it is a focus expression, hence it must be accented What makes
this constituent focal is not the assumed cognitive state of the
representation of its referent in the addressee's mind, nor the nature of
the semantic relation between it and the predicate (the semantic role of
the focus argument in the reply, whether it is the mew.i or the restaurant.
can be expected to be directional), hut rather the lact that it is this
denotatum, and not another possible one, that is chosen to supply the
missing argument in the open proposition "speaker went to x. It is in
212
Pragmatic relations: focus
this relational sense that the focus element can be said to be
“unpredictable" or “non-recoverable" at the time of utterance.
Notice, incidentally, that the accent on the noun restaurant in (5.1") is
not “contrastive" in any clear sense. This observation will be of
importance in Section 5.5, where I will argue that the notion of
contrastiveness cannot be used to account for the occurrence of accented
constituents whose denotata are discourse-active at the time of utterance
(such as the restaurant in (5 1')).
The fact that it is not the accented constituent itself that conveys the
new information but the establishment of a relation between the
denotatum of this constituent and an abstract proposition is clearly
stated by Akmajian (1973) in his discussion of the role of focus in the
interpretation of anaphoric expressions. Akmajian illustrates the
relationship between focus and presupposition with the following
example:
(5.3)
mitchell
urged Nixon to appoint Carswell.
Akmajian analyzes the proposition expressed by this sentence as the
complex semantic structure in (5.3'):
(5.3’)
"[ x urged Nixon to appoint Carswell ¡, [ x = Mitchell
He then writes:
Note that ... the focus component of the semantic reading is given as a
semantic relation, not a single term .. The focus constituent of a
sentence represents novel information not because the constituent is
necessarily novel, but rather because the semantic relation which the
constituent enters into is novel with respect to a given universe of '
discourse ... The entire expression "[x = Mitchell]," then, is taken to be 1
what the speaker assumes to represent novel information to the hearer. 1
(1973:218)
J
II
Akmajian here defines focus clearly as a semantic relation rather than as 4
a property of a constituent?
.1
My concept of focus is similar to Akmajian's, with two terminological I
and conceptual provisos. The first proviso concerns the expression!
“entering a semantic relation." Since in Akmajian’s example we already!
know from the presupposition component of the semantic reading thatj
the missing argument will have the semantic role of agent in the!
proposition it is strictly speaking not the semantic relation entered into®
by the focus denotatum that is novel in the universe of discourse. RatherJ
■
Definition offocus
213
what is novel is the fact that a particular denotatum is chosen as the agent
argument. This is what I referred to above as the focus relation. This
focus relation is perhaps better characterized as pragmatic than as
semantic.
।
The second proviso concerns the fact that what Akmajian calls the
“focus component of the semantic reading” is closely related to what I
1 have called the "(pragmatic) assertion” in Chapter 2. Akmajian thus
conflates here two notions which 1 think ought to be distinguished:
[ ‘.‘pragmatic assertion" and “focus.” The expression “(x = Mitchell]"
' indicates a relation between an element which is, and an element which is
I not, part of the presupposition, given that the x stands for “the (set of)
r individual(s) that urged Nixon to appoint Carswell," which is not a focus
[ denotatum. To capture the fact that the focus is the complement of the
f presupposition it is necessary to separate the two terms of the relation,
r I propose then the following modified analysis of Akmajian's example:
1 the expression “[x urged Nixon to appoint Carswell]" in (5.3”) is the
■ pragmatic presupposition (the “old information”); the expression “[x =
1 Mitchell]" is the assertion (the “new information"); and the right-hand
t side of the equation which constitutes the assertion is the focus. In this
r analysis, the focus is indeed a term, but a term in a pragmatic relation.
L The word “focus” is then to be understood as shorthand for “focus of the
r assertion” or “focus of the new information."
f. My definition of “focus” is given in (5.4). The terms “(pragmatic)
' presupposition” and “(pragmatic) assertion” in (5.4) are as defined in
। example (2.12) of Chapter 2;
F (5.4)
t
focus: The semantic component of a pragmatically structured
proposition whereby the assertion differs from the presupposition.
E Example (5.4) implies that if a sentence evokes no presupposition, focus
r and assertion coincide. This situation obtains often (but not always) in
F thetic sentences, such as It's raihiisg.
| It is very important to understand that focus is defined in (5.4) as a
| semantico-pragmatic, not a formal, category. It is defined at the semantic
I level of the (pragmatically structured) proposition, not at the grammaEtical level of the (syntactically structured) sentence. The pragmatic
^category "focus" must be sharply distinguished from its grammatical
Jfrealization in the sentence, i.e. the syntactic domain in which it is
f expressed and the prosodic means whereby this syntactic domain is
P marked, i.e. the means of sentence accentuation. The distinction between
214
Pragmatic relations: focus
focus and sentence accent is particularly important since-as mentioned
earlier-sentence accentuation is not a focus-marking device per se but a
general device for the marking of semantic portions within pragmatically
structured propositions, whether focal or not. The focus construal of a
proposition is determined by a number of grammatical factors, only one
of which is prosodic.
A semantic element which is part of the focus component of a
pragmatically structured proposition will be said to be in focus or
focal, independently of whether the constituent coding it carries an
accent or not. For example, if we were to use sentence (5.1) We went to
the movies as a reply to the question “What did you do last night?" the
designata expressed by the (relatively) unaccented constituents went and
to would be in focus together with that of the accented constituent
movies. The expression "in focus” (or “focal”) is the converse of the
expression “in the presupposition” which I introduced in Section 4.3.
(Recall that I reserve the adjective "presupposed” for propositional
designata.) A denotatum which is not in focus is necessarily in the
presupposition. For example, in sentence (5.1) the topical subject
pronoun we is in the presupposition.
The word or minimal constituent carrying the focus accent will be
referred to as the accented constituent, e.g. Mitchel! in (5.3) or movies
in (5.1). (For reasons of typographic clarity, I capitalize words, or
sometimes morphemes within words, rather than the syllables, or
segments of syllables, which carry the pitch accent.) I will avoid the
term “focused constituent” which is sometimes found in the literature,
because accented constituents are not necessarily focus expressions and
because it tends to blur the distinction between a pragmatic category
(focus) and a prosodic category (pitch prominence). It should be obvious
from what I have said so far that accented constituents are not necessarily
coextensive with focal elements. While in our paradigm example (5.3)
focus, focal element, and accented constituent all converge on the same
word (the proper noun Mitchell), such convergence is by no means the
norm. One of the main issues to be dealt with in this chapter is the
ppmplex problem of the relationship between focus domains and
prosodic prominence. We can refer to this problem as the problem of
FOCUS projection, using a term introduced by Höhle (1982).
The syntactic domain in a sentence which expresses the focus
component of the pragmatically structured proposition v.ill be called
the focus domain. For example in (5.1) and (5 3) the focus domains are
Definition offocus
215
the noun phrases the movies and Mitchell} It follows from my definition
of “focus" that focus domains must be constituents whose denotata are
capable of producing assertions when added to presuppositions. As we
shall see, such denotata are either predicates or arguments (including
adjuncts), or else complete propositions. This entails that focus domains
must be phrasal categories (verb or adjective phrases, noun phrases,
prepositional phrases, adverbial phrases, and sentences). Focus domains
cannot be lexical categories. This is so because information structure is
not concerned with words and their meanings, nor with the relations
between the meanings of words and those of phrases or sentences, but
with the pragmatic construal of the relations between entities and states
of affairs in given discourse situations. Entities and states of affairs are
syntactically expressed in phrasal categories, not in lexical items.
Let us look at an example. While a predicate phrase can express the
focus of a proposition, a predicator by itself cannot. Consider (5.5):
(5.5)
And then, when we’d finished talking about pigs, we started talking to
the pigs.
In the main clause, the preposition alone is accented and we could say,
with Bolinger, that this preposition constitutes in some sense the
“information point" of the clause, since the remaining elements we,
talk, and the pigs, as well as their semantic relation to each other, are
pragmatically recoverable. Nevertheless the predicator to cannot by itself
be the focus constituent of that clause. Since its denotatum is purely
relational, it cannot supply an element of information whose addition to
a presupposition would result in an assertion. The stnng “we talked x the
pigs" is not a viable presupposition. Thus while the question-answer
pairs in (5.6)-though stilted make sense
(5 6)
a. What was the relation between you and the pigs9
b. What did you do to the pigs'1 Talk to them.
A talking relation,
the exchanges in (5.6”) do not:
(5.6’J
a. *Whal uras the talking relation between you and the pigs’1 - A torelation
b *What did you talk the pigs'1 To
In (5.6), the NP a talking relation and the VP talk to them are capable of
supplying meaningful complements to the presuppositions created by the
questions, but the expressions involving the bare preposition to in (5.6 )
are not. The focus domain in (5.5) is the prepositional phrase to the pigs
216
Pragmatic relations: focus
(or the verb phrase started talking to the pigs, see Section 5.6.1), not the
preposition io.
।
i
The above remarks lead us to an important conclusion. Since, on the
one hand, the referent designated by the complement of the preposition
(the pigs) is not only discourse-active but also topical in the sentence-the
sentence is about the relation between the speakers and the pigs-but
since, on the other hand, this noun phrase is nevertheless part of the focus
domain, it follows that focus domains must be allowed to contain con­
focal elements. (As we shall see, the reverse is not true, i.e. focus elements
may not be pan of topical domains.) I will return to this important
conclusion in Section 5.3.3.
Here is another example, involving a focus domain containing a
modifier:
(5.7)
a. Which shirt did you buy? - I bought the green one.
The green one.
•green.
b. What color is your shirt? - green.
The question in (5.7a) may be answered either with a full sentence or with ■
a full noun phrase, but not with the adjectival modifier alone, even 1
though the constituents which distinguish the second from the third
version, i.e. the and one, are fully predictable elements in the answer (the
definite article is lhe symbol of the identifiability of the referent, the
unaccented pronominal one is a topic expression with an active referent, ’
see Section 4.4.3). Thus the focus domain of the answer must be the NP ■
the green one (or the VP bought rhe green one), not the adjective green.
Indeed what the addressee is being informed of is not the color of a shirt '
but the identity of a purchased item. The string “1 bought the x shirt” is ।
not a viable presupposition. This is so because a modification relation
within a noun phrase is necessarily pragmatically presupposed, as an
application of the lie-test (Section 2.3) will reveal. Therefore an adjectival ,
modifier alone cannot constitute a focus domain. Notice, however, that
the ill-formedness of lhe third answer in (a) is not due to the fact that an
adjective cannot serve as a focus domain. As (5.7b) shows, the adjective’
phrase green does constitute a well-formed focus domain if its^M
designatum is construed as the predicate of an asserted proposition. Inj|M
this sentence the addressee is indeed being informed of the color of a
shirt. The string “The shirt is x-color” forms a viable presupposition. *
Definition offocus
217
It is important to state from the outset that focus domains may contain
constituents denoting pragmatically presupposed propositions. We saw
that the proposition which is evoked by the modification construction the
green one in (5.7a), i.e. “the shirt is green," is pragmatically presupposed.
Nevertheless, the NP which codes this proposition is in focus. Similarly,
in the following variant of example (5.3), in which the proper noun
, Mitchell is replaced by an indefinite noun phrase:
i (5.3")
One of his close collaborators urged Nixon to appoint Carswell.
> the referent of the subject one of his close collaborators is in focus, but the
proposition evoked within the focus NP, i.e. that Nixon has close
i collaborators, is pragmatically presupposed. If someone were to
j challenge the utterance in (5.3”) by saying “That's not true,” this
I challenge would involve the identity of the agent who did the urging, not
r the notion that Nixon has close collaborators. Notice also that the
i possessive determiner his in (5.3”), referring to the individual “Nixon,” is
| a topic expression, whose pragmatic status is unambiguously expressed
i by the fact that it is an unaccented referential pronominal (see Section
[ 4.4.3). The status of this determiner is comparable to that of the NP the
i pigs in (5.5) and the pronoun one in (5.7a), all of whom are topical
I expressions within focus domains.
Focus domains may not only contain constituents coding pragmatiI cally presupposed propositions but they may be coextensive with such
F constituents. A clear example is the adverbial clause When I was seventeen
f in example (2.8), uttered in reply to the question JWieri did you move to
I Switzerland? Both the time relation expressed by when and the
| proposition "1 was seventeen” are “old” in the discourse. As I
I emphasized before, what creates the assertion is not the focus denotatum
I by itself but the establishment of a relation between the denotatum and
L the proposition. In the reply in (2.8), the assertion is created by
I establishing a lime relation between two known situations. I will return to
I the issue of presuppositions within focus domains in Section 5.4.3.
F
Let me summarize the analysis presented in this section. The focus of a
F proposition is that element of a pragmatically structured proposition
I which makes the utterance of the sentence expressing the proposition into
| a piece of information. It is the balance remaining when one subtracts the
I presupposed component from a given assertion. When a sentence evokes
। no presupposition, focus and assertion coincide. Like the topic, the focus
I is an element which stands in a pragmatically construed relation to a
218
Pragmatic relations: focus
proposition. But while the pragmatic relation between a topic and a
proposition is assumed to be predictable or recoverable, the relation
between the focus element and the proposition is assumed to be
unpredictable or non-recoverable for the addressee at the time of the
utterance. The focus relation relates the pragmatically non-recoverable to
the recoverable component of a proposition and thereby creates a new
state of information in the mind of the addressee. Focus marking is then
the formal mechanism for signalling a focus relation between a
pragmatically construed denotatum and a proposition. The focus of a
proposition may be marked prosodically, morphologically, syntactically,
or via a combination of prosodic and morphosyntactic means. Following
the multiple-level approach to grammatical analysis sketched in Section
1.3, I will emphasize in my discussion the relationship between prosodic
and morphosyntactic focus-marking devices, as well as the relationship
between focus marking and other aspects of information structure, in
particular activation, identifiability, and topic.
5.1.2
Focus and sentence accents
It will be useful to elaborate briefly on an issue which I hinted at before
and which might appear to be a problem for the approach to focus and
focus marking adopted here. Since the definition in (5.4) makes crucial
reference to the contrast between presupposition and assertion, the
occurrence of focus accents (or other focus-marking devices) is
necessarily restricted to sentences whose propositions are asserted.
However there are numerous contexts-such as those mentioned at the
tad of the preceding section-in which the content of a proposition is
presupposed, i.e. assumed to be known to the addressee, but in which the
constituent expressing this proposition nevertheless carries an accent. As
we saw, one situation in which this happens is when the constituent
evoking the presupposition functions as a focal argument in an assertion.
But a constituent expressing a presupposed proposition may carry’ an
accent even if it is not in focus. This situation anses often when a
presupposed proposition serves as a topical argument (or adjunct) in an
asserted proposition. One such context was illustrated in (4.2d):
(4.2)
d. (John was very busy that morning.) After the children went to
school, he had to clean the house and go shopping for the party
Definition offocus
I
'
2! 9
As I observed in the discussion of this example in Section 4.1.1, the
proposition “the children went to school” expressed in the subordinate
clause is not being asserted in the context of (4.2d) but informationally
speaking taken for granted. The designated event, which is assumed to be
known to the addressee, merely serves as a temporal reference point for
the events expressed in the main clause propositions. As we saw in that
discussion, the presuppositional status of the subordinate clause
proposition has implications for the topic status of its subject NP the
children. In one sense, this NP may be seen as a topic, since the
proposition is about the referent of the NP; in another sense, it is not a
topic, since the comment about the topic is not new to the addressee, i.e.
does not increase the hearer’s knowledge of the topic referent.
An analogous observation can be made about the pragmatic status of
the predicate went to school in (4.2d). In one sense, this predicate is focal,
inasmuch as it expresses a comment about the subject referent, in another
sense it is not focal, since in the context of (4.2d) the comment does not
constitute an assertion. The accent on school can therefore not properly
be called a focus accent, even though it is prosodically similar to the focus
accent in the independent sentence (4.2a) (The children went to school),
whose proposition is asserted. Rather, the function of the accent is to
reactivate the referent of the presupposed proposition and to announce
its role as a scene-setting topic for the main-clause proposition. As we
saw in Section 3.1, propositional referents may be stored in long-term
memory like entities and, like the latter, they must be activated in order
to be used as arguments in new assertions. The accent in question is
therefore more properly called an activation accent I will return to the
issue of the difference between focus accents and activation accents in
Section 5.7, where I will suggest a unified account of sentence
accentuation in which the two types are seen as two expressions of a
single underlying discourse function: that of establishing a relation, either
topical or focal, between a designatum and a proposition
Notice that under the right discourse circumstances even the
identificational allosentence in (4.2b) (The cHttiw. went to school)
could occur within a topical, i e. non-local, adverbial clause, as in After
the children went to school, he hud to clean the holse ... This sentence
would be appropriate e.g. in a context in which the known event of the
children's departure for school is contrasted with a known event
involving someone else’s departure. Finally, the adverbial clause could
also be entirely unaccented This would be appropriate in a discourse
220
Pragmatic relations: focus
situation in which the referent of the presupposed proposition would be
both topical and discourse-active at the time of utterance. For example in
a situation where someone asked us about John’s activities after his
children left for school we could answer He had to clean the house after
they went to school, where the postposed adverbial clause is entirely
unaccented.
Here is another example illustrating the issue at hand. Consider again
sentence (5.3) with its NP focus domain. In a discourse context in which
the proposition expressed in (5.3) would constitute already-shared
knowledge between the interlocutors, the accent might still fall on the
subject NP Mitchell. Consider the possible replies to (5.3) uttered by
speaker B in (5.8):
(5.8)
1» L
r ”
i
j
J
i
j
i
]
I
1
A:
mitchell urged Nixon to appoint j
Carswell. (= (5.3))
B: a. Well if mitchell did it, then what's the problem?
' *
b. 1 wonder why mitchell did it.
1
c. Surprise, surprise. So mitchell was the one.
j
By placing the accent on the same constituent as in speaker A's utterance i
(i.e. on the subject Mitchell), speaker B uses the focus structure of A’s ]
assertion as the point of departure for the assertion expressed in his reply, j
as a kind of “second-instance” focus articulation. Version (a) of speaker j
B’s reply for example could be loosely paraphrased as follows: “Given the i
previously known fact that some individual urged Nixon to appoint 1
Carswell, and given the now known fact that the individual in question is;
Mitchell, I ask what the problem is." The presuppositions evoked in such 1
sentences are “layered," so to speak,
1
Such cases of layered presuppositions are not limited to contexts in I
which a speaker literally reproduces a previously occurring focus '
prosody. B’s responses in (5.8) would be possible also if A’s utterance-;
had been as in (5.9):
(5.9)
A: Mitchell urged Nixon to appoint carswell.
B: I wonder why mitchell did it.
The pragmatic articulation in speaker A's utterance in (5.9) is that of a
topic^comment sentence, in which the fact that Nixon was urged to J
appoint Carswell is not presupposed but asserted. By choosing a different 1
focus articulation of the proposition in his reply, speaker B acts as if thej
presuppositional situation at the time of his utterance were in fact that)
evoked in (5.3) (in which the fact that someone urged Nixon to appoint]
Focus structure and focus marking
221
Carswell was already known) and thereby invites his addressee to
accommodate this different presuppositional situation in the universe of
discourse.4
F 5.2
Focus structure and focus marking
i 5.2.1
Types offocus structure
[ The approach to the grammar of focus adopted here is based on the idea
L that the focus articulations of sentences can be divided into in a number
I of distinct types which correspond to different kinds of pragmatically
I structured propositions. These focus types are used in different
| communicative situations and are manifested across languages in
I distinct formal categories. Since in English the focus articulation of a
I proposition is often expressed by prosody alone, and since accent
■ placement can be seen as a linear continuum from left to right, the
I existence of such distinct focus types has gone widely unnoticed in the
I literature on English. My approach to prosodic focus marking differs
■ then from most current approaches in that various focus-accent positions
■ are not interpreted as signaling different points on a continuum leading
i from the narrowest to the broadest kind of focus. Rather they are seen as
E prosodic correlates for a small number of discrete information-structure
■ categories, each of which expresses a different type of focus meaning.
E Now since there are more possible focus-accent positions than focus
E categories, it follows that different accent positions can be manifestations
■ of the same focus category.
I , One advantage of my approach is that it offers a way out of the
I “segmentation” problem I mentioned in Section 5.1.1 by identifying
| focus domains with major syntactic and semantic categories. Another
I. advantage is that it makes it possible to capture semantic correspon| dences between formally divergent but functionally identical sentences
K across or within languages, in particular between sentences with prosodic
k and non-prosodic focus marking. The prosodic expression of focus
c categories will be discussed in detail in Section 5.6. In the present section,
my goal is mainly to establish the existence of such categories by
| comparing a number of focus-marking mechanisms in different
| languages.
i i The sets of examples which 1 will discuss-many of which are familiar
r from previous chapters - are parallel to the examples which I used in
222
Pragmatic relations: focus
Chapter 4 to illustrate the category of topic (examples (4.2) (a) through
(c)). The three pragmatic categories established with those earlier
examples, i.e. the “topic-comment,” the “identificational," and the
“event-reporting" (or “presentational") categories, will be reformulated
focus structure. By the "focus structure” of a
sentence I mean the conventional association of a focus meaning with a
sentence form. The unmarked subject-predicate (topic-comment)
sentence type in (4.2a), in which the predicate is the focus and in which
the subject (plus any other topical elements) is in the presupposition, will
be said to have predicate-focus structure; the identificational type
illustrated in (4.2b), in which the focus identifies the missing argument in
a presupposed open proposition, will be said to have argument-focus
structure; and the event-reporting or presentational sentence type, in
which the focus extends over both the subject and the predicate (minus
any topical non-subject elements), will be said to have sentence-focus
structure.3
The terms “predicate focus," “argument focus,” and “sentence focus"
play on the notorious ambiguity of the terms “predicate,” "argument,”
and “sentence" as referring both to semantic and to syntactic categories.
They evoke both differences in the respective syntactic focus domains,
such as VP, NP, PP, S, and differences in the focus portions of the
pragmatically structured proposition, i.e. predicate, argument, and
sentence. (The English word “sentence” is nowadays used almost
exclusively to designate a formal category, but its origin in Latin
senlentia “judgment” is still transparent in some of its uses.) Notice that
the terms “subject," “predicate," and “sentence" themselves will be used
in the traditional way, i.e. to designate semantic rather than pragmatic
categories (see the terminological remarks in Section 5.2.3 below). In
combining the semantico-syntactic terms “predicate,” “argument," and
“sentence” with the pragmatic term “focus," my intention is to capture
the correlation between certain formal and semantic categories and
certain types of communicative functions, such as the function of
commenting on a given topic of conversation (predicate focus), of
identifying a referent (argument focus), or of reporting an event or
presenting a new discourse referent (sentence focus). There is thus a
correlation between type of focus structure and type of communicative
situation.
The three focus-structure categories are illustrated in the three sets of
English, Italian, (spoken) French, and Japanese examples below. While in
here in terms of their
Focus structure and focus marking
223
the English examples in (4.2) certain differences in presuppositions!
structure were not overtly marked, the example sets discussed here are
sets of allosentences proper, i.e. they express differences in information
structure via differences in prosody or morphosyntax. The formal
identity of some of the examples in (5.11) and (5.12) will be explained
later on as a case of functionally motivated homophony (Section 5.6.2.3),
As usual, the questions preceding the examples suggest discourse
situations in which the structures could be used appropriately:
(5.10)
PREDICATE-FOCUS STRUCTURE
What happened to your car?
a. My car/lt broke down.
b. (La mia macchina) si e rotta.
c. (Ma voiture) elie est en panne.
d. (Kuruma wa) KosHOo-shi-ta.
(5.H)
ARGUMENT-FOCUS STRUCTURE
I heard your motorcycle broke down9
a. My car broke down.
b. Si e rotta la mia macchina./£ la mia
c. Cest ma voiture qui est en panne
d. kuruma ga koshoc-shi-ta.
(5.12)
macchina
che si e rotta.
SENTENCE-FOCUS STRUCTURE
What happened?
a. My car broke down.
b. Mi si ¿ rotta (rotta) la macchina.
c. J'ai ma voiture qui est en panne
d. kuruma ga Kosnoo-shi-ta.
Concerning the predicate-focus examples in (5.10), it is clear that in che
minimal context provided here the sentences would be most natural with
pronominal or null subjects. The versions with lexical topic NPs are
included here as possible grammatical alternatives, which would be
required in discourse contexts tn which the topic referent is pragmatically
less accessible. The two Italian sentences in (5.1 lb) illustrate two formal
types which could occur in the minimally specified context (the defied
version is perceived as somewhat stilted by some speakers). 1 am not
claiming that these two types are equivalent in all discourse contexts (see
below).
It is worth noticing, in this context, that the optionality of the lexical
NPs in (5.10) is evidence for their topical, i.e non-focai, status A
a
■I »
*V
r ♦"
JJ4
Pragmatic relations: Jbcus
constituent in focus can by definition not be omitted without depriving
the utterance of some or all of its information value. One might argue
that the difference between a sentence with a lexical topic expression and
a sentence with a pronominal or phonologically null topic expression
should also be seen as a difference in focus structure, since in many
discourse contexts topic NPs such as those in (5.10) may not be omitted
without “loss of information.” However, what is lost in such cases is not
propositional information, in the sense in which this term is understood
in this book, but rather the addressee’s ability to activate the referent of
the topic with respect to which the information is to be construed as
relevant. Such differences in the pragmatic accessibility of the referents of
topic expressions have no direct bearing on the focus category of the
sentence.
Concerning the argument-focus example in (5.11) I should emphasize
that the choice of a grammatical subject as the focus argument is an
artefact of the exposition. The term “argument-focus structure” applies
in principle to any sentence in which the focus is an argument rather than
a predicate or an entire proposition. Nevertheless, as we will see towards
the end of this chapter, there is an intrinsic relation between the formal
marking of argument focus and the role of the argument as a subject. It
should be noted also that the word “argument" in “argument focus” is
used here as a cover term for any non-predicating expression in a
proposition, i.e. it includes terms expressing place, time, and manner. It is
neutral with respect to the issue of the valence of predicates
("subcategorization”) and the argument-adjunct distinction.
The focus-marking mechanisms illustrated in these sets of examples
are in short the following: (i) exclusively prosodic (English); (ii) prosodic
and morphological (use of iva vs. ga with the subject/topic noun in
Japanese); (iii) prosodic and syntactic (word-order variation in Italian);
(iv) constructional (French and Italian) 6 I will make no attempt to
characterize different kinds of pitch accent or other phonetic variations
across languages or within one language, as 1 do not consider these
relevant to the issue of focus marking (see 5.3.1 below). In general, I will
also ignore secondary accents which may accompany the main focus
accent, except when such accents serve to mark particular informationstructure contrasts.
The focus-marking strategies illustrated tn (5.101 through (5.12) do not
exhaust the grammatical possibilities lound across languages. A more
complete typology of focus-marking mechanisms would have to mention
'
।
J
1
1
j
j
1
1
1
1
1
J
I
1
1
1
1
1
1
I
1
1
ri
3
1
j
"I
Focus structure and focus marking
225
for example the marking of focus-structure distinctions within the
morphology of the verb, as in various African languages (see e.g. Given
1975a, Sasse 1987, Watters 1979). Nor does the above account exhaust
the formal possibilities offered within the four languages mentioned. For
example, under certain conditions both English and French permit the
placement of a focal object constituent in presubject (“topicalized”)
position, resulting in the argument-focus construction called “focus
movement" in Prince (1981b) (e.g. macadamia huts they're called; see also
Stempel 1981). Like French, though less freely, English may also use cleft
constructions; and French, like Italian, may use (a type of) subject-verb
inversion for a restricted set of thetic sentences (see Lambrecht 1986b,
Section 7.5). Determining the appropriateness conditions for the use of
alternative focus-marking devices for the same general focus category is a
complex matter, which is beyond the scope of this chapter.
It is necessary to mention that focus-structure homophony may occur
not only in prosodic systems, as in the English examples in (5.11) and
(5.12), but also in morphosyntactic systems. For example, in Italian and
other Romance languages subject verb inversion may be used not only
for thetic sentences, as in (5.12), but also for certain argument-focus
sentences (see the alternative Italian sentence in (5.11b) or the Spanish
example in (5.51) below). The existence of such cases of homophony is
consistent with the observations made in Section 1.4.2 concerning the
multiple discourse functions of syntactic structures.
The only focus-marking device which all of our examples have in
common is prosodic prominence of a given syllable in the sentence. It is
also the only device which occurs by itself, without being complemented
by another coding system (as e.g. in English). It would seem therefore
that the role of prosody in focus marking is in some sense functionally
more important than morphosyntactic marking. This is no doubt a
consequence of the iconic relationship between pitch prominence and the
degree of communicative importance assigned to the focal portion of a
proposition (see 5.2.2). However, in insisting on the fundamental
importance of prosody in the marking of focus structure I do not wish
to claim that the relationship between focus and prosody is universal.
Nor am I in a position to establish any systematic relationship between
language type and the use of one rather than another type of focus
marking. I believe that differences in the rhythmic structure of languages
account at least in part for the use of particular focus-marking systems.
For example it seems likely that in French the prevalent use of cleft
226
Pragmatic relations: focus
constructions for the marking of focus differences is at least in part due to
the fact that this language has both a relatively rigid constituent order
and a relatively rigid rhythmic structure (see my remarks to this effect in
Section 1.3.4), However, extensive typological research is necessary to
substantiate such ideas. In the remainder of this chapter, I will be
concerned mainly with the nature of prosodic marking,
5.2.2 Predicate-focus structure
In the predicate-focus structure in (5,10), the relevant presupposition
evoked in the reply is that the speaker’s car is pragmatically available as a
topic for discussion, i.e. that the proposition can be construed as a
comment about this topic (see Section 4.3); the assertion is the
establishment of an aboutness relation between the topic referent and
the event denoted by the predicate; and the focus is the predicate “broke
down.” The sentence accent marks the predicate denotatum as the focus
of the proposition. The information structure of (5.10) is schematically
represented in (5.10’):
(5.I0T)
Sentence:
Presupposition:
Assertion:
Focus:
Focus domain:
My car broke boh'.v.
"speaker’s car is a topic for comment x"
“x = broke down"
“broke down"
VP
There is no contradiction between the representation of the (relevance)
presupposition as an open proposition-hence as lacking a truth valueand the nature of the presupposed proposition as being pragmatically
taken for granted since it is not the truth of the proposition that is at issue
here but its assumed availability in the mind of the addressee at the time
of speech (see Section 2.2).
Formally, the predicate-focus structure of (5.10) is minimally
expressed in all four languages by prosodic prominence on an element
of the predicate, marking the predicate phrase as the focus domain. The
presence of such prominence is a necessary condition for predicate­
focus construal of a proposition. (However, it is not a sufficient
condition; see Section 5.6.1.) The focus structure of the sentence is also
expressed by the fact that the subject is marked as a topic, hence as being
excluded from the focus domain. This topic appears either in the
preferred form, i.e. as an unaccented pronominal (cf. Section 4.4.3), or as
a lexical NP, or as both. In French. Japanese, and Italian, the lexical NP is
Focus structure and focus marking
|
If
I
j
1
।
I
227
morphosyntactically marked for its topic function (left-detachment, wumarking, preverbal position). In English, it is marked only prosodically,
via the absence of an accent. Notice that, unlike the presence of prosodic
prominence on the predicate phrase, lack of prominence on the subject
NP is not a necessary condition for predicate focus. The topical subject of
a predicate-focus sentence may be accented (see example (4.2c') and
Section 5.5.2 below).7
In the representation in (5.10") I have only taken into account those
aspects of the information structure of the sentences which are necessary
to distinguish the predicate-focus type in (5.10) from the other focus
categories. A more complete representation of the information structure
of the different sentences in (5.10) would have to mention other
presuppositional features as well. For example in the English sentence
involving a lexical subject NP (Afy car broke down} the following
presuppositional features are evoked in addition to that mentioned in
(5.10’): (i) the possessive NP my car evokes the presupposition that the
speaker has a car; (ii) the definiteness of the NP my car evokes the
presupposition that the referent of the NP is identifiable; (iii) the
unaccented pronominal my evokes the presupposition that a second
referent, i.e. the speaker, is topical; (iv) both the determiner my and the
NP my car evoke the presupposition that the referents of these
expressions (i.e. the speaker and her car) are active in the mind of the
addressee: the first by virtue of being a pronoun, the second by virtue of
being unaccented.
What is not to be represented as a presupposition evoked by the
sentence in (5.10”) is the connotation that something happened to the
speaker’s car. This connotation, which is created by the question, is
merely a property of the discourse context, not a grammatical property of
the sentence. It is due to a discourse situation, not to a presuppositional
structure. Recall that the definition of “pragmatic presupposition” in
Chapter 2 requires that a proposition be “lexicogrammatically evoked”
to qualify as a presupposition in the sense of information structure.
In the theoretical framework assumed in the present study, the various
sentence structures in (5.10) — as well as those in (5.11) and (5.12) to be
discussed below -are seen as grammatical constructions. in the sense of
Construction Grammar (see Section 1 4.3), i.e. as grammatical config­
urations in which morphosyn tactic and prosodic features concur to
produce particular form function use correspondences. The information
structure of the proposition expressed in the sentences in (5.10), i.e. the
228
Pragmatic relations: focus
pragmatic construal of the predicate as a comment about the topicsubject, is seen as an intrinsic property of the grammatical construction.
It is a fact of grammar, not merely a case of compatibility between a
pragmatically neutral grammatical structure and a given discourse
function. The fact that the English construction in (5.10a) may occur
also in discourse contexts in which no topic-comment or predicate-focus
meaning is called for (as e.g. in the case of non-referenlial subjects) is
explained by the fact that the predicate-focus structure is the unmarked
pragmatic articulation. The marked pragmatic articulations discussed
below are distributionally more restricted.
5.7.3 Argument-focus structure
The analysis of the argument-focus structures in (5.11) is similar to
that of the previously discussed sentence (5.3) (mitchell urged Nixon to
appoint Carswell). The relevant knowledge presupposition evoked in the
reply in (5.11) is that something belonging to the speaker broke down; the
assertion is that this thing is the speaker’s car; and the focus is “car." The
accent marks the argument "car" as the focus of the proposition.
Schematically:
(5. Il’)
Sentence:
Presupposition:
Assertion:
Focus:
Focus domain:
My car broke down.
"speaker’s x broke down"
“x = car"
"car”
NP
As in the predicate-focus representation in (5.10’), the representation in
(5.11') ignores the various presuppositions evoked by the definite NP my
car, as these are irrelevant for the distinction between focus types. The
focus domain in (5.11’) is given as NP rather than N in accordance with
our definition of focus domains as phrasal categories (Section 5.1.1). The
focal argument, and hence the constituent expressing it, is not “car" but
“my car." But as in previously discussed cases, this focus constituent
contains a non-focal expression, namely the possessive determiner my,
which, by virtue of being an unaccented referential pronominal, is
necessarily a topic expression (see the discussion of example (5.3”)
above). The topical status of the leferent of this determiner (i.e. the
speaker) is expressed in (5 11 ) in the fact that the speaker appears in the
presupposition line, as an entity under discussion.
i
i
1
i
3
1
1
J
1
J
1
Focus structure and focus marking
229
1 should emphasize that the representation in (5.11 ’) leaves unexpressed
one important feature of the information structure of the represented
sentence: the designatum of the open proposition “X broke down" is not
only presupposed to be known to the addressee but it is also marked, via
lack of pitch prominence, as being presently under discussion, i.e. as
active in the discourse. I will return to the important issue of the
relationship between presupposition and activation in Section 5.4.3,
where I will argue that the construal of the knowledge presupposition in
the English version in (5.11) is in fact a consequence of the activation
state of the open proposition.
From the point of view of the actual communicative situation in which
(5.11) is uttered, the schematic representation in (5.11’) is considerably
underspecified. In the given situation, the common ground between the
speaker and the addressee is not simply that something belonging to the
speaker broke down but that the addressee thinks that this something is
the speaker’s motorcycle. The assertion made by uttering this sentence is
therefore not merely the identification of X with the speaker’s car but
also the correction of a mistaken belief on the part of the addressee.
However this aspect of the presuppositional situation is not formally
evoked in the structure of the sentence: the utterance in (5.11) is
compatible also with a situation in which the addressee did not hold such
a mistaken belief. For example, (5.11) could serve as a reply to the
alternative question “What broke down?” Therefore the representation
in (5.11’) does not have to take such facts into account.
This is not to imply that the choice of a different context question could
not have an impact on the information structure of the reply. For example
the just-mentioned alternative context question “What broke down?”
could have as an answer the simple noun phrase My car, an answer which
would be inappropriate in the context provided in (5.11). In this case, the
difference in appropriateness between two replies with respect to a given
question is reflected in a difference in form (one is a full sentence, the
other a sentence fragment). This difference in form would entail a
difference in presuppositional structure. The sentence fragment My car
would therefore require a different information-structure representation.8
Grammatically, the focus structure of the sentences in (5.11) is
expressed in rather heterogeneous ways. In English, we find focus
accentuation of the subject noun and lack of accentuation of all other
constituents. In Japanese, we find focus accentuation plusga-marking on
the subject noun, and lack of accentuation of the rest of the sentence (but
I
i
I
230
9
■
■
■
■
B
■
■
B
B
)
>
i
Pragmatic relations: focus
see note 6, p. 354), In French, and in one of the two Italian versions, a
cleft construction is used, i.e. the semantic content of the proposition is
syntactically represented by a sequence of two clauses. (The cleft
construction is obligatory in French but not in Italian, which also has
the-more natural-option of using a subject-verb inversion construction.) Notice that the first of the two clauses in the cleft construction (E la
mia macchixa. C’est ma voiture) has the syntactic and prosodic form of a
predicate-focus construction, while the second (relative) clause is entirely
unaccented, i.e, has no focus at all, In other words, the focus articulation
of the pragmatically structured proposition, in which the focus
corresponds to an argument in semantic structure, is grammatically
expressed by means of a sequence of two clauses neither of which is
formally marked as having argument-focus structure. The focus meaning
of these two-clause sequences is thus non-compositional, in the sense that
it is not the computable sum of the meaning of its parts. Rather it is a
property of the complex grammatical construction as a whole. While this
construction is clearly motivated pragmatically, neither its form nor its
interpretation are predictable on the basis of general syntactic and
semantic properties of the grammar.
The various focus-marking devices found in the constructions in (5.11)
have one formal feature in common: in all four languages, the NP
expressing the focus denotatum is the only accented constituent in the
sentence. Prosodically, i.e. in terms of accent placement, the argumentfocus structure can therefore be characterized as the reversal of the
predicate-focus structure, in which only the predicate constituent
necessarily carries an accent. This prosodic difference between the
topic-comment type and the identificational type directly reflects the
difference in communicative function. In (5.10) it is pragmatically
predicated of the speaker’s car that it broke down; in (5.11) it is
pragmatically predicated of a broken-down thing that it is the speaker's
car. (This formulation is somewhat misleading and will be revised below,
see also the remarks in Section 4.1,1 about the non-topic status of
presupposed open propositions.) In the former sentence, the semanticsyntactic subject is in the presupposition and the semantic-syntactic
predicate is in focus; in the latter sentence, the semantic-syntactic subject
is in focus and the semantic-syntactic “predicate" is in the presupposition.
The scare quotes around the word “predicate" in the preceding sentence
are the expression of a terminological and definitional dilemma:
"predicate” and "presupposition” seem to exclude each other. It is this
Focus structure and focus marking
231
dilemma that Jespersen had in mind in the passage from his Philosphy of
Grammar quoted at the end of Section 2.2. Recall that according to
Jespersen (and other linguists of his time, see p. 355, note 9) the definition
of the predicate of a sentence as "the element which is added as something
new to the subject" does not apply to a sentence like Peter said that when
used in reply to the question "Who said that?”, a sentence which we can
now categorize as having argument-focus structure. (The terminological
dilemma is less acute with the formulation “the subject is in focus” since
the term “subject,” unlike "predicate," is commonly used to refer both to
a grammatical relation and to a syntactic sentence constituent.)
The terminological dilemma mentioned here is is an expression of a
deeper, conceptual, problem which deserves to be elucidated, as it is a
potential source of misunderstandings and confusion. In the present
analysis, the term “argument-focus structure” applies to a sentence
construction in which a designatum which functions as an argument on
the semantic level of the proposition serves as the focus portion on the
level of information structure. In (5.11), the semantic theme argument
required by the predicate break down, which syntactically appears as the
subject NP my car, is the focus element of the pragmatically structured
proposition “the thing that broke down is the speaker's car." (An
impoverished version of this proposition is represented in the Assertion
line in (5.11’) “X = car ") Now notice that in this pragmatically
structured proposition the focus is in fact construed as a predicate,
namely the predicate "(is) the speaker’s car." This means that in an
argument-focus sentence like (5.11} the designatum of a subject NP (here
my car) is construed simultaneously as an argument on the level of
semantics and as a predicate on the level of information structure.
To capture terminologically the conceptual distinctions I am drawing
here it may be helpful to use alternative labels for “focus" and
“presupposition" which prevent the identification of predicate w'ith
focus and of subject with presupposition while at the same time capturing
the perceived parallel. For lack of a better alternative, I suggest the
expressions pragmatic predicate and pragmatic subject, which contrast
with semantic predicate and semanticsubject. Thus in (5.11) we can say
that the syntactic predicate phrase (or verb phrase) broke down codes both
the semantic predicate “broke down" and the pragmatic subject “the x
that broke down." while the syntactic subject phrase mi car codes both
the semantic subject “speaker's car" and the pragmatic predicate "(is) the
speaker’s car." Notice that the terms "pragmatic predicate" and
232
Pragmatic relations: focus
“pragmatic subject" are not synonymous with "comment" and “topic," ,
which apply only to propositions with a particular type of pragmatic
articulation.’
The non-identity between semantic predicate and pragmatic predicate I
in argument-focus sentences is captured in the information-structure 1
representation in (5.11 ’In the Assertion line "X = speaker’s car,” which 1
symbolizes the pragmatically structured proposition “The x that broke J
down is the speaker’s car,” the relation between the pragmatic subject and J
the pragmatic predicate is not a topic-comment relation but an equational J
relation. It would be incorrect to say that the pragmatic predicate “is the 1
speaker’s car” is a comment about (or “is true of”) the pragmatic subject 1
“the x that broke down." Since this subject is semantically incomplete it j
cannot designate an identifiable discourse referent, hence it cannot serve 1
as a topic. The relation between the pragmatic subject and the pragmatic 1
predicate is not one of predication but of identification, as indicated by 1
the “equals" sign (see the remarks in Section 4.1.1 concerning the 1
identificational sentence type illustrated in example (4.2b)).
I
The terminological and conceptual problem at issue here has its roots 1
in Greco-Roman grammatical tradition, from where it was imported into 1
generative grammar, in spite of Chomsky’s attempt at defining 'I
grammatical functions in structural terms (1965:71ff) and in spite of his 1
later substitution of the term “verb phrase” to the term “predicate fl
phrase." In the classical tradition the “predicate” portion of a 1
proposition is “what is said about the subject” (cf. Gr. kategorema and ■
Lat. praedicatum “what is revealed or expressed’), not “what is true of the j
subject,” as in post-Fregean logic. The classical terminology was no ■
doubt dictated by unconscious pragmatic considerations. Since in most ■
sentences subjects are topics (see Section 4.2.1), the subject-predicate ■
relation was naturally equated with the topic-comment relation for the fl
purposes of grammatical (hence logical) analysis. Unfortunately, this ■
equation is misleading in the case of sentences with argument-focus J
structure, as pointed out by modern grammarians such as Jespersen) fl
Paul, and many others.
• fl
Tosum up, in sentences such as (5.1 la) the potential for confusion, and fl
the need for terminological distinction, lies in the non-isomorphic fl
mapping relation between syntactic and semantic categories on the one fl
hand (semantic predicate = verb phrase.) and syntactic and information- fl
structure categories on the other (pragmatic predicate = subject NP). The fl
existence of this non-isomorphic relation is not an artifact of my analysis 1
Focus structure and focus marking
P
E.
E
E
W
B
B
I
K
■
t
E
B
E
B
but is directly reflected in the structure of sentences. It is a matter of
grammar, not merely of conversational inference. This is particularly clear
in the case of the “clefted" construction in French (and in one of the
Italian versions). In the cleft sentence, the pragmatic predicate (i.e. “my
car”) appears as a syntactic predicate phrase, i.e. the right-hand
complement of the copula, while the semantic predicate (i.e. “broke
down") is syntactically expressed as a relative clause, i.e. by means of a
clause construction which is typically (though not necessarily) reserved for
the coding of pragmatically presupposed propositions. The non-identity
of semantic and pragmatic predicate is syntactically marked also in the
Italian VS version Si e rotta la mia macchina, in which the pragmatic
predicate (the denotatum of la macchina) appears in the clause-final
position normally reserved for semantic predicates. Cleft constructions
and subject-verb inversions can be seen as grammatical strategies for
overcoming disparities between semantic structure and information
structure.
5.2.4
■
i
t.
1
F
f
J
1
F
|
|
L
0
I
r
Sentence-focus structure
Let us go on now to the sentence focus structures in (5.12). In these
structures, no pragmatic presupposition is formally evoked, except for
some of the non-distinctive presuppositional features also found in (5.10)
or (5.11) (e.g. the proposition that the speaker has a car, that the speaker
is a topic, etc). One might suggest that (5.12) presupposes the proposition
“something happened." However, such a presupposition is merely
situationally implied, not lexicogrammaLically evoked in the sentence.
What is formally evoked in (5.12) is an absence of the relevant
presuppositions obtaining in (5.10) and (5.11): neither is the subject a
topic, nor is an open proposition "X broke down” pragmatically
presupposed (the latter feature is formally neutralized in English and in
the non-clefted version in Italian). Since the assertion extends over the
entire proposition, assertion and focus coincide in these structures. It is
this lack of a presupposition that gives rise to the "eventive”
interpretation of the proposition. Schematically:
(5.12’J
i
■
233
Sentence:
Presupposition:
Assertion:
Focus:
Focus domain.
A/p Car broke down.
“speaker's car broke down"
"speaker's car broke down"
S
234
Pragmatic relations: focus
As in (5.10’) and (5.11’), the representation in (5.12’) does not mention
the presuppositions evoked by the definite NP my car as they have no
bearing on the determination of the focus domain, which in (5.12) is the
entire sentence. Notice that in (5.12’), unlike (5.10’) and (5.11’), the
assertion is not expressed as a relation, i.e. assertion and focus coincide,
reflecting the non-binary pragmatic structure of the thetic proposition
(see Section 4.2.2).
Grammatically, the focus structure of the sentences in (5.12) is
expressed in rather heterogeneous ways in the four languages.10 In
English, the sentence is prosodically (and syntactically) identical to the
argument-focus sentence in (5.10). The accent placement on the subject is
an instance of what I referred to in Section 1.3.2 as “prosodic inversion"
(see Section 5.6.2.3 below for further discussion). It would not be possible
to accent any other constituent without altering the focus category. In
Italian, the focus structure is expressed via a combination of subject
accentuation and subject inversion. Unlike the English sentence, the
Italian sentence may have a secondary accent on the predicate (the
participle rotta) without affecting the focus category. This is so because in
Italian prosody is not the primary device for marking the focus structure;
an accent on the verb is therefore not necessarily interpreted as a signal of
predicate focus. French uses the moir-cleft construction, in which the
underlying simple proposition is expressed via a combination of two
clauses (see Section 1.3), as in the case of the argument-focus
construction. In both of these clauses the accent falls on the predicate
phrase, i.e. in purely formal terms both clauses can be said to have
predicate focus structure. Moreover, both the personal pronoun je and
the relative pronoun qut are topical subjects in their clauses and the
proposition in the relative clause is asserted rather than presupposed. The
focus structure of the French sentence is expressed by the grammatical
construction as a whole, in the same way as that of the cleft constructions
in (5.11c). Finally, in Japanese the structure of the sentence is similar to
that in (5.1 Id) in that the subject is accented and marked with ga.
However, unlike (5.1 Id), the predicate constituent koshoo is also
prosodically prominent.11
Despite the rather heterogeneous coding strategies employed in the
four languages, the sentence-focus constructions in (5.12) have one
crucial formal property in common: the marking of the subject as a non­
topic, whether by prosodic, morphological, or syntactic means. Since
topichood of the subject (or highest-ranking argument) is the defining
Focus structure and focus marking
235
criterion for the unmarked topic-comment (or predicate-focus) structure,
the sentences in (5.12) can be characterized by the absence of predicate­
focus structure. This observation complements the remarks in Section
4.2.2 concerning the role of the subject for the formal expression of the
contrast between thetic and categorical sentences.
For the purposes of the grammatical coding of discourse functions the
marking of the subject as a non-topic appears to be more important than
the marking of the predicate as non-presupposed. This is suggested by an
overall comparison of the formal similarities and dissimilarities among
the predicate-focus, argument-focus, and sentence-focus versions in
(5.10) through (5.12). While all argument-focus and sentence-focus
structures differ clearly from the corresponding predicate-focus struc­
tures in a given language, the sentence-focus and the argument-focus
structures in each language do not necessarily differ from each other, i.e.
they may be homophonous (as in English) or near-homophonous (as in
Japanese and in one of the Italian versions). In other words, focus­
structure homophony seems to be tolerable only between non-predicate­
focus structures The fundamental category boundary is that between the
presence vs. absence of a topic-comment articulation. This observation
corroborates my analysis of the topic-comment structure as the
unmarked pragmatic articulation and of the other focus types as
marked departures from this basic type (see Section 4.2.1). As I have
repeatedly emphasized, in order to fully capture the relationship between
focus marking and focus meaning, it is necessary to understand the status
of different sentential structures as allosentences, i.e. as elements in a
system of formal and pragmatic oppositions.
5.2.5
Summary
The pragmatic articulations of the three focus-structure categories are
summarized in Table 2. Notice that the words “argument" and "predicate"
in the top line refer to the semantic argument and the semantic
predicate respectively.
The feature distribution in Table 2 reflects the above-mentioned fact
that the argument-focus type is the reversal of the predicate-focus type.
For the sentence-focus type, u reflects the non-binary semantic structure
which characterizes thetic propositions (see Section 4.2.2). The sentence­
focus structure exhibits neither the topic comment articulation of the
predicate-focus structure nor the focus-presupposition articulation of the
ezsa
236
Pragmatic relations: focus
Table 2.
Pragmatic articulation of the three focus-structure categories
Predicate focus
Argument focus
Sentence focus
Argument in focus
Predicate in focus
+
+
+
+
argument-focus structure. Since both in the predicate-focus and the
sentence-focus categories reference to the grammatical category “subject"
(or highest-ranking argument) is criteria!, the header “Argument in
focus" in Table 2 necessarily refers to the subject argument in these two
articulations. As I mentioned earlier, this is not true in the case of the
argument-focus category, since in principle any argument element of a
proposition can serve as the focus in a focus-presupposition relation.
Nevertheless, as we will see later on, there is a formal correlation between
the prosodic marking of an argument focus and subject status of the
argument constituent (see Section 5.6.1).
It is worth mentioning that the representation in Table 2 does not
involve the feature combination “minus-minus,” i.e. no allowance is
made for structures coding only pragmatically presupposed propositions.
Indeed for a structure to qualify as an independent sentence it must
express an assertion, i.e. the proposition expressed by it must contain a
focus. There are no independent sentences expressing only pragmatically
presupposed propositions. (This is true even for sentences like / love you,
which may have been said hundreds of times to the same addressee.)
Sentences expressing pragmatically presupposed propositions typically
appear as subordinate clauses, such as the unaccented relative clauses in
the French and Italian cleft constructions in (5.11).12
The three major focus-structure types discussed in the preceding
sections no doubt do not exhaust all possibilities. A likely candidate for a',
fourth type is the "counterassertive” or “counterpresuppositional" type,
proposed by Dik et al (1980), which involves the polarity of ai
proposition rather than some semantic domain within it (see example
(5.25) below). It is also possible to combine different focus types within a
single sentence construction, e.g. by combining prosodic and morpho-1
syntactic devices. For example under certain conditions a proposition,
with sentence-focus or argument-locus articulation may serve as a
comment for a given topic, resulting in a combination of the topic-!
Focus structure and focus marking
237
> comment articulation (predicate focus) with the thetic articulation
- (sentence focus) or the identificationa! articulation (argument focus),
f
An example of a configuration in which two focus-structure types are
combined is the structure illustrated in The kitchen, you have to clean,
I which I will discuss in detail later on (examples (5.54) and (5.54’)). In this
I configuration an argument-focus structure in which the focus “you”
[ supplies the missing argument in the presupposed open proposition “x
I has to clean the kitchen” serves at the same time as a comment for the
I topic "the kitchen," resulting in a sentence which combines predicate[ focus and argument-focus elements. Another example of combined focus
| types is the one discussed in Chapter 2, examples (2.1) Here comes the cat
I and (2.2") Here the cal comes, where we saw a sentence-focus-marking
f device (the deictic here-construction) combined with a predicate-focusI marking device (the prosody and position of a subject NP). Predicate1 focus structure and sentence-focus structure are combined also in the
| Reagan-quote in example (4.49). An interesting Chinese example of the
I combination of sentence focus and predicate focus is discussed by
| LaPolla (forthcoming). LaPolla observes that in a sentence like Ta si le
I fuqin “His father died,” the sequence si le fuqin (die ASP father) is an
| event-central thetic sentence which serves as a comment for the initial
I topic NP ta “he." In future work (Lambrecht in preparation) I intend to
I account for such focus-structure combinations in terms of the concept of
I inheritance as used in Construction Grammar and other monostratal
I syntactic theories. In such an account, various information-structure
I features are analyzed as being passed on from one grammatical
I construction to another.13
। ■ There is one important aspect of the grammar of focus which I have
I not mentioned so far and about which I will unfortunately have very little
I to say in this book. This is the question of the amount and type of
I propositional information which can be indicated by a single focus accent
I in a single sentence or clause. One example will suffice to illustrate the
tissue 1 have in mind. Imagine having a stimulating but very brief
I conversation with someone you didn't know before and who you are not
I sure to see again. Imagine further that you want to express to that person
| your hope for some future meeting, which will be less brief. It is no doubt
I possible in English to express the desired propositional content by means
I of a single sentence, such as 1 hope we will meet again for more than five
[ minutes. However, this sentence does not express the pragmatically
I structured proposition you have in mind. The syntax of this sentence only
238
Pragmatic relations: focus
seems compatible with pragmatic readings which do not fit the given
situation.
In one reading of this sentence the fact that you and your interlocutor
■
will meet again is pragmatically presupposed and what is asserted is only
your hope that the next meeting will be longer than the first one; in this
case the temporal adjunct phrase will receive the focus accent (7 hope we
will meet again for more than five minutes). In another reading of the
sentence what is asserted is that you hope for a future meeting, resulting
in the undesirable presupposition that your present meeting was in fact
longer than five minutes; in this case the accent will fall on again (I hope
we will meet again for more than five minutes). In either case, your
utterance conveys the wrong message. Let us then try to avoid the two
misleading readings by accenting both relevant portions of the sentence: 7
hope we will meet again for more than five minutes. Although this
utterance is less misleading than the previous ones, it seems nevertheless
odd. We have the desire to pause after the first accent, suggesting that the
prepositional phrase which follows is not part of the same clause but
belongs to an incomplete separate clause expressing a separate assertion.
The intended piece of information would be more clearly (though less
concisely) expressed in a bi-clausal sequence like I hope ire will meet again
and I hope it'll be for more than five minutes. 11
Facts such as these suggest that there are constraints on the amount of
asserted information compatible with given clausal structures. I must
leave this interesting topic for future research. The issue brought up here
is related to the remarks at the end of Section 4.4.2 concerning the
number of unidentifiable referents that can be introduced in a single
clause. It is also related to the Principle of the Separation of Reference
and Role (see Section 4.5.1). Stimulating suggestions concerning the
existence of constraints on the amount of information that can be
packaged in a single clause are found in Givon 1975a, Chafe 1987, and
DuBois 1987.
53
Prosodic accents: iconicity, rule, default
5.3.1
Accent, intonation, stress
I would like to start my discussion of the nature and function of sentence
accents with a few general observations. First. 1 would like to remind the
reader that I am concerned with prosody only inasmuch as it serves to
.
1
<
<
i
1
’
1
Prosodic accents: ¡conicity, rule, default
i
;
239
mark contrasts in the information structure of sentences, in accordance
with the goal of this study as laid out in Chapter 1. I am not concerned
with the use of intonation for other kinds of semantic or pragmatic
purposes, such as the marking of speech-act distinctions (e.g. question
vs. imperative intonation, see e.g. Culicover & Rochemont 1983:125) or
of speakers” attitudes toward propositions (see Section 1.4.3). One
example should suffice to justify the distinction between speech-act
marking and focus marking:
(5.13)
a.
b.
c.
d.
Your car broke down.
Your car broke down.
Did your car break down?
Did your car break down?
The accentual difference between the predicate-focus structure in (5.13a)
and the sentence-focus structure in (5.13b) is preserved in the
interrogative versions in (c) and (d), even though the latter differ
sharply in their intonation contour from their declarative counterparts.
Sentences (a) and (c), on the one hand, and (b) and (d), on the other, have
the same focus prosody, but they differ in intonation
Similar remarks can be made about the use of intonation for the coding
of speakers” attitudes towards propositions, which, following Ladd, I
will call the expressive use. As Ladd (1978:213) observes, “focus is
signaled solely by the location of the accent; various intonational
characteristics such as greater volume and widened pitch range can also
be used to signal what might be called ‘emphasis.’ " A distinction along
similar lines is made by Selkirk (1984:1980. who suggests that we
partition the domain of “intonational meaning” into two components:
the “expressiveness component” and the “focus-structure component”
(see also Woodbury 1987). To designate what Selkirk calls the “focusstructure component” I prefer the term "information-structure compo­
nent,” for reasons which will become apparent in Section 5.4, where I will
argue that not all of the accents covered by Selkirk’s term are focus
accents.
Functionally distinct though they are, the various components of
intonational meaning-the information-structure component, the speechact component, and the expressiveness component - have nevertheless an
important grammatical property in common: all may be expressed by
formal means other than prosody, depending on the language. For
example yes-no questions may be marked by question morphemes or
240
Pragmatic relations: focus
word-order variation instead of, or in addition to, “question intonation";
a speaker’s attitude may be marked intonationally as well as e.g. by
various types of particles, such as the evidential particles (“Ablonungs- 1
partikeln") of modern German. This suggests that the different ।
components of intonational meaning are perhaps more closely related J
than I am assuming in the present study. In a more exhaustive treatment, I
the study of sentence accentuation and that of sentence intonation might 1
be profitably combined.15
1
Next, I should make explicit that my analysis of sentence accentuation i
lakes for granted a theoretical distinction between meaningful prosodic a
contrasts of the kind mentioned above and the non-meaningful I
assignment of stress to individual lexical items via language-specific 1
phonological rules. Unlike the assignment of prosodic accents, the 1
assignment of word stress is not meaningful. Therefore ungrammatically 1
rather than meaningful pragmatic contrasts tend to arise when the stress |
on a word is changed. To take a simple example, compare the difference I
in stress between the English word existence and its German equivalent 1
ExistENZ. Changes in stress assignment in these words result in I
ungrammaticality rather than in new meaning: English *exisTENCE and J
German *Existenz are phonologically ill-formed. Since sentence accents g
are the formal expression of pragmatic relations between propositions J
and their elements, they necessarily mark relationships between (two or 1
more) meaningful elements. And such elements typically appear as I
different words or groups of words.
■ J
Nevertheless, since words may contain more than one meaningful g
segment (morpheme), focus-related contrasts are sometimes expressed!
also within words, in particular in compounds and derivational!
formations. One example is the contrast in That's not an adi'M'tage, 3
that's a Disadvantage; another is the metalinguistic distinction in J didn't 3
say affirmation but confirmation discussed in Chomsky 1970.16 In the J
unmarked case, the prosodic accent will coincide with the word stress asj
assigned by the phonological stress rules. In the marked case, the accent a
will override the word stress, at least in languages with “free accentW
position" like English. In a genera) language typology, the category of afl
“free accent position language” might be profitably contrasted with the®
established category of a “free word order language,” since accent«
position and constituent position have comparable pragmatic functions, 1
The possibility of expressing information-structure contrasts within«
words vanes from language to language. Compare the English pair Therea
Prosodic accents; ¿conicity, rule, default
241
• are ad^ytages and Disadvantages, involving a “contrastive” accent shift
on the second noun, with the Spanish Hay venTAjas y desvenTAjas, where,
| in spite of identical discourse circumstances, no accent shift occurs.
I Another example: while English permits prosodic focus contrasts in such
I derivational pairs as Zr she ChtNESE? No, she's jAPAttese, no such contrast
I would be possible in German, even though the derivational structure of
I the German adjectives is similar; next to the regular chiNcsisch, jaPAnisch
I there is no possible *CHtnesisch or *jApanisch. This difference between
I English and German may be a result of the fact that German has greater
I word-order flexibility than English, hence can express certain pragmatic
I contrasts syntactically rather than phonologically.17
5.3.2
¡conic motivation versus grammatical rule
Given the view of the role of information structure in grammar espoused
in this book, sentence accentuation cannot be accounted for with the
same phonological rules as those which assign word stress. Nor can it be
exhaustively accounted for with any rule which is uniquely formulated in
terms of constituent structure, i.e. without recourse to the communicative
intentions of speakersin given discourse situations.
;
The notion that sentence prosody is determined by communicative
1 intentions rather than formal rules has been repeatedly and forcefully
i expressed by Bolinger, as e.g. in the following quote from an early essay
(the term "prosodic stress" in the quote is equivalent to the term
"prosodic accent” in Bolinger's later work):
■
.
I
I
।
Prosodic stress does not have io fall as I described u. The heart of the
matter is this very freedom to fall now here, now there, with the
speaker’s attitude determining where it will fall, A mechanical rule
demands that we predict directly where it will fall. A functional rule
predicts indirectly: it will fall here, or there, if the meaning is such-andsuch; instead of automatism, we have a meaning. (1954:153)
f The view that focus prosody cannot be exclusively accounted for with
[semantically or pragmatically "blind” phonological rules is now shared
J by most scholars, in spite of important individual differences.IS A famous
I example making this point forcefully is the (thetic categoncal) pair
I iohnsos' died vs. Truman died discussed by Schmerling (1976:41 ff), in
¡which two syntactically identical surface strings express two different
I focus meanings (i.e. predicate focus vs. sentence focus) via radically
different prosodic structures.
242
Pragmatic relations: focus
The assignment of different accentual patterns to a given syntactic
structure-i.e. the occurrence of prosodic allosentences-can no more be
captured in purely phonological terms than the use of different syntactic
structures to express a given propositional content - i.e. the occurrence Of
syntactic allosentences-can be captured in purely syntactic terms (see the
discussion in Section 1.4). The interpretation of sentence prosody in
terms of communicative intentions is based on the notion of a correlation
between prosodic prominence and the relative communicative impor­
tance of the prosodically highlighted element, the prosodic peak pointing
to the communicatively most important element in the utterance.
Prosodic marking is thus in an important sense iconic, since it involves
a more or less direct, rather than purely symbolic, relationship between
meaning and grammatical form (see the remarks on activation accents in
Section 3.3.1).
Having said this, I hasten to add that I do not consider it possible to
explain sentence prosody without recourse to formal grammatical rules.
It is clear that the relationship between prosodic prominence and
communicative importance can be at best partially iconic. A sentence
accent necessarily falls on a single word (or rather a single syllable within
a word), while the semantic domain marked by the accent typically
extends over a sequence of words, not all of which are accented (cf. the
preliminary remarks to this effect in Section 5.1.1). Thetic sentences, like
Schmerling's above-mentioned Johnson died, are an excellent case in
point. In such sentences, the focus extends over the entire proposition, yet
only the subject of the sentence is accented. The prosody of thetic
sentences is thus a problem both for a “purely pragmatic" and for a
“purely formal" view of sentence accentuation.
While accent assignment is motivated by pragmatic principles, it is not
free in the sense of an iconic isomorphism between the communicative
importance of a denotatum and the placement of the accent on a
particular word. Just as the syntactic structure of, say, a cleft construction
cannot be fully accounted for by explaining its discourse properties, the
prosodic structure of a sentence is not fully accounted for by explaining its
appropriateness in certain communicative situations. Bolinger’s dictum
that the focus accent has the “freedom to fall now here, now there, with
the speaker's attitude determining where it will fall” ought not to be taken
too literally, either for English or for other languages.
There can be no one-to-one relationship between sentence accents and
communicative intentions. One of the tasks in the description of sentence
Prosodic accents: ¡conicity, rule, default
243
prosody must therefore be to show how prosodic prominence as an iconic
information signal is converted into informational meaning by being
mapped onto grammatical structure, which is an essentially non-iconic
■ system for the expression of meaning. (This conversion procedure is what
Höhle 1982 refers to as “focus projection.’’) The iconicity of sentence
prosody is comparable, mutatis mutandis, to the iconicity of onomatopoetic expressions. We know that the words for animal cries often
resemble, or are perceived to resemble, the sounds made by animals. But
’ to get from a rooster's crow to English cockadoodledoo or to German
kikeriki we must first walk the constrained path through the grammars of
these languages. Sentence accentuation may be iconic in its foundations,
but it is filtered through the machinery of grammar.
The analysis of prosodic structure must therefore concern itself, among
other things, with the formal principles which determine where a
meaningful accent will fa!) within a given stuctural domain expressing
a given denotatum within a proposition. To account for the relationship
between prosodic prominence and prosodically defined meaning it is
necessary to assume the existence of a forma! level that mediates between
the two (see Selkirk 1984:1971T).
The need for such an intermediate level can be demonstrated by
comparing accent placement in languages with different word order
constraints. Consider these two simple predicate-focus sentences in
English and French.
(5.14)
a. She doesn’t have a particularly interesting job
Ib. Elie n'a pas tin metier particulierement intfrfssant
|
j
■
!
.'
!
The two sentences in (5.14) have the same meaning and can be used in the
same discourse context to convey the same piece of information. In both
languages, the accent which defines the focus domain fails within the
object noun phrase, which is the fast phrase in the sentence, and within
this phrase, it falls on the last word. But while in English this last word is
the head of this phrase, in French it is the adjective modifying the head.
This difference is clearly not the result of a difference in communicative
intentions. It is not the case that m English the noun job is the point of the
information while in French more importance is attributed to the
modifier interessam. If we were to put the accent on interesting in English
the result would be a different focus reading. (In French, the two readings
are compatible with the same prosodic structure.) What remains constant
in (he (wo languages is not the association ol the accent with a narrow
244
Pragmatic relations, focus
semantic denotatum but its final position within the focus domain (here
the verb phrase).
Further examples showing the need for grammatical rules of sentence­
accent placement are easy to adduce. Consider the English question in
(5.15a) and its spoken French equivalent in (5.15b):
(5.15)
a. Who’S THAT?
b. C'est qui ?a? (lit. "it is who that?’’)
The two sentences have the same meaning and can be used under the ]
same discourse circumstances (the speaker may e.g. ask this questioqj
while pointing to the individual designated with the demonstrative
pronoun that}. Nevertheless the sentence accent falls on a different word]
in the two languages. If sentence prosody were entirely determined by I
iconic considerations - the prosodic point of prominence coinciding will] J
the pragmatic information peak-we would expect the same word to be^
prominent in English and in French. In fact, given the presuppositionall
structure of WH-questions, in which the non-WH portion of the sentenef!
is normally pragmatically presupposed, we would expect the accent to fall I
on the question word, as it does in French. However, here as before, the]
accents are assigned on structural grounds, i.e. they fall on the last!
accentable constituent of the sentence (the French pronoun pn is an]
antitopic-i.e. post-clausal-constituent and as such not capable ofs
carrying a sentence accent, see Lambrecht 1981). I will return to th?j
specific issue of the accentuation of WH-questions in Section 5.4.4.
il
To explain the difference in accent placement in the two sentences in J
(5.15) one might want to invoke some language-specific semantic]
motivation. For example, since both who and that are (in a ratherj
vague sense) "new” to the discourse, one might argue that each language!
simply picks one of lhe two new elements as the bearer of the accent!
Besides the fact that such an explanation would introduce unwelcome!
randomness into the notion of iconic motivation, it could not account fofj
the existence of the alternative French version of (5.15b) in (5.15b’): J
(5.1 5b') Qui c'EST ca1
In (5.15b’) the accent falls neither on the demonstrative nor on the]
interrogative pronoun, but on the verb, which can hardly be argued tobej
the “new" element or communicatiie highlight of the proposition. As ¡¿I
the previous cases, the accent lulls where it does in (5.15b') because then
Prosodic accents: iconicity, rule, default
245
¡(verb happens to be the last accentable element in the domain within
twhich the accent is assigned.19
b Or consider example (5.16). Imagine a bricklayer on a ladder calling
pbr a new brick for his wall:
[(5.16)
t
a. ... every lime he needs one.
b. ... chaque fois qu'il en a besoin d’uNE.
[One may argue that the accent on the predicate need in English is at least
Endirectly motivated iconicaily: the pronoun one is unaccented because
[the referent “brick" is active in the context; however no such argument
Ran be made for French. The presence of the accent on une runs counter
gto any narrow iconic account. (Notice that the French sentence has no
[“contrastive" connotation whatsoever: the point of (5.16b) is not to ask
Efor one rather than two or more bricks.) It is true that the pronominal en
P'of it, of them" shows the lack of prominence expected from topical
[anaphoric expressions; but the presence of the accent on une is not
[similarly motivated.
► The limitations of a narrow iconic view of accent placement can be
demonstrated also within the prosodic system of a single language. A
striking example, which 1 have referred to before, is the prosodic
Expression of the thetic-categoncal contrast in English, as illustrated e.g.
lin the earlier-mentioned pair Johnson died vs. Truman d/ed, or in the
[contrast between (5.10a) My car broke down and (5.12a) My car broke
[down. This contrast is clearly not amenable to an iconic explanation (an
Gabservation which should not obscure the fact that it also resists any
Explanation in purely syntactic terms). To take another example, consider
Lthe French sentences in (5.17), illustrating three syntactic allosentences
tfor the question "Where are you going?” Examples (a) and (b) represent
[Spoken French, while (c) represents the standard written form (notice
Rhat (a) is not an echo question like the corresponding English sentence
'ou're going where?):
fiS.l7)
a. Tu vas ou?
<
b. Olj IU IAS?
P
c. Ou vas-Tti?
“Where are you going?"
"Where are you going?"
"Where are you going?"
(While there may be a subtle pragmatic difference between (a) and (b), and
While there clearly is a register difference between (a)/(b) on the one hand
'and (c) on lhe other, these differences are not differences in focus
■structure Nor are they differences in emphasis in any clear sense of this
246
Pragmatic relations: focus
be tempting to attribute pragmatic meaning to the accent
in (a), since the word ou represents in some sense the focus of the
question (the fact that the addressee is going somewhere being
pragmatically presupposed; see Section 5.4.4 below). But if the
designatum of ou is the pragmatic focus, why are the verb vas and the
bound pronoun tu accented in (b) and (c)? The answer is of course that,
given the focus-structure type of these questions, French grammar
requires the accent to fall on a specific place in the sentence, i.e. at the
end, rather than on a specific word expressing a certain denotatum. The
purely grammatical character of this requirement is all the more striking
since in (c) the sentence accent falls on a bound morpheme (a so-called
"clitic" pronoun), which grammatical tradition has correctly identified as
being atonic or unstressable.20
The minimal conclusion to draw from such crosslmguistic and
language-internal observations is that while accent placement is
pragmatically motivated, the prosodic expression of pragmatic meaning
is nevertheless mediated by rules of grammar.2’ The assignment of the
sentence accent to a certain position within a phrase cannot be said to be
uniquely determined by semantic or pragmatic principles. At the very
least, we must allow for certain phrasal accent rules which, given a
semantic domain to be signaled, assign the accent to a certain position
within the phrasal constituent expressing this domain.
An early proposal for such a phrasal accent rule is made by Halliday
(1967). After giving his definition of focus (quoted in 5.1.1 above),
Halliday states the following general rule: "The tonic falls ... on the last
accented syllable of the item under focus" (1967:206). Halliday’s rule
captures an important generalization and is in my opinion essentially
correct, though it needs to be further specified in order to account for
important exceptions. A modified version of Halliday’s rule is proposed
by Jackendoff, who restates the notion “item under focus" in terms of
syntactic phrase structure: “If a phrase P is chosen as the focus of a
sentence S, the highest stress in S will fall on the syllable of P that is
assigned highest stress by the regular stress rules" (1972:232). As pointed
out by Schmerling, Ladd, Selkirk, and others, JackendofTs rule, which is
based on the notion that "regular stress rules” assign accents
automatically within syntactic constituents, is unable to account for
sentences in which accents do not occupy the predicted position within
focus phrases (see Section 5.3.3 below)
term. It may
position
Prosodic accents: ¡conicity, rule, default
247
Finally, Ladd (1978:85), who, like Schmerling 1976 and Selkirk 1984,
rejects the very notion of “regular stress rules," proposes the following
version, which he calls the "Revised Focus Rule’: “Accent goes on the
most accentable syllable of the focus constituent." Like Halliday’s tonic
placement rule, Ladd’s version of the phrasal accent rule - which I take to
hold, mutatis mutandis, for English, French, and many other languagescaptures an important generalization, provided, of course, that it is
complemented with a principled account (not provided by Ladd) of what
constitutes a "focus constituent" and what the “most accentable syllable"
within such a constituent is. One of the goals of the present analysis is to
provide such an account. The reader should keep in mind that in the
present framework any accent placement rule is seen as applying not only
to focus domains but to pragmatically construed semantic domains in
general (see the preliminary remarks to that effect in Section 5.1.2).
ft is a generally acknowledged - though not uniformly interpreted-fact
that what Ladd calls the "most accentable syllable of the focus
constituent" strongly tends to be located at, or towards, the end of
that constituent, al least in languages like English and French. As a
general rule, we may say that a sentence accent serves to mark the right
boundary of a pragmatically construed semantic domain. This semantic
domain may extend leftward towards the beginning of the sentence, i.e.
its major portion may precede the accented word. It is a fundamental
principle of information structure, i.e. of grammar, that a sentence accent
marks the end of a semantic domain, whose beginning is marked by nonprosodic means, in particular by phrase structure. I will call this
fundamental principle the general phrasal accent principle. This
principle can be stated as follows:
(5.18)
general phrasal accent principle. /A phrasal accent marks the right
boundary of a syntactic domain expressing a pragmatically construed
portion of a proposition
Notice that Ladd’s simple term “focus constituent" has been replaced tn
(5.18) by the cumbersome "syntactic domain expressing a pragmatically
construed portion of a proposition." This is necessary because the
domain in question may be either a focus domain or a topic domain.
Notice also that the “syntactic domain" mentioned in (5.18) is not
necessarilv coterminous with “syntactic constituent." As we have seen,
and as 1 will show in more detail in the next section, the activated
248
Pragmatic relations: focus
1
designs turn marked by a phrasal accent is not always coextensive with ■
that of the syntactic constituent carrying the accent.
1
It is worth pointing out that the grammatical mechanism described in I
the General Phrasal Accent Principle is not "natural,” in the sense that it 1
does not follow from general extra-linguistic mechanisms of perception I
or interpretation. It is in fact the opposite of the natural mechanism I
whereby a noise signals the beginning of an event, as e.g. the mechanism I
whereby the sound of a starting pistol marks the beginning of a dash. In!
the sports event, it is the beginning of the dash that is signaled-!
acoustically, while its end, i.e. the crossing of the finish line, is measured 1
by non-acoustic (mechanical or electronic) means. In sentence prosody,'!
the acoustic signal marks the end of the signaled domain, allowing for-!
elements following the accent to be interpreted as outside that domain,!
The General Phrasal Accent Principle is a principle of grammar and musf!
be stated as such.
1
533 Default accentuation
In the preceding section I argued that prosodic accent placement '¿1
determined by a combination of two factors: pragmatic function andx
grammatical rule. It is now necessary to comment on a third factor]
influencing the location of a focus accent, which I have repeatedly hinted!
at tn the preceding discussion. This factor is what Ladd (1978:81(1) has J
called accent placement by default. Default accentuation is the prosodicJ
phenomenon whereby an accent is assigned to a constituent neither fori
pragmatic reasons (i.e. because the denotatum of the constituent is to be j
highlighted), nor for structural reasons (i.e. because the constituent]
occupies the unmarked accent position), but because accentuation of any!
other constituent would result in a different - unintended-pragmatic!
construal of the proposition
'j
The phenomenon is most easy to observe in sentences in which a3
constituent which could receive the accent is "deaccented,” as Ladd calls']
it, for pragmatic (or sometimes phonological) reasons, resulting in a shift J
of the accent to a preceding or following constituent or syllable. One ofJ
Ladd’s examples illustrating default accentuation is the following:
(5.19)
A Has John read SLughierh..-usc-Fhe'’ ( - Ladd’s (19))
B No, John doesn't kl -h beo},s.
Prosodic accents: ¿conicity, ride, default
I
I
L
I
k
L
I
[
[
I
j
I
L
t
f
If
|
t
L
L
[
r
t
I
I
J
|
249
As Ladd observes, “the accent in (19) is in no sense ‘contrastive,’ as it is
often said to be: the meaning of B’s reply is not the explicit contrast ‘John
doesn't read books, he writes (reviews, collects, burns, etc.) them.’
Rather, the point of the accentual pattern is that books is deaccented; the
focus is broad, but the accent falls on read by default’’ (p. 81). The accent
on read is then neither iconic in the narrow sense, since it docs not
highlight a specific denotatum, nor is it directly defined on syntactic
structure, since the focus domain cannot be identified with a syntactic
constituent. Instead, it is determined by the pragmatic status of the
denotatum of some other element in the sentence.
The “deaccenting” phenomenon in (5.19) finds a simple and
straightforward explanation in terms of the concepts of activation,
presupposition, and topic, as defined in this book.22 In the reply in (5.19),
the (generic) refereni of the NP books was activated via mention of the
specific book “Slaughterhouse-Five” in the question (see the discussion
in Section 3.4 concerning automatic coactivation of types, given
activation of tokens). It may therefore be coded as an unaccented noun
phrase, and its referent may bear the pragmatic relation of topic to the
proposition (the sentence is about the relationship between "John” and
"books”). The focus structure of the reply sentence in (5.19) can then be
analyzed as follows. Since the sentence is a topic-comment sentence, with
the subject as the primary topic, the focus is necessarily expressed in the
predicate. The focus domain is therefore the verb phrase, and this verb
phrase must carry an accent. Within the verb phrase, however, the object
NP is marked, via lack of pitch accent, as a topic expression with a
discourse-active referent, hence as not being in focus. Now since the
sequence doesn't read in (5.19) is not a single constituent, and since the
verb phrase nevertheless expresses the focus, we must identify as the focus
domain the verb phrase while exempting one of its constituents from
focus status. The representation of B’s reply in (5.19) is then as in (5.19’):
(5.19”) IO,[ John ]
[ doesn't read
books ] ).
A similar analysis can be given to example (5.16) above. In the clause
every time he needs one, the post-focal object one, which stands for “a
brick,” is a topic expression with an active referent of the same sort as the
NP books in (5.19). The behavior of these unaccented topic constituents is
analogous to that of the possessive determiners his and my and the
indefinite pronoun one in (5.3”), (5.1 T), and (5.5) respectively, which
have the function of topic expressions wuhin the focal NPs one of his
250
close
Pragmatic relations: focus
collaborators,
my CAR, and the green one (see also Section 4.2.2,
example (4.20) and discussion).
In English, unaccented topic constituents may also
precede the
accented constituent in a focus domain, as in (5.20), which 1 borrow
again from Ladd (1978:84):
(5.20)
I’m leaving for Crete tomorrow. ( = Ladd's (31))
In (5.20) the noun phrase Crete, whose referent must be discourse-active
in the utterance context, is marked via deaccentuation as a topic
constituent, hence as being excluded from the focus. As a result, the focus
accent must fall on some other element of the sentence. By default it falls
on the final constituent of the focus domain, i.e. of the verb phrase.13 The
focus structure of (5.20) is as in (5.20’):
(5.20")
I ] „, [’m leaving for TOP[ Crete ] tomorrow ].
It so happens that the accented final constituent following the topic Crete
is the deictic adverbial tomorrow, an expression type which normally does
not attract a focus accent (see Section 5.6.1 below). Since such adverbs
are usually unaccented, the accent on tomorrow in (5.20") tends to be
interpreted as “contrastive." In view of the analysis to be presented in
Section 5.6.1, it is important to realize that in (5.20), as in (5.19) and
(5.16), the shifted accent does not necessarily signal the contrastive
argument focus of an identificational sentence (as in I'm not leaving for
Crete today, I’m going there tomorrow). The sentence would be equally
appropriate in a context like “What do you mean 1 never go to Crete; I’m
going there tomorrow,” where the fact that the speaker is going to Crete
is not pragmatically presupposed but asserted. I take the prosodic status
of such topical constituents within focus domains to be a strong
confirmation of the reality of the category “topic” as a forma! category in
the grammar of English.
Examples such as (5.16a), (5.19), and (5.20) confirm the observation,
first made in Section 5.1.1 (examples (5.5), (5 6) and discussion), that
topical non-subject constituents with active referents may occur within
focal verb phrases. This fact allows us to draw an important conclusion
concerning the relationship between prosodic focus marking and
syntactic structure, a conclusion which I have hinted at repeatedly in
the preceding sections: it is possible to match focus structure and phrase
structure only under the condition that syntactic focus domains be
allowed to contain non-focal elements.24 There can be no one-to-one
Prosodic accents: ¡conicity, rule, default
251
mapping relation between the two domains. This conclusion is
unproblematic within the approach to focus developed here. Il is
consistent with the view of the non-segmentability of propositional
information expressed in Sections 2.2 and 5.1. The grammatical
mechanism which allows for this asymmetrical relationship between
focus structure and constituent structure is the markedness difference
between accented and non-accented referential constituents (see Section
3.3.1). Since non-accented constituents are positively marked for the
feature “active," and since activeness combined with lack of prominence
entails topic status, the non-focal status of such constituents within focus
domains is unambiguously marked.
One advantage of this conclusion is that it allows us to preserve the
generalizations expressed in Ladd’s Revised Focus Rule (see Section
5.3.2) and implicit in the General Phrasal Accent Principle, according to
which in the great majority of cases the focus accent fails on the last
acceptable constituent of the focus domain. Il is clear, however, that the
term “accentable" must be understood here in a pragmatic rather than
grammatical sense. Unaccented topical elements within focus domains
are “unaccentable" not in the sense that their lexical nature prevents
them from receiving an accent. Rather they are unaccentable within the
particular discourse contexts in which they occur, given the commu­
nicative intentions of the speaker. These elements cannot be accented
because accenting them would result in an unintended focus articulation
of the sentence. I will return to the concept of‘'accentable constituent" in
the analysis of the relationship between focus and predicates in Section
5.4.2 and again in Section 5.7, where I will present a revised account of
the conditions under which a referential constituent may occur without
an accent.
The extent to which topic expressions may occur within focus domains
is subject to typological variation. For example, we saw in the analysis of
sentences (l.i) through (1.31 in Chapter 1 that a possessor-topic which in
English is coded as a possessive determiner within a focal noun phrase
(the NP my c.s/t in (1.1)) may be coded in Italian and French as a
sentence-initial argument expression (Italian mi. French je). My analysis
of spoken French (see Lambrecht 1986h, Chapters 6 and 8) reveals as a
general syntactic feature of this language that it systematically avoids
structures such as (5.19") or (5.20‘), in which topic constituents appear
within focus domains. In spoken French, non-pronominal topic
constituents with active referents are regularly placed in right-detached
252
Pragmatic relations: focus
(antitopic) position, rather than directly under S or VP. For example the
spoken French versions of (5.19) and (5.20) might be as in (5.21a) and
(5.22a). rather than as in the corresponding (b) sentences whose basic
structure is similar to English in the relevant respects:
)
(5.21)
a. Jean [ il en lit pas ] de livres. “J. doesn’t
Jean he of-them read not of books
b. ? Jean [ il lit pas de livres |.
(5.22)
a. [ J’y vais demain ] en Crete. ‘Tin going to Crete
I there go tomorrow to Crete
b. [ Je vais en Crete oemaii. ].
read
books.”
tomorrow."
In these examples, the topic constituents corresponding to the English!
complements books and Crete appear as antitopic (i.e. non-argument) ]
constituents after the clause, thereby allowing the focus accents to fall in^
normal clause-final position.25 The information-structure function of the ]
detachment construction in French is then not only to satisfy the j
Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role (see Section 4.5.1) but j
also to allow for a closer match between focus structure and phrase!
structure, by eliminating topical NPs from the predicate or comment:!
domain. The difference revealed in the contrast between (5.19) and (5.21) J
or (5.20) and (5.22) is the manifestation of an important typological!
parameter, which I believe has received insufficient attention in studies of1
language typology.
■”
It is necessary to mention that not all unaccented constituents within!
focus domains are topic expressions. The placement of a focus accent!
before the end of a focus domain may be triggered also by presupposed^
elements which do not function as topics. Let me mention here one*,
particularly clear example, involving a leftward accent “shift” within a
semantically complex word (see Section 5.3.1). In accounting for the
accent pattern in the second sentence in (5.23) (quoted on p. 356, note 16) '
(5.23)
Jerry Brown also smoked pot twenty-five years ago. But he forgot tp
Exhale.
it would be counterintuitive to analyze the postaccentual bound
morpheme -hale as a topic expression since this morpheme does noli
designate a discourse referent. (For example, it could not be represented j
by an anaphoric pronoun.) This morpheme can hardly be said to be what
the proposition is about. To understand the prosodic pattern in (5.23) 1
recall that in addition to the proposition expressed in the first sentence <
Prosodic accents: ¡conicity, rule, default
253
the following two propositions had been activated in the utterance
context and could therefore be taken as presupposed: “Bill Clinton
smoked pot twenty-five years ago” and “Bill Clinton did not inhale the
smoke." (Recall that for a proposition to be taken as presupposed it does
not have to be considered true by the interlocutors; see Section 2.3.)
Given this conversational background, the second sentence in (5.23) can
be said to evoke the presupposition “Jerry Brown breathed (pot smoke)
in x way." The assertion expressed by this sentence is then “x = out,” and
the focus is “out." Since the bound morpheme ex- expresses the focus, it
is the only constituent which can receive the focus accent. The mechanism
whereby the focus accent is assigned in (5.23) is essentially the same as
that in (5.19) and (5.20), even though the pragmatic status of the
unaccented element is slightly different. In both situations, it is the
presence of a non-focal element within the focus domain that causes the
accent to occupy non-final position in this domain. What the denotata of
the words books, Crete, and -hale in our sentences have in common is that
they are both discourse-active and in the presupposition.
Notice, again, that the occurrence of the focus accent before the
unaccented morpheme -hale is not a sign of “contrastiveness" but a
simple consequence of English morphosyntax. To see this, it is sufficient
to replace the Latinate exhale with its quasi-synonymous Germanic
equivalent breathe out. In sentence (5 23')
(5.23')
He forgot to breathe out
which is semantically close to (5.23), and which would be more or less
appropriate (though clearly less witty) in the given discourse context, no
accent "shift" occurs and no connotation of contrastiveness arises. The
presence of the focus accent on the prefix ex- in (5.23) is a case of default
accentuation, not of "contrastive accent shift.” I will return to the issue
of contrastiveness in more explicit terms in Section 5.5.
A revealing fact about the nature of default accentuation is that a
default accent may fall on certain grammatical morphemes whose
meaning (or lack thereof) does not seem to be compatible with focus
status. Consider the pair of negative sentences in (5.24) (a) and (b):
(5.24)
I
a. I bion't.
b. I did NOT.
c. *1 did not
254
Pragmatic relations: focus
It is no doubt possible to explain the difference between the accented and
non-accented (enclitic) form of the negative morpheme in (5.24) (a)
and (b) ¡conically, i.e. as a difference of emphasis. But as I observed
earlier, emphasis is not a matter of information structure but of
expressiveness. By their focus structure, the two sentences are identical:
they both assert pragmatically that the speaker did not do a certain
action. The interesting fact in (5.24) is not the difference between the
enclitic and the non-enclitic form of the negative morpheme but the
prosodic status of the verb did. No iconic explanation is available for the
difference between the accented and the non-accented occurrence of did
in the two versions. The presence of the accent on did in (a) is not
motivated by the desire to mark this word as important or new. Rather
the deciding factor is that the enclitic n't cannot be accented, leaving no
other place for the accent to go, as demonstrated by the ill-formededness
of (5.24c). Notice that example (5.24) differs from the previous examples
of default accentuation in that the lack of prominence on n 7 is not due to
pragmatic reasons (such as activeness and topic status of a referent) but
to the fact that the enclitic negative morpheme is inherently unaccentable.
A default accent can even fall on certain function words to which no
independent lexical meaning can be assigned. For example in the short
dialogue in (5.25)
the
(5.25)
A: Let’s go to the kitchew and get something to
B: There’s nothing to eat.
eat.
the focus accent in the reply falls on the semantically empty function
word to.26 In (5.25) the entire sentence except the preposition to is
unaccented. The function of the accent on to is to mark the proposition
“There’s nothing to eat (in the kitchen)“ as a correction of the erroneous
pragmatic presupposition "There is something to eat in the kitchen”
which was evoked in A’s utterance. It is not to mark the word to as the
newest or most important element of the sentence. (This case is thus
different from that of the accented preposition to in (5.5) ll'e started
talking to the pigs, which in some pretheoretical sense could indeed be
said to be “the most important semantic element’’ in the sentence).
The prosody of (5.25) is clearly not amenable to any iconic account of
accent placement. Example (5.25) is of special theoretical interest as it
shows with great clarity that the interpretation of an accented constituent
as representing the “new information’' er the "new element" in a
sentence is misleading. At the same time it shows with equal clarity (hat
Prosodic accents: ¡conicity, rule, default
255
focus accent assignment cannot be a matter of constituent structure, at
least not in all sentences. This is not to say that the accent on to is
assigned randomly. It is motivated indirectly, in the sense that any other
position would entail a different focus interpretation of the sentence.
What allows the accent on the word to to act as the locus of the focus
marker is neither its denotatum nor its syntactic status in the sentence but
the fact that the accent pattern of (5.25) contrasts implicitly with possible
alternative sentence patterns for the same proposition, each of which has
its own focus construal (e.g. the pattern in There ir nothing to eat}.
The phenomenon of default accentuation allows me to emphasize one
very important aspect of the grammar of focus which in my opinion has
not been sufficiently emphasized in the generative literature. We have
seen that the interpretation of the focus structure of sentences containing
a default accent is determined neither by formal rules alone, i.e. by rules
defined on some structural property of the sentence, nor by pragmatic
principles alone, i.e. by weighing the relative communicative importance
of the various designata in a sentence. The cognitive mechanism for the
interpretation of a default accent is of an entirely different sort. Rather
than being interpreted within a given structure, the value of such an
accent is understood against the background of alternative but unused
grammatical structures expressing the same proposition. In other words,
the interpretation of the accentual pattern is determined by the existence
of one or more prosodic allosentences generated by the grammar of the
language (see Sections 1.1 and 1.4.3). Given this theoretical outlook.
Ladd’s term “deaccentuation,” which evokes the idea of a process
whereby one accentual pattern is changed into another one. is somewhat
misleading (though eminently convenient). Accent assignment by default
is not a process whereby a focus accent is assigned to a less rather than
more normal position in the sentence. As various researchers
(Schmerling, Selkirk, and others, including Ladd ) have pointed out,
the very notion of “normal stress” (or “normal accent") is misguided.
The assignment of a default accent to a constituent is the necessary result
of independent grammatical factors, in particular (but not only) the
presence of a non-focal discourse-active designatum in phrase-final
position
As evidence in support of the notion that focus meaning is often
construed against the background of a set of allosentences I would like to
present some German facts, which to my knowledge have not been
noticed before. In German, the accented subject NP of event-reporting
256
Pragmatic relations, focus
sentences can either appear in clause-initial position, as in English, or,
under certain syntactic conditions, it can be inverted, as in Italian (see
Sections 1.3 and 4.2.2). The two options are illustrated in (5.26). Sentence
(a) parallels the English SV construction in (4.10a) and sentence (b) the
Italian OVS construction in (4.10b).
(5.26)
a. Mein hals tut weh. “My throat hurts"
my throat does pain
b. Mtr tut der hals weh. "My throat hurts"
me-DAT does the throat pain
Both (5.26a) and (5.26b) have possible thetic interpretations, the word- 1
order difference being motivated essentially by syntactic factors. What j
allows the accented subject NP to appear postverbally in (b) is that the j
possessor expression, which was "advanced” from the status of a 1
determiner to that of a dative argument, now occupies the first position in 1
the clause; see example (4.49) and discussion.11
I
Now notice the following fact. If the positions of the preverbal topic 1
pronoun and the accented postverbal NP in (5.26b) are reversed, without 1
however making the structure identical to (5.26a), i.e. if (5.26b) is 1
changed into (5.26b’), which is also a well-formed grammatical structure: >1
(5.26b’) Der Hals tut mir weh. "My
throat
buris"
the resulting sentence has only an argument-focus interpretation, i.e. it
has only the identificational, not the event-reporting (sentence-focus)
reading. Even though (5.26b”) is prosodically and lexically similar to
(5.26a), the focus interpretation of the two sentences is different.
Pragmatically, (5,26b”) contrasts both with (5.26a) and with (5.26b).
It is clear that this difference in interpretation cannot be explained on
the basis of the syntactic, prosodic, or lexical properties of (5.26) alone.
No formal element in this sentence is per se incompatible with thetic
construal of the proposition. For example the syntactically analogous
sentence in (5.27)
(5.27)
.j
J
1
J
J
1
1
1
*1
J
2
Die Polizei ist hinter mir her “The folk e are aller nie"
the police is after me-DAT PART
does have a sentence-locus reading. The reason the thetic interpretation is i
absent in (5.26b") is because it is preempted by the existence of the two J
alternative thetic structures in t5 2oi (a) and (b). The point of using the
possessor-advancement construction in (5.26b) is to allow the topical!
element mir io appear in initial position, thereby making it possible for (
focus and the mental representations of referents
257
the focus accent to appear in postverbal position, resulting in
preservation of the unmarked information-structure sequence topicfocus. A syntactic reversal, or “re-inversion," of this inverted sequence
would be pragmatically unmotivated unless it also involved a change in
focus conrtrual. To quote Anttila's famous dictum: "The mind shuns
purposeless variety."
These German facts show clearly that, in some cases at least, the focus
structure of a sentence can be correctly interpreted only within a system
of contrasting allosentences. The notion of a prosodic allosentence will
prove particularly important in the analysis of the prosodic marking of
the contrast between predicate-focus and sentence-focus sentences (see
Section 5.6-2). The kind of interpretive mechanism postulated here
requires a “structuralist” (rather than "generativist”) approach, i.e. an
approach in which the interpretation of a given structure is viewed as
being determined within a system of formal oppositions rather than by a
set of rules. Such an approach to focus interpretation is comparable,
mutatis mutandis, to Reinhart’s (1983:Ch. 7) approach to the interpreta­
tion of bound vs. free anaphoric expressions in English. Reinhart argues
that the phenomenon referred to as “disjoint reference” in the generative
literature on anaphora cannot be accounted for on the basis of the
structural properties of a given sentence alone but on the basis of
pragmatic inferences determined by the unconscious awareness of
possible alternative structures 28 My approach differs from Reinhart’s,
however, in that 1 do not think that a speaker’s choice among possible
allosentences, as well as a hearer’s interpretation of this choice, is
determined by pragmatic inferencing. Rather I take this choice to be
directly determined by the speaker’s and the hearer’s knowledge of
grammar. In the case of the phenomena under discussion, it is their
knowledge of the rules and conventions of information structure. No
recourse to conversational implicature is necessary.
5.4
Focus and the mental representations of referents
5.4.1
focus relation and activation stale
In the preceding sections I described what I lake to be the shortcomings
of a narrow pragmatic view of sentence accentuation, according to
which prosodic prominence is a direct signal of “new information," and
I argued that accent position is determined by at least three factors:
258
Pragmatic relations: focus
¡conicity, grammatical rule, and default. In the present section I would
like to discuss one particular view of the pragmatic function of sentence
accentuation, which is explicitly or implicitly shared by many linguists.
According to this view, there is a direct correlation between the
prosodic marking of “new information” and the assumed “newness” of
the referent or denotatum of the accented constituent in the
addressee’s mind. In this view, which has perhaps been most
consistently expressed in work by Wallace Chafe (e.g. 1974, 1976,
1987), sentence prosody can be fully or partially explained in terms of
the function of referent activation. I will call this the focus-newness
correlation view. This view can be understood in two ways, which I
will cal! the “strong" and the “weak" version. According to the strong
version, any constituent that carries an accent necessarily expresses a
referent or denotatum which is new to the discourse (i.e. to the
addressee's mind or consciousness). According to the weak version, any
referent or denotatum which is new to a discourse requires prosodic
prominence of the corresponding constituent.
In order to evaluate the two versions of the focus-newness correlation
view it will be useful to recall the theoretical distinction which I drew at
the end of Chapter 3, and repeatedly thereafter, between two kinds of
information-structure categories: those indicating the cognitive states of
the mental representations of discourse referents (activation and
identifiability) and those indicating pragmatically construed relations
between propositions and their elements (topic and focus). The two
categories correlate with each other, but they cannot be equated. (The
fact that they correlate with each other may explain why the difference
between them has often been neglected.) In the analysis of prosody, the
need for a distinction between the marking of cognitive states and that of
pragmatic relations follows from two observations. The first is that
constituents whose designata have similar activation states often have
different accentual properties; the second is that constituents with the
same accentual properties may have different pragmatic relations to the
proposition, i.e. they may be either topical or focal.
That the presence or absence of an accent is often not due to a
difference in the activation state of a designatum was first shown in
example (3.27), which I repeat here for convenience:
(3.27)
I heard something terrible last night. Remember mark, the guy we
went hiking with, who’s gay9 His lover just died of aids.
B
Focus and the mental representations of referents
259
As I noted in the original discussion of this example, it would make little
sense to explain the prosodic difference between the unaccented forms
heard and went, on the one hand, and the accented forms hiking and Gar,
on the other, in terms of "concept” activation, since the denotata of these
expressions are all equally "new” in the discourse context. As I will show
in the next section, these expressions do not have the necessary referential
properties for their activation states to be a determining factor in the
prosodic structuring of the sentence.
Example (3.27) also illustrates the second fact (though it does so
somewhat weakly), i.e. that an accent may fall on a constituent which is
not in focus. In one possible construal of (3.27), the accented subject NP
his lover in the last sentence is a topic expression, hence is excluded from
the focus domain. (Topic construal of the subject NP is somewhat
unlikely in the given context, but it is nevertheless compatible with the
prosodic structure of the sentence.) In this case, the accent on lover is not
a focus accent but an activation accent. Its presence signals the
assumption that the referent of the subject NP, though topical in the
discourse, was not yet established as the topic of the sentence at the time
of utterance. The focus accent in the sentence is the one on AIDS.
That the accent on the subject noun and that on the object of the
preposition in (3.27) are functionally not equivalent can be demonstrated
by modifying the prosodic pattern of the sentence. If we take away the
accent on AIDS, leaving only the accent on lover, the focus structure
changes from predicate focus to argument focus, i.e. the sentence
necessarily evokes the presupposition that someone died of AIDS. But if
we take away the accent on lover, changing the sentence to His lover just
died of aids, the focus structure remains the same, i.e. the sentence still
has predicate focus. The only change is that in the assumed activation
status of the topic referent. (The sentence, with two prosodic peaks, may
in principle also be used in an event-reporting context, but this is beside
the point.) In a predicate-focus structure, an accent on the predicate is
criterial, but an accent on the subject is not (see Section 5.6.1).
More clearly perhaps than in (3.27) the difference between focus accent
and activation accent appears in our paradigm example (3.31), whose
focus articulation is coded not only prosodically but morphosyntactically:
(3.31)
a. io pago
moi je payi.
b. Pago io. - C'est moi qui pave.
260
Pragmatic relations: focus
In the (a) examples, the pronouns to and moi are syntactically marked as
topic expressions. The accents on the pronouns cannot therefore be focus
accents. This is confirmed by the fact that the pronouns could be
deaccented without a concomitant change in focus structure (Io pago Moi Je paye). In fact, these pronouns are semantically and syntactically
speaking omissible altogether, making focus status of their referents
logically impossible (see Section 5.2.1, example (5.10) and discussion). In
(3.31b), on the other hand, the pronouns are syntactically marked as
being in focus, by appearing in postverbal position. The accents on the
pronouns therefore are focus accents. These pronouns could not be
deaccented (let alone omitted) without causing the sentence to be
prosodically ill-formed. Since every sentence must have a focus to be
informative, every sentence must have at least one accent, and this accent
is necessarily a focus accent. (The last statement does not necessarily
apply to sentences with non-prosodic focus marking; see the discussion of
WH-questions below.)2’
Let us now return to the focus-newness correlation view. It is clear that
any claim concerning a correlation between focus and the cognitive state
"inactive” can be made only for focus constituents to which the
activation parameter can be applied, i.e. to referential constituents in
the sense of Section 3.1. It is easy to demonstrate that even for such ’
constituents the strong version of the focus-newness correlation view'
cannot be upheld. Referential constituents may carry a focus accent even i
if their referents can in no way be said to be "new.” Consider the)
sentences in (5.28) (a variant of (4.3)):
(5.28)
Q: Who did Felix praise9
A. a. He praised himself.
b. He praised you.
c. He praised his brother.
d. He praised a woman you don’t know.
e. He praised noonl.
’1
The foci of the answers in (5.28) are argument foci, i.e. they provide the ,
referent inquired about with the word h7io in the preceding question.!
(The answers would be well-formed if the subject and the verb were]
deleted.) Notice that only in idi is the referent of the focus phrase!
necessarily new to the discourse it is marked as unidentifiable, hence]
necessarily inactive, via the indefinite article. In (a) and (b) the referent is*
active, due either to its anaphoric status in the text-internal world ■
Focus and the menial representations of referents
261
(himself}, or to its deictic status in the text-external world (you).20 In (c),
the referent of the NP his brother may in principle be in any activation
state, since accented definite noun phrases are unmarked for the active­
inactive distinction (see Section 3.3.1). As for (e), the activation criterion
simply does not apply, since no activation state can be assigned to the
denotatum of noone.
The referents designated by the direct object constituents in (5.28) thus
range from active to brand-new in the discourse. Yet they are all
accented. The only pragmatic property which all examples have in
common is that the designatmn of the direct object stands in a focus
relation to the proposition. This focus relation is exactly the same in (b),
where the referent is entirely active, as in (d), where it is entirely new, or
i in (e), where the constituent has no referent at all. Moreover it is
f expressed by the same formal means, i.e. prosodic prominence on the last
f constituent in the sentence. Since all accented constituents in (5.28) are
I focus expressions, and since only some of them have inactive referents, we
| may conclude that, in these examples at least, focus prosody overrides
| activation prosody.
I
The communicative purpose of the various replies in (5.28) is to
I identify for the addressee the referent of a missing argument in a
| pragmatically presupposed proposition (hence my characterization of
B sentences with argument focus as “identificational,” see Sections 4.1.1
V and 5.2.3). And the function of the focus accent is to mark a particular
B constituent as the one designating that referent. Whether the referent of
r
B
B
L
|
f
"
■
K
■
E
■
|F
the missing argument is “new" or “old" in the discourse is irrelevant
from the point of view of the prosodic form of the sentence. Not
knowing which referent fits a given argument position in an open
proposition is an entirely different mental slate from not being familiar
with the referent or from not thinking of it. In asking the question in
(5.28), the speaker may well be familiar with the referent, as in (c); she
may even be thinking of it, as in (a). What counts is that she does not
know that this referent corresponds to the missing argument in the
proposition. What gives a focus constituent its flavor as a “new”
element is not the status of its denotatum in the discourse but its
relation to the asserted proposition at the time of utterance. Focus and
inactiveness are independent information-structure parameters and their
grammatical manifestations must be carefully distinguished.
I conclude therefore that the strong version of the focus-newness
correlation view' cannot be upheld. Let us now turn to the weak version,
262
Pragmatic relations: focus
I according to which a referent which is new to a discourse necessarily
I involves focus status of the corresponding constituent. 1 believe that this
l view is essentially correct, although it may not contribute much to our
understanding of the grammar of focus. To see that there is a necessary
correlation between the newness of a discourse referent and focus
prominence of the expression coding it we must go back to the Topic
Acceptability Scale in example (4.34) which predicts that referents which
are low on the scale, in particular brand-new referents, are cognitively
speaking “poor" topics. Such referents will therefore normally be coded
in Don-topical form, i.e. as focus constituents. From a certain degree of
inactiveness on, referents are more acceptably coded as focus expressions
than as topic expressions. It is this correlation between inactiveness (or
unidentiftability) and focus status that was shown to motivate the use of
topic-promoting constructions of the presentational type (cf. Section
4.4.4.1). In this sense, a certain relationship of complementarity holds
between the activation states of topic and of focus referents. But this
complementarity is only partial; while a topic constituent must have a
referent, and while this referent must be identifiable and have a certain
degree of pragmatic salience in the discourse, a focus constituent is in
principle free with respect to the question of identifiability and activation.
The theoretical observation that pragmatically inaccessible discourse
referents are most likely to be coded as focal constituents is strongly
confirmed by statistical observations concerning the distribution of topic
and focus constituents in texts. For example the text counts from spoken
French presented in Lambrecht 1986b (Chapter 6) reveal that subjects
overwhelmingly tend to be pronouns while objects overwhelmingly
appear as lexical noun phrases. Given the necessary correlation between
pronominal coding and activeness on the one hand and between
inactiveness and lexical coding on the other (Chapter 3), and given the
correlation between subject and topic on the one hand and object and
focus on the other (Chapter 4), we can conclude that there must be a
strong discourse tendency for referential focus constituents to have
“new" referents.31 And this tendency may have important consequences
for the syntactic structuring of sentences. Nevertheless, there is no
necessary correlation between focus and the activation states of referents.
An important conclusion to draw from the discussion in this section is
that a point of prosodic prominence is neither necessarily an indicator of
a focus relation nor necessarily an indicator of inactiveness of a referent.
It may be one or the other, or both at the same time. With the claim that
Focus and ¡he mema! representations of referents
263
inactiveness marking and focus marking must be functionally (but not
necessarily phonetically) distinguished I depart on the one hand from
analyses like Chafe’s (1976, 1987), in which prosodic prominence is
explained solely in terms of the marking of activation states and in which
no use is made of the notions of focus and presupposition; and on the
other hand from analyses like JackendofTs (1972) or Selkirk’s (1984), in
which pitch accent is analyzed solely in terms of focus marking. Notice
that both the “activation approach” and the “focus approach" to pitch
prominence are based on the idea that sentence accentuation is a means
of expressing "new information.” One might therefore be tempted to
identify the two approaches with each other by redefining the notion of
“new information" in such a way that all sentence accents can be
subsumed under this notion. One might say, for example, that activating
a referent in an addressee’s mind is an act of information of essentially
the same kind as conveying new propositional knowledge to an addressee
and that all sentence accents are therefore expressions of the same
function: the marking of new information.
Besides being incompatible with the notion of information I argued for
in Chapter 2, such an attempt at collapsing the inactiveness-marking
function and the focus-marking function of sentence prosody would fail
to account for the fundamentally different effects which the two kinds of
accent have on the pragmatic interpretation of a sentence (cf. the
discussion of the different status of the pronouns io and moi in (3.31)
above). Moreover it would neglect the fundamental markedness
asymmetry between accented and non-accented constituents which I
first pointed out in Section 3.3. Unaccented referential constituents,
whether pronouns or lexical noun phrases, necessarily have active
referents, i.e. they are formally marked for the pragmatic feature "active
referent.” Accented constituents, on the other hand, are unmarked with
respect to activation, i.e. they may have either active or inactive referents.
It is therefore in principle impossible to teli from the accent on a
constituent alone whether its referent is "new" or “old." But it is equally
impossible to determine on the basis of an accent alone, i.e. without
considering other grammatical aspects of the sentence, whether the
accented constituent indicates a focus relation or an inactive referent.
Neither the focus parameter alone nor the activation parameter alone are
sufficient to account for the role of prosody in information structure.
What the two parameters have in common is that they involve the
marking of pragmatically construed portions of propositions via prosodic
a
264
usa
Pragmatic relations: focus
structure. 1 will return to this issue in Section 5.7, where I will suggest an
interpretation of the two accent functions which is neutral with respect to
the focus-activation distinction.
5.4.2
Predicates versus arguments
So far, the discussion of the relationship between focus and activation
states has been centered on the status of discourse referents. In the
present section, I will examine the assignment of focus accents to
expressions which are not referential in the sense of Chapter 3, in
particular to predicating expressions.
That the discourse status of predicators has a fundamentally different
effect on focus prosody than that of referential expressions (noun
phrases, pronouns, nominalized clauses, non-finite verb phrases, etc.) can
be seen in sentences in which both a verb and a noun are in focus. We saw
a clear example of this difference in (3.27) (repeated at the beginning of
5.3.1), where we noticed that the referential expressions something
terrible, Mark, and AIDS were accented, while the predicates heard,
remember, went, and died were not, even though the desígnala of all these
expressions were equally “new” in the discourse. The different prosodic
behavior of nouns and verbs is not restricted to English, as demonstrated
by the parallel between the English and German sentences in (5.29):
(5.29)
.
b.
*
*“
Q:Why is he so upset?
A: a. He bought a car from one of his neighbors and now it’s not
RUNNING.
b. Er hat von einem seiner Nachbarn ein auto gekauft, und jetzt ó
läuft es nicht.
,
Í
Taking these sentences to have predicate-focus structure (they provide B
information about the referent designated by the pronoun he in the lg
question), i.e. taking the focus domain in both clauses to be the verbiflí
phrase (exempting from it the topical expression his/seitter), it is clear that
the designate of the verbs and the nouns are equally new to the discourse.
But while in the second clause the verb (running!lauft) carries the main
accent, in the first clause only the nouns are accented. The difference is i.
particularly sinking in the case of the German past participle gekauft, -j.
This verb form is unaccented even though it occupies clause-fmal
position, which in German, us m English and French, is the unmarked '■
position for the predicate-focus accent "
'' F
Focus and the mental representations of referents
265
The different behavior of nouns and verbs with respect to focus
prosody can be observed also in anaphoric contexts. Unlike nominal
arguments, predicates are not necessarily unaccented on second mention.
Consider the contrast between (5.30) and (5.31):
(5.30)
a. He promised to go shopping but he forgot to go.
b. #He promised to go shopping but he forgot to go.
(5.31)
a. He promised to buy food but he forgot to get the stuff,
b. #He promised to buy food but he forgot to get the stuff.
In (5.30a) the second instance of the verb go receives the focus accent, due
to its final position in the focus VP forgot to go, even though it is
anaphorically related to the VP go shopping in the first part of the
sentence. As (5.30b) shows, it would be inappropriate to deaccent go and
to put the main accent on forgot, in spite of the fact that the latter verb
expresses the “newest” denotatum in the proposition. In (5.31a), on the
other hand, the noun stuff, which is anaphorically linked to the
antecedent food, is necessarily unaccented, even though it is not lexically
identical to its antecedent. If accented, as in (5.31b), its anaphoric status
would be canceled and stuff would refer to something other than the food
in question.
The same situation obtains in the following short dialogues;
(5.32)
A: I know what instinct means.
B:Oh yeah? What does {instinct/il} mean?
Oh yeah7 #What does instinct mean?
(5.33)
A:1 know where anna is.
B:Oh yeah7 Where is (Anna/she).
Oh yeah? #Where is anna?
In (5.32), the anaphoric arguments instinct or it in B's reply must be
unaccented upon second mention. The predicate mean on the other hand
must receive the accent upon second mention, even though its denotatum
is as clearly activated as that of the argument expression. Accenting the
argument instinct, as tn the second version of the reply, would have the
effect of canceling the anaphoric link between the two occurrences of the
argument, leading tn this case to unacceptability since there is no other
referent in the universe of discourse that could be designated with the
noun instinct (the noun designates the class, not an individual). Example
(5.33) is similar, except that here the order of the predicate and the
argument is reversed in B’s reply, showing that it is not the position of the
266
Pragmatic relations: focus
in the sentence but its function in the predicate-argument
determines where the accent will fall.
Such examples show that from the point of view of the expression of
information-structure distinctions the pragmatic status of verbs is in
some sense less important than that of nouns. It is true, as Bolinger
(1972) has pointed out, that verbs sometimes require accentuation,
depending on their relative “semantic weight." Bolinger discusses
sentence pairs such as 1 have a foist to make vs. 1 have a point to
emphasize. In this pair, the verb make does not require an accent in order
to be in focus but the verb emphasize does. If the latter verb were
unaccented, it would necessarily be interpreted as being in the
presupposition. Whatever the reason for this difference is, it does not
affect the point at hand: while lack of prosodic prominence on a
referential expression is necessarily an indication of activeness or at least
high accessibility of the referent, lack of prominence on a predicating
expression does not necessarily have a similar implication. Phrased
differently, while unaccented referential expressions are marked for the
feature “active referent,” unaccented predicating expressions are
unmarked with respect to the activation states of their denotata.
Now since accented expressions, whether referential or not, are always
unmarked for the active-inactive contrast, we may conclude that the
activation parameter is irrelevant, or at least relatively unimportant, for
the prosodic coding of verbs. A verb with a “new” denotatum must
receive an accent only if it is located in a syntactic position which attracts
an accent for independent reasons, for example because no argument
expression is present or because an occurring argument cannot be
accented due to its role as a topic with an active referent. Thus prosodic
prominence on predicating expressions is generally assigned by default
rather than by iconic motivation. The accent on a predicator indicates a
broader focal designatum in a proposition, not merely the focal status of
the predicator itself.
The fact that nouns and verbs behave differently with repect to
sentence accentuation was noticed early on by Chafe (1974) and
Schmerling (1976). Schmerling tried to account for this fact with the
following statement (her “Principle II”);
constituent
structure that
The verb receives lower stress than the subject and the direct object, if
there is one; in other words, predicates receive lower stress than their
arguments, irrespective of their linear position in surface structure.
(1976:82)
Focus and the mental representations of referents
267
Schmerling, who makes this observation in the context of her criticism of
Chomsky & Halle's formulation of the Nuclear Stress Rule, does not
make use of the notions of focus and activation. To account for sentences
such as truman died or john susi'H ED, which are counterexamples to her
Principle II, she postulates a pragmatic distinction between "news
sentences” and “topic-comment cases” and she argues that her Principle
II does not hold for topic-comment sentences, i.e. sentences whose
subject NPs are topics. Schmerling's distinction between news sentences
and topic-comment sentences is clearly related in spirit to the distinction
I drew in Section 4.2.2 between thetic and categorical sentences.
Schmerling’s analysis is taken up by Selkirk, who makes the following
observation (the term “focus” in the quote is equivalent to my “focus
accent” and “focused” to my "accented”):
One important observation to be made about the interpretation of focus
is that lack of focus is not uniformly interpreted- A nonfocused NP is
necessarily interpreted as old information, but a nonfocused verb is
not ... We believe the generalization to be that only the focus of
constituents that are arguments is relevant to the aspect of inionational
meaning where the discourse-relevant distinction between old and new
information is represented (1984:213)
Selkirk does not define “argument” but she contrasts arguments with
“modifiers, quantifiers, and others,” which (somewhat surprisingly) she
calls “adjuncts.” She does not discuss the status of locative or temporal
adjunct phrases containing lexical NPs. whose focus properties are in
many respects similar to those of arguments and which she would
presumably subsume under the category “argument.” Selkirk’s general­
ization according to which only the behavior of arguments is relevant for
the interpretation of focus structure is called by her the “Focus
Interpretation Principle ”
The different prosodic behavior of nouns and verbs or arguments and
predicates noticed by Schmerling and Selkirk (and others) finds a natural
explanation within my theory of information structure, with its
distinction between pragmatic relation and pragmatic property. The
prosodic difference between nouns and verbs can be seen as a
consequence of the inherent difference in the way in which discoursereferential vs. non-referential expressions are processed. While the
processing of referential expressions involves the task of creating,
identifying, remembering, and modifying mental representations, the
processing of predicating expressions requires al most the task of
268
Pragmatic relations: focus
remembering that a particular predicate occurred in a previously uttered
sentence (as in the cases of gapping and ellipsis mentioned in Section 3.4).
The former involve long-term memory, the latter short-term memory
only. In the next section, we will see another important manifestation of
the distinction being drawn here, in the different prosodic behavior of
constituents expressing complete vs. incomplete (or open) propositions.
Thus it is the processing difference between arguments and predicates
that accounts for the fact that only the former require prosodic
prominence when their denotata are inactive, while the activation state
of the latter has no similar effect on sentence prosody. The fact that
verbs, adjectives, or prepositions do not require the mental identification
of referents explains e.g. why these categories are not grammatically
marked for definiteness across languages, except when they are
nominaiized, i.e. when they function as arguments. It is also consistent
with the non-existence of presentational or detachment constructions
involving predicators (except, again, in nominalizations). Since predica­
te« do not code discourse referents with semantic roles in propositions,
the Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role (Section 4.5.1) does
not apply to them. The level at which the distribution of points of
prosodic prominence is determined is not the level of semantics, with its
contrast between predicates and arguments, nor the level of syntax, with
its contrast between noun phrases and verb phrases. Rather it is the level
of information structure, al which the mental representations of entities
and states of affairs are marked for their statuses in the minds of the
interlocutors and for the pragmatic relations they enter into within
pragmatically structured propositions.
The preceding remarks are not meant to imply that the discourse
interpretation of predicates involves no anaphoric processing and has no
bearing on the structuring of sentences in discourse. For example, if I say
I'm going hiking tomorrow and after my return you ask me How was your
hike? it is the fact that I used the verb hike in my first utterance that
allows you to refer to my activity with the phrase your hike. My utterance
has activated something in your mind which makes the anaphoric
relation between /liking and hike possible. But notice that the thing
referred to in your reply is not 'imply the denotatum of the verb hike.
Rather it is a presupposed proposition. i.e. "you hiked," which involves a
predicate and an argument This is why under the appropriate
circumstances you could also have inquired about my outing with the
question How n <■> it'' in which ihe anaphoric pronoun it designates a
Focus and the menial representations of referents
269
I topic referent. It is the denotatum of a proposition, not only of a
f predicate, that got activated by my utterance, and it is this propositional
f denotatum which can be referred to with an (accented or unaccented)
f anaphoric expression.
t
The observations made in this section concerning the different prosodic
t behavior of arguments and predicates are comparable to observations
[ made in a different theoretical context by Hankamer & Sag (1984), The
f distinction drawn by these authors between model-interpretive anaphora
| (or “deep” anaphora) and ellipsis (or “surface" anaphora) is related, I
r believe, to the distinction 1 am drawing between the discourse
| interpretation of referential vs. non-referential categories. Hankamer &
| Sag do not draw this latter distinction, nor do they operate with the
notions of activation and identifiability, but it is no doubt not a
r coincidence that the ellipsis phenomena they mention all involve verbs
’ (“VP ellipsis,” “sluicing," “gapping,” and “stripping”). Hankamer & Sag
t observe that such ellipsis phenomena are understood “by reference to the
f representation of propositional structure of recent discourse” (emphasis
f mine). The restriction of ellipsis phenomena to anaphoric relations
| between elements in adjacent sentences or clauses is consistent with my
I observation that predicates are not stored in the form of mental
I representations which can be activated and maintained over stretches
L of discourse of indefinite length.
5.4.3
Focus relation, activation, and presupposition
L The distinction which 1 drew in Section 5.4.1 between the formal marking
Lof “focus" and that of the cognitive state “inactive” allows us to shed
L light on a number of prosodic phenomena which have posed problems in
(previous treatments (see e.g. Schmerling 1976:74ff) or which have been
[ ignored in the literature. The phenomena I have in mind all involve the
[ difference between the marking of activation states and that of pragmatic
I presuppositions. The observations presented here further develop the
f preliminary remarks made in Section 5.1 2.
* The definition of focus as that portion of a proposition whereby the
* assertion differs from the presupposition entails that focus and
'presupposition exclude each other. Since a focus accent necessarily falls
■ within a focus domain, it w-ould seem natural to conclude that a
f constituent expressing a pragmatically presupposed proposition cannot
be prosodically prominent. This conclusion is indeed implied in much
fl
270
Pragmatic relations: focus
on focus and presupposition in which the distinction between focus
made (e.g. Chomsky 1970, Jackendoff 1972).
However, this conclusion is patently false. To claim that constituents
expressing pragmatically presupposed propositions cannot be accented
on the grounds that the content of the propositions is assumed to be
already known to the addressee is as false as to claim that definite noun
phrases cannot receive an accent on the grounds that their referents are
assumed to be already identifiable. As 1 have repeatedly emphasized, not
knowing something and not thinking of something are different mental
states, which are expressed in different grammatical categories. In this
section, I will show that the absence of pitch prominence on a clause or
portion of a clause merely has the effect of marking a propositional
denotatum as active, in accordance with the analysis in Section 3.3, and
that the construal of this denotatum as pragmatically presupposed is
merely a consequence of its activation state. The discussion will proceed
in two parts. The first part deals with the accentual marking of
constituents expressing complete or saturated presupposed propositions,
the second with the marking of constituents expressing presupposed
propositions which are incomplete or open.
work
and activation is not
5.4.3.1 Complete presupposed propositions
In Section 3.1, I observed that discourse referents may be either entities
or propositions. Like entities, the referents of propositions may be in
various activation states. Constituents expressing presupposed proposi­
tions are therefore subject to the same prosodic contrasts as noun phrases
and pronouns. As with nominal constituents, any accent they carry may
be either a focus accent-indicating the establishment of a focus relation
between the referent of the presupposed proposition and the larger
proposition in which it is embedded-or an activation accent - indicating
that the referent of the presupposed proposition is being promoted from
inactive (or accessible) to active status in the discourse. As we saw in
Section 5.4.1, the two functions of pitch prominence may coincide, i.e. the
establishment of a focus relation may involve activation of the referent of
the focus constituent, but they cannot be equated. Moreover, as I briefly
mentioned in Section 5.1.2, a pragmatically presupposed proposition may
be activated “in layers," so to speak, giving rise to default accents within
the sentential constituents coding them, analogous to the default accents
which may occur within noun phrases.
Focus and ¡he menial representations of referents
271
That a constituent expressing a presupposed proposition may carry an
accent was first mentioned in the discussion of the difference between
“semantic” and “pragmatic” presupposition in Section 2.3, where I
observed that sentential complements may be accented even when they
are pragmatically presupposed. Let us take another look at example
(2.15), which I repeat here in modified form as (5.34):
(5.34)
a. I didn’t realize [ that you lied Io me ].
b. I didn’t realize ( that you lied to me ].
c. t didn't realize (that ].
In the discussion of (2.15), I observed that the propositional content of
the complement of a factive verb like realize, though always semantically
presupposed, is not necessarily presupposed pragmatically. Let us
remember that (5.34a) is compatible both with a situation in which the
proposition “You lied to me” is already part of the common ground
between the speaker and the hearer and with a situation in which this
common ground is only being created with the utterance. But the form of
the sentence is the same in both situations. The prosodic structure of the
sentence can therefore not be explained in terms of the contrast between
presupposed and non-presupposed propositions.
In the (b) and (c) examples of (5.34), the proposition “You lied to me”
clearly is pragmatically presupposed, since it is prosodically and-in (c)morphosyntactically marked as having an active referent. Something that
is active in our minds is necessarily something that we know or at least
can identify. (The difference between lexica) coding in (b) and
pronominal coding in (c) is determined by discourse factors which
cannot be explained on the basis of these constructed examples.) In (b)
and (c), the complement of realize is a topic constituent with a discourseactive referent of the same kind as the unaccented topic constituents
books and Crete in examples (5.19) and (5.20). These sentences are about
the relationship between the speaker and the fact that someone lied to
her.
Thus in (5.34) the status of the complement proposition as
pragmatically presupposed is formally marked only in those cases where
the presupposed denotatum is also discourse-active. We may therefore
conclude that it is the cognitive status of the presupposed proposition as
active in the discourse that determines the position of the focus accent in
these sentences, not the fact that the proposition is presupposed. The
1
272
Pragmatic relations: focus
relevant aspects of the information structure of (5.34) (b) and (c) are
represented in (5.34b’) and (5.34c'):
(5.34b’) ( toc[ 1 ] tocf didn’t realize ,□>■[ that you lied to me ] ] ]
(5.34c’) [«»-[1] >oc[ didn’t realize [ that ) ]
I
(5.34) (b) and (c) are instances of the prosodic type discussed in Section
5.3.3, in which a predicate-focus domain includes a topical object
constituent, causing the focus accent to fall by default on the last
"accentable" syllable preceding the topical object.
Let us now take a closer look at example (5.34a), in which the
propositional content of the complement clause may or may not
represent mutually shared knowledge. Let us first take a situation in
which the knowledge of the proposition expressed in the complement
clause in (a) is not assumed to be shared between the speaker and the
addressee, i.e. in which the sentence is uttered with the intent to make the
addressee aware of the fact that the speaker knows that the addressee lied
to her. In this situation, the utterance of (5.34a) establishes a new shared
discourse referent, i.e. the referent of the proposition "You lied to me,"
which will then be added to the discourse register. After being
established, this discourse referent necessarily has the status “identifn
able." In being established, the referent is necessarily also being activated
in the hearer’s mind, hence the necessary presence of an accent in (5.34a).'
Notice that this activation accent is at the same time the focus accent for
the entire sentence. It marks the higher VP didn 't realize that you lied lo}
me as the focus domain of a predicate-focus sentence. In contrast to (b),
and (c), the complement of realize in (a) has a focus relation to thCj
matrix proposition.
Next let us assume a situation in which the content of the complement!
clause in (5.34a) is already pragmatically presupposed, i.e. in which the
fact that the speaker was lied to by the addressee is shared knowledge]
between the two. In this situation the accent on lied again has the’
function of establishing a focus relation between the complement clause’
and the rest of the proposition, marking the higher predicate as (he focus]
domain of the sentence and the complement as being in focus. At tha
same time, the accent promotes the already identifiable referent of the!
complement clause from injcme to active state in the mind of the<
addressee. The complement clause is then an example ot a focus]
constituent with a pragmatically presupposed propositional denotatum.1!
Focus and the menial representations of referents
273
Finally, (5.34a) is compatible with a discourse situation in which the
referent of the complement is already discourse-active (hence necessarily
identifiable) at the time of utterance. This would be the case e.g. if (a)
were uttered in reply to the (admittedly somewhat bizarre) question
“Which of the two did you not realize, that I lied to you or that I was
cheating on you?” In this third situation, the complement proposition is
presupposed, active, and in focus. For all three situations, the
information structure of (5.34a) can be represented as in (5.34a'):
(5.34a') [ ™.[ I ) ioc [ didn’t realize that TO,[ you ] lied to
(In the third situation, the denotatum “didn't realize” would not be in
focus, but this fact has no consequences for the prosodic structure of the
sentence; see Sections 5.4.2 above and 5.6.1 below).
The differences between the three communicative situations in which
(5.34a) can be used thus have no influence on the form of the sentence.
What the three readings of (5.34a) have in common, and what determines
the prosodic structure of the sentence, is not the presuppositional or
identifiability status of the complement clause proposition, nor the
activation status of the propositional referent, but the fact that the
referent of the complement clause has a focus relation to the main
proposition in all three situations, i.e. that the role of this referent as an
argument in the proposition is not predictable or recoverable at the time
of the utterance. The information structure, and the prosodic form, of
(5.34a’) is identical, mutatis mutandis, to that of (5.35), where the
complement of the matrix predicate is a noun phrase:
(5.35)
[ w>r [ I ]
( didn t realize the
danger
,]
Both in (5.34a’) and in (5.35) the position of the accent is determined by
I the General Phrasal Accent Principle, i.e. the focus accent falls on the last
■'accentable syllable of the focus domain, which is the predicate phrase. In
’(5.34a) the accented syllable is not final in the focus domain because the
'clause-final argument expression me has an active referent with a topic
'relation to the proposition, hence it cannot receive an accent. The same
¡situation would hold in (5.35) if we added an active topic referent to the
¡focus NP, as e.g. in / ditiri'i realize the danger for you.
h’The necessity to draw a distinction between the presuppositional status
¡of a clausal denotatum and the pragmatic relation between this
■ denotatum and the rest of the proposition is particularly obvious in the
.case of grammatical constructions whose presuppositional structure
274
Pragmatic relations: focus
clause as pragmatically presupposed (unlike in
complement clauses, whose pragmatic status is unmarked). One
such case is the restrictive relative clause construction, which I discussed
in Section 2.3. Consider again example (2.11), which I repeat here for
convenience as (5.36), provided with phrase structure brackets and
information-structure labels:
marks the content of a
factive
(5.36) 1 ]
finally met [ the woman [ TOT.[ who) moved in downstairs ]] ].
The relative clause in (5.36) carries an accent, even though it does not
express an assertion, i.e. even though the fact that someone moved in
downstairs from the speaker constitutes already shared knowledge. This
accent is required because the referent of the entire complex noun phrascj
which includes the modifying relative clause, has a focus relation to the
proposition. The larger sentence in (5.36) is a topic-comment sentence
with predicate-focus structure, therefore a focus accent is required
somewhere in the higher verb phrase met the woman who moved in
downstairs. The General Phrasal Accent Principle assigns this accent to
the final constituent of the focus domain, which is the final constituent of
the direct object NP, which happens to contain a clause coding a
pragmatically presupposed proposition. The accent is assigned to the
same position to which it would be assigned if the sentence were I finally
met my new downstairs s'eighror, in which the object NP contains no
relative clause.
Now let us assume a discourse situation in which it is known that a
man and a woman have moved in downstairs from the speaker and in
which this fact has been recently mentioned in the discourse. In such a
situation, the speaker might say:
(5.36')
I've only met the
woman
who moved in downstairs
In contrast to (5.36), the relative clause in (5.36’) is unaccented. The
prosodic difference between the relative clause in (5.36) and that in (5.36‘)
results from the different pragmatic relation between the denotatum who
moved in downstairs and the rest of the proposition in the two situations.
While in (5.36) the presupposed relative clause proposition is part of the
focus denotatum, in (5.36') it is topical in the discourse. What the two
sentences have in common is that the referent of the entire complex noun
phrase the woman who moved in downstairs has a focus relation to the
proposition, hence that this noun phrase must receive an accent. They
also have in common that the proposition expressed in the relative clause
Focus and the mental representations of referents
215
lis pragmatically presupposed. What distinguishes them is that in (5.36’)
the focus domain contains a discourse-active non-focal denotatum,
'expressed in the relative clause, causing the focus accent to fall on the
head noun. The information structure of (5.36’) can be paraphrased as
follows: “Speaking of the couple who has moved in downstairs, I’ve only
met the woman.”
While focus accent and activation accent coincide in (5.34a) and (5.36),
the two kinds of accent are distinct in (5.37):
(5.37) Oh my God! My new downstairs
neighbor
is a pianist!
In (5.37), the subject NP my net. downstairs neighbor is a topic expression;
the sentence is to be interpreted as conveying relevant news about the
referent of this NP. The topic constituent is accented because its referent
is not discourse-active. (If it were active, it might appear as the
unaccented pronoun she.) The accent on neighbor, which may be
perceived as less prominent than that on pianist, is not a focus accent
but an activation accent. The relevant aspects of the information
structure of (5.37) are represented in (5.37’):
(5.37'1
TDr[ My new downstairs neighbor ) ,,, [ is a pianist 1
F
As in the examples of activation accents discussed in 5.4.1 (examples
(3.27) and (3.31)), the accent on the topic constituent in (5.37) could be
omitted without influencing the focus structure of the sentence. On the
other hand, the accent on the 1non-referential) predicate nominal a
pianist is a focus accent, indicating that the verb phrase is the focus
domain. If this accent were omitted, leaving the accent on neighbor as the
sole point of prominence, the focus structure of the sentence would
change from predicate focus to argument focus.
Another grammatical context which allows for revealing contrasts
between presupposed propositions with active vs. inactive referents is the
construction (or family of constructions) referred to as '■extraposition" in
the generative literature. In this construction, a sentential subject is
“extraposed" from preverbal subject position and appended immediately
to the right of the verb phrase, the position of the preverbal subject being
filled by the pronoun it. If the referent of such an extraposed sentential
subject is assumed to be active in the discourse context, the extraposed
clause will be unaccented, as e.g in (5 3X):
1
(5.3R)
I
A: I’m afraid the president might be Ivirie
H: What do you mean. Il’s ubikhs lhat he is bing
276
Focus and the mental representations of referents
Pragmatic relations: focus
In the context in which speaker B uses the extraposition construction, the,!
referent of the proposition “The president is lying" is discourse-active andt!
bears a topic relation to the proposition. (B‘s utterance is a shortcut, viayi
pragmatic accommodation, for some more explicit sequence like “Whatlj
do you mean 'The president might be lying.’ He is lying. It’s obvious.”)«
Now consider the following (attested) example. The speaker is a||
woman who was used to carrying a bag on her shoulder but who had 1
given the bag to a repairman that morning:
-tj
(5.39)
Il’s so strange not carrying a
purse
around.
JI
(The utterance was accompanied by a gesture of the shoulder, indicating«
a funny sensation.) In the situation in which (5.39) was uttered, the facii
that the speaker was not carrying a purse was pragmatically presupposed.'«
However, this fact had not yet been activated in the conversation, i.e. theH
speaker was not assuming that her addressee was presently thinking of it.«
The fact was known, but not yet a topic under discussion. Therefore theS
nominalized VP constituent evoking the pragmatic presupposition (nota
carrying a purse around) was given prosodic prominence. Again, it is not«
the presuppositional status of the denotatum but its pragmatic relation to fl
the rest of the proposition that determines the presence or absence of anjj
accent. As for the location of the point of prominence within the clause1!
expressing the presupposed proposition, it is determined, as in previousljj
examples, by the General Phrasal Accent Principle. The prosodichi
structure of this clause is the same as that of the corresponding asserted^
predicate-focus sentence I'm not carrying a plrse around,
To sum up, in order to understand the accentuation facts involving^
constituents which express pragmatically presupposed propositions
must carefully distinguish among the different information-structur^«
categories discussed in this book First we must distinguish the question
of whether a proposition is pragmatically presupposed or ASSERTED-i.eM
whether or not it represents an already known or identifiable discourse!
referent-from the question of whether the referent of a givej
pragmatically presupposed proposition is active or inactive (unuseDjM
at a particular time - i.e. whether or not it is assumed by the speaker to be!
at the forefront of the addressee’s consciousness (or at least cognitivel^j
highly accessible) at the time ol utterance. Only the latter category has*fl
have determined that a given presupposed denotatum is active or
inactive
in the discourse we must ask w bet her this relerent has a topic relation 01
277
a focus relation to the main proposition. Only if the referent is both
< discourse-active and non-focal in the discourse can the constituent
[ expressing the proposition occur without an accent. (Recall that prosodic
r prominence, being unmarked, is compatible both with active and inactive
kstatus of a referent; see Section 3.3.1.)
p The prosodic status of a constituent coding a pragmatically
i presupposed proposition is then determined by two factors only: the
activation state of its referent and the pragmatic relation which it bears to
i the matrix proposition. The prosodic status docs not depend on the
’ “knowledge” presupposition of the proposition itself. Prosody is not a
distinguishing factor within the discourse categories of presupposition
hand identifiability. These categories are expressed by lexical or
i morphosyntactic means alone, especially by nominalization of the
(- verbal constituent expressing the presupposed proposition.
^5.4.3.2 Open presupposed propositions
। The examples of presupposed propositions discussed in the previous
section involved subordinate clauses functioning as arguments of higher
■ predicates (complement clauses) or as noun modifiers (relative clauses).
■ Such propositions, which are semantically complete or saturated, must
i be distinguished from presupposed propositions which are semantically
, incomplete or open, like those expressed by the VPs in (5.3) (metchell)
, urged Nixon to appoint Carswell or (5.11 a) (My car) broke downis In the
Í saturated type, the entire clausal denotatum is presupposed, hence the
। clause itself does not evoke a contrast between a focal and a presupposed
portion. Instead, the presupposed proposition as a whole functions as an
f argument or modifier in an asserted proposition. If such a clause carries
fan accent it is because of the pragmatic relation it has to the matrix
proposition, not because of a focus-presupposition contrast within its
Ibwn denotatum.
I It is the second type, the one involving incomplete or open
ipresupposed propositions, which has received most attention in the
[generative literature on focus and presupposition since Chomsky 1970.
¡What has not received sufficient attention is the question of the
(Activation status of such open propositions in the discourse. In
contrast to saturated propositions, the discourse presuppositions evoked
in open propositions are typically interpreted as recently activated in
Ithe discourse context (except in WH-questions, whose presuppositional
[structure is marked syntactically; see Section 5.4.4 below). The grammar
278
Pragmatic relations: focus
English does not provide for the unambiguous marking of
designata are inactive in the
addressee's mind. Consider the contrasts in the following set of examples:
of
presupposed open propositions whose
(5.40)
a.
b.
c.
d.
Mitchell urged Nixon to appoint Carswell. ( = (5.3))
Mitchell urged nixon to appoint Carswell.
The one who urged nixon to appoint Carswell was mitchell.
It was mitchell who urged nixon to appoint carswell.
In the (a) sentence in (5.40), the open proposition “x urged Nixon to
appoint Carswell” is both pragmatically presupposed and active in the
discourse. It would be odd to use this sentence in a situation in which
someone’s having urged Nixon to appoint Carswell was not presently
under discussion in one way or another. (Of course, it would not be
impossible to use it in such a situation; this would simply show that the
speaker assumes that the addressee is able to accommodate the required
activeness presupposition.) In contrast, it seems difficult to interpret the
(b) sentence as evoking the same presupposed open proposition, but
where the denotatum of this proposition would be in an inactive state. In
order to mark the predicate portion in (a) as both presupposed and less
than fully active it is necessary to evoke the presupposition morphosyntactically, in the form of a clause expressing a saturated proposition,
as e.g. in (c), where it appears as a nominalized topic argument to the left
of the matrix predicate, or in (d) where it appears as a relative clause to its
right (for a discussion of //-cleft sentences with accented relative clauses
see Prince 1978).
Notice that it would be inaccurate to say that in a sentence like (5.40a)
the discourse-active state of the predicate denotatum is marked ria lack
of prominence on the verb. To say this would contradict the claim I made
in Section 5.4.2, according to which prosodic prominence is not
distinctive with predicates in the way it is with arguments. Only the
arguments contained within the predicate (i.e. Nixon and Carswell} are so
marked. To see that it is indeed not the prosodic status of the verb that
accounts for its pragmatic construal in presupposed open propositions let
us look at the following pair:
(5.40’)
a. ( mitchell ] urged him.
b. He [ was urged | by mitchell 1 ]
In both sentences the verb is unaccented, but while in the argument-focus
sentence in (5.40’a) the denotatum of the open proposition "x urged him”
Focus and the mental representations of referents
!
I
279
is necessarily construed as recently activated (hence presupposed), in the
predicate-focus sentence in (5.40’b) the denotatum of the open
proposition “he was urged by x," which is semantically equivalent to
“x urged him," may or may not be active and presupposed. (5.40'b) could
be used to answer either “Who was he urged by?” or “Why did he do
that?" This shows that the interpretation of the predicate denotatum as
being discourse-active is not determined by the prosodic status of the
verbal constituent itself but by the presence of an accent elsewhere in the
sentence. In (5.40’a) it is not the absence of prominence on the verb urged
but the presence of a focus accent preceding the predicate phrase that
determines the focus construal of its denotatum. Since predicate-focus
construal requires an accent on some portion of a predicate phrase,
absence of such prominence necessarily indicates lack of predicate focus
(this last point will be further developed in Section 5.6).
While presupposed open propositions cannot be unambiguously
marked as inactive in English, it is nevertheless possible under certain
conditions to construe the denotata of accented finite verb phrases as
presupposed. Compare the (attested) French cleft sentence in (5.41) (a)
with its German and English counterparts in (b) and (c). Example (5.41a)
was uttered by a factory manager who employed workers who were being
retrained at the expense of the French government; the clause in
parentheses provides the necessary context:
(5.41)
a. (ils travaileent pour sws) mais c'est le Gouvernement qui pave
they work
for us
but it is the government which pays
b. (die arbeiten für ins) aber bfzaheen tut die Regierung
they work for us but pay-INF does the government
c. (they work for is) but the government pvw
In the situation of utterance, the proposition “x pays for the work done
by the workers" is taken as presupposed but not necessarily activated and
the fact that x is the government is asserted. The pragmatic articulation of
the proposition is made formally explicit in French The denotatum of
the predicate NP le gouvernemcnt. which is the semantic subject of the
proposition, is unambiguously marked as focal (via syntax) and that of
the relative clause qui pave, which is the semantic predicate of the
proposition, is unambiguously marked as presupposed (via syntax) and
as inactive (via prosodic prominence). A similar unambiguous marking
effect is found in the German version in (b) with its topicalized (hence
presupposed) vet accented predicate bezahlen ' to pay and its inverted
280
Pragmatic relations: focus
(hence focal) subject die Hegterung "the government." As for the English
sentence in (c), it is syntactically and prosodically unmarked for its
pragmatic articulation. Since it can be used under the same discourse
circumstances as (a) and (b) the predicate phrase pays can be interpreted
as non-focal, the accent indicating the not-yet-active status of its ■
denotatum. But this pragmatic construal is merely compatible with the
given structure; it is not marked by it. The same structure can also receive!
(and normally does receive) a predicate-focus interpretation.
J
The above observation concerning the marking of the activation states!
of the denotata of presupposed open propositions is consistent with the!
observations made in Sections 3.1 and 4.1 concerning the fact that]
propositional referents are expressed tn argument categories (see.]
examples (3.1), (3.2), (4.2b) and discussion). Since open propositions of;
the type in (5.40a) are semantically incomplete, their denotata do not
constitute referents which could be stored in the discourse register, i.e. in
the long-term memory of the speech participants. Only those activation .
changes which involve the mental representations of discourse referents]
are reflected in the formal contrasts discussed in Chapter 3, in particular'
the morphological contrast between lexical and pronominal coding. Non-1;
argument categories, such as the tensed VP in (5.40a), are subject to'
different cognitive manipulations, invoiving short-term memory pro-,1
cessing, such as those described by Hankatner & Sag in their above-1:
mentioned study.
m
What has been called the “presupposition" in the Chomsky-Jackendoffi
tradition is then only one kind of presupposed proposition, i.e. an open]
proposition with a recently activated denotatum. The word "presuppo-]
sition" is used here in a rather special sense. Being incomplete, suchi
propositions by definition have no truth value, or-using the concepts ofj
the present framework - they are not represented as discourse referents ini
the minds of the speech participants. Since they have no independent
referential existence outside the sentences in which they occur they cannqS
be stored as identifiable entities in the discourse register. Their denotatM
can therefore not be properly presupposed, i.e. they cannot be considered]
part of the common ground between the speaker and the addressee, m
The above analysis of the activation status of presupposed opein
propositions raises an import,mi question, which unfortunately I cap]
only touch upon briefly here when is an open proposition accessible!
enough in the discourse for the constituent expressing it to go]
unaccented? Consider the short dialogues in (5.42V.
i]
Focus and the mental representations of referents
t (5.42)
I
I
1
f
281
A: Where's my pencil?
S: a. john's got it.
b- JOHN took ¡1.
c. ?JOHN Stole It./JCHN STOLE it.
d-*JOHN put it in his pocket./john put it in his pocket.
F Among the replies in (5.42), the one containing the unaccented noun
f pocket in (d) is clearly the least acceptable. This reply can only occur in
ft the form of a predicate-accented sentence. The locative phrase in his
P pocket provides the referent inquired about with the question word where,
L hence it must appear in the focus domain in the reply. But how to
■ account for the contrast between (a) and (b) on the one hand, and (c) on
[ the other, none of which contain a lexical noun phrase? This contrast
indicates that the possibility of taking a predicate denotatum as active is
1 not only determined by the presence or absence of a referential expression
r but also by the semantics of the predicator.
The question Where's my pencil? sets an expectation for a reply whose
L focus will be the indication of the place of the pencil and whose topic will
be the pencil. In languages in which the relationship between grammatical
1 relations and sentence positions is less fixed than in English a reply to this
( question will tend to have the form of a topic-comment sentence in which
, the pencil is the initial topic ISP and the locative expression the final focus
expression. For example the most natural German equivalent of (5.42a)
would be Den hat h.-lvs, lit. “It has John,” where the sentence-initial topic
) is an accusative object and the final focus NP a nominative subject. In
i English, an argument-focus sentence is used instead, in which the location
I' of the pencil is expressed by the initial subject John.yb
। ; The reply in (5.42b) is similar to that in (a) but it adds some semantic
I content to the predicate. Rather than simply stating the place of the
pencil, (b) also indicates how the pencil got from its former to its present
F location. This semantic change from be to take does not require a change
J in focus structure, presumably because of the common-sense inference
F that when certain kinds of objects are not at their usual place it is because
I they have been taken away. The designatum “take” can therefore be
I pragmatically accommodated as discourse-active, hence the verb took can
I remain unaccented in the sentence. But consider now the reply in (c). This
reply is similar to (b) in that, in addition to indicating the new location of
I the pencil, it also provides some explanation of why the pencil is not at its
normal place. However this time the indication of the transfer of the
' object from its old to its new location entails a difference in focus
282
Pragmatic relations: focus
Structure: unlike the denotatum "take,” the denotatum "steal” cannot be i
taken for granted as active in the discourse. Therefore it is naturally J
construed as focal.
i
While the semantic difference between take and steal is easy enough to <
characterize, this difference does not in itself explain the difference in
focus structure. Is there some cut-off point beyond which the denotata of
verbs, unless recently activated, must be coded as focal instead of being
pragmatically taken for granted and coded without an accent? I have
unfortunately no answer to this question. I can merely make a very
tentative suggestion as to the direction in which the answer may lie. The
difference between “focus-attracting" and "non-focus-attracting" pre­
dicates may have to do with the cognitive difference between so-called
“basic level" and “subordinate” categories discussed in much work by
Eleanor Rosch (e.g. Rosch 1977, Mervis & Rosch 1981) and applied to
linguistic analysis e.g. in work by George Lakoff (in particular 1987). It
seems possible that basic-level categories, being cognitively more easily
accessible, can be more easily taken for granted pragmatically than
subordinate categories. The difference in prosodic behavior between take
and steal in (5.42) could then be explained by the fact that the former
would be a basic-level category while the latter would be non-basic. I
must emphasize that this is no more than speculation at this point.37
5.4.4
Focus and information questions
In this section, I would like to discuss a particular construction which I
have repeatedly alluded to before and in which the relationship between
forma} structure and information structure has a somewhat exceptional
status. I have in mind the construction expressing information questions,
or WH-questions.
As a general rule we can say that the use of an information question is
appropriate only if the open proposition resulting from removal of the
question expression (the WH-expression in English) from the sentence is
pragmatically presupposed in the discourse. For example, if I ask the
question in (5.43)
(5.43)
Who ate the cookie?
my question not only evokes the assumption (conjured up by the
definiteness of the noun phrase) that my addressee can identify the
particular cookie I have in mind but also that she knows that some
Focus and the mental representations of referents
'
individual ate this cookie, i.e. I take the proposition “Someone ate the
cookie” to be uncontroversial (unless it is a rhetorical question suggesting
the answer Noone). The first presupposition is evoked by the NP
construction, the second by the sentence construction as a whole. The
assertion expressed by (5.43) is then the expression of my desire for my
addressee to tell me who that individual is, (Recall that in the present
framework assertions are not limited to declarative sentences; see Section
2.3.) In asking my question, I normally also assume that my addressee
knows the identity of the referent, i.e. that she can answer my question.
However that assumption is not a presupposition evoked by the
grammatical structure of information questions but merely a felicity
condition on the use of questions in general. One normally does not ask
questions without assuming that one can get an answer. I am not
concerned with the latter kind of assumption.38
To take another example, which 1 have used before, in asking the
question in (5.15a)
(5.15a)
I
I
|
i
j
i
1
283
Who’s that?
I normally presuppose not only the presence of a particular individual in
the universe of discourse (for example in the text-external world) who is
identifiable to my addressee but also-and in this case somewhat
trivially-that this individual has a certain identity. The question in
(5.15a) presupposes the open proposition “That identifiable individual
has x identity" and asserts the speaker's desire to find out what that
identity is. That (5.15a) indeed evokes these presuppositions is shown by
the bizarreness of WH-questions in which the identifiability of the
referent is not taken for granted, like H 'Ito's someone'1 or Who's a guy over
there?
Since it is the WH-expression that evokes the set of possible fillers of
the empty argument position in the presupposed open proposition, the
only constituent in (5.28) and (5.15a) which qualifies as the focus domain
is the question word u7m. WH-questions are thus a particular type of
argument-focus construction. We would therefore expect the main
sentence accent to fall on the WH-phrase. However, in our examples
the accent falls on the final constituents cookie and that. It is clear that
this sentence-final accent cannot be a focus accent but only an activation
accent. At the time the question is uttered, the referents of the NPs the
cookies and that, though identifiable to the addressee, have not yet been
activated in the addressee’s mind. or. perhaps more accurately, have not
284
Pragmatic relations: focus
W "l v
yet been established as objects of inquiry in the discourse. The NPs
therefore require activation accents (or, as I will say in Section 5.7,
"topic-establishing” accents). If the referents were already-established,
active topics, the sentences would likely be of the form Who ate them and ’
Who ts that, with them and that as unaccented topic expressions of thei
preferred type and default accents on the verbs. But in either situation,!
the final NPs are topic rather than focus constituents, since they!
designate the referents about which information is requested. This!
analysis is corroborated by the French versions of the question in (5.I5b)l
and (5.15b'), i.e. Os I qui pa? and Qui c'zsrpa?, which have the syntax of!
topic-comment sentences, with the pronoun pa in A-TOP position.
1
Nevertheless, it would be misleading to say that the function of thc|
final accent in a WH-question is always to activate the referent ofaj
sentence-final (or clause-final) topic constituent. Indeed, in the French]
examples, which can be used under exactly the same discourse!
circumstances as their English counterparts, the pronouns referring to]
the individual inquired about, i.e. the bound <■’ and the antitopic pa, are!
unaccented. What is being activated in these questions is not, or at leastj
not primarily, the individual designated by the sentence-final pronoun]
but rather the entire presupposed proposition, in the case at hand the!
proposition “That person is someone” or “That person has a certain!
identity.” This accounts for the prosodic structure of a question like .
(5.44):
(5.44)
Where are you going9
In (5.44), the accented constituent is clearly not a topic expression. 1
Rather it is the last accentable constituent of the domain marked by the.l
accent, i.e. the syntactic domain evoking the presupposed proposition,
“You are going somewhere.” It is the denotatum of this proposition that]
is being activated in the discourse.
.
Notice that in contexts in which the presupposed proposition of an]
information question has already been activated in preceding discourse,]
the accent will necessarily fall on the focus argument, i.e. the WH’
expression, as in (5.45):
।
1-1
(5.45)
a.
who ale the cookies'1
b who’s ihat9
c. where are you going.’
■
' 3
1
Focus and the mental representations of referents
285
The prosodic structure of the sentences in (5.45) is identical to that of the
argument-focus sentences discussed in the preceding section, in which
post-focal open propositions are marked as discourse-active and as a
result interpreted as pragmatically presupposed. That the open proposi­
tion is discourse-active in examples like (5.45) is demonstrated by the fact
that, given the appropriate context, the WH-expression could appear all
by itself, as in /’nr going somewhere. - Where? or Someone ale the cookies.
- Who?™
In WH-questions like (5.43), (5.44), and (5.15a), the prosodic marking
of activation thus takes precedence over the prosodic marking of focus.
This fact constitutes an exception to a general principle stated earlier in
this chapter, according to which a single accent in any sentence is
necessarily a focus accent. The exception has a natural functional
explanation. Since the presuppositional structure of WH-questions is
marked constructionally, i.e. by the form and position of the question
word, the accent does not need to mark the focus and can be used for its
other main function, the coding of inactiveness of a denotatum.
For the sake of completeness, I should mention that there are
exceptions to what I characterized above as the normal presuppositional
Structure of WH-questions While a question like (5.43) normally
presupposes that someone ate a particular cookie, a question like (5.46)
(5.46)
Who wants a cookje?/who wants a cookie?
does not necessarily presuppose that someone in the audience wants a
cookie. The pragmatic difference between WH-questions which do and
those which do not evoke a presupposed open proposition can be made
explicit in French via the form of the answer To answer a question like
(5.43), a speaker will normally use a cleft construction, as in (S.43’):
(5.43’)
Q; Qui (c'esl qui) a mange le biscuit’’ “Who ate the cookie?"
A: C’est moi. "me," "i did."
On the other hand, the question in (5.46), in which the final NP is
indefinite, will typically be answered with a simple NP, as in (5.47):
(5.47)
Q: Qui veut un biscuit? “Who wants a cookie?”
A: Moi. "Me,” "I do.”
In sentences like (5.46) and (5.47), the question is perhaps best analyzed
as a conventionalized shortcut for a more cumbersome sequence such as
"Does anyone want a cookie, and if so, who?” I believe it is the
286
Pragmatic relations; focus
possibility of making
such shortcuts that acounts also for the occurrence,
like (5.48)
in English, of questions
(5.48)
Where’s a piece of paper?
needs a piece of paper but who is not sure
there is one available in the speech situation. What makes such
questions strange (and for the present author unacceptable) is the clash
between two mutually exclusive presuppositional structures: that of the
indefinite noun phrase and that of the WH-question construction. While
the latter indirectly evokes the existence of the referent in the universe of
discourse, the former indirectly questions it.
as uttered by someone who
that
5,5
Contrastiveness
In Section 5.4.1 I argued against the idea of a necessary correlation
between focus and the “newness" of a referent in a discourse and J
concluded that focus and activation must be seen as independent, though
interacting, parameters. One of the reasons for drawing the distinction
was that constituents with “old” (active) referents often carry focus
accents. In this section, I would like to take a closer look at the category
"accented constituent with an active referent." On the basis of this
analysis I will then suggest a revision of the notion “activation accent” as
presented in Chapter 3. This in turn will allow me to present a unified
account of sentence accentuation, in which focus prosody and activation
prosody will be shown to be two different manifestations of a single
communicative function (Section 5.7).
5.5.1
Contrastive foci
Among the previously discussed examples illustrating accented constitu­
ents with active referents were (3.30) and (3.31):
(3.30)
a. Pat said she was called.
b. Pat said they called her
(3.31)
Pago io. - C’est
moi qui paye
An example of a non-pronominal focus constituent with an active
referent was found in Kuno's sentence quoted in (3.2 i 5:
(3.21)
Among John. Mary, and Tom. who is the oldest?
tom is the oldest.
Contrastiveness
287
Sentences containing such accented anaphoric or deictic pronouns or
nouns have often been characterized as involving contrastive accents
(see e.g. Halliday 1967:206, Chafe 1976, Schmerling l976:Ch. 4). The
notion “contrastive" is defined by Halliday as “contrary to some
predicted or stated alternative." Halliday calls contrastive foci involving
accented pronouns "structurally new." Clear examples of such
contrastive foci are the postverbal pronouns in (3.31), which are used
by the speaker to contrast himself with the person who was trying to pay
the bill in his stead.
Even though accented pronouns or accented nouns with active
referents are often contrastive in Halliday’s sense, they do not have to
be. Consider the utterance in (5.49), for which the reader can easily
conjure up an appropriate context:
(5.49)
(Sherlock Holmes to the butler) The murderer is
you.
While it is conceivable that in the detective's utterance the focal referent
rou is interpreted as contrasting with some other previously entertained
alternative suspect of the committed murder (“It wasn't the pet alligator
after all; the murderer is you”), the utterance would be equally
appropriate if the detective had no other suspect in mind. The latter,
non-conlrastive, reading is perhaps even the likelier of the two. This is
suggested by the fact that in (5.49) the focus accent occupies the ordinary
final position in the focus domain.
The impression of contrastiveness in (5.49) may be largely due to the
somewhat unusual syntactic and pragmatic configuration of this
sentence, anything unusual being potentially perceived as contrasting
with a more usual alternative. Example (5.49) is unusual in the sense that
it involves contact between the two discourse worlds (see Section 2.1).
The referent of the deictic pronoun row, which is taken for granted as an
element of the text-external world, plays at the same time the role of the
missing argument in a proposition which belongs to the text-internal
world, i.e. the open proposition “The murderer is X." (Cf. the discussion
of examples (2.5) and (2.6) in Section 2.1.) What counts for the present
discussion is that (5.49) need not be perceived as contrastive. The
accentual pattern of ihe sentence can therefore not be explained in terms
of the pragmatic notion of contrastiveness.
If the speaker in (5.49) had a specific alternative in mind, i.e. if he were
explicitly contrasting the proposition expressed by this sentence with
some alternative proposition in which it was asserted that someone else
288
Pragmatic relations: focus
was the murderer, the sentence in (5.50) with marked argument-focus'
structure would perhaps be more appropriate:
■
)
(5.50) you are the murderer'
-c
In the same vein, the marked structure in (3.21) above (tom is the oldest)^
seems co convey more strongly rhe notion “contrary to some statedalternative” than the equally possible The oldest is tom, where the focusj
accent is in its unmarked final position and the rest of the proposition!
may or may not be in focus. However, intuitions are not clear-cut with!
respect to such sentence pairs and it seems impossible to determine whichj
structure is contrastive and which one is not. A similar situation obtains!
in the tw'o versions in (3.30) above. Here too, Halliday's characterization!
of contrast does not necessarily apply. The assertion in these sentences]
does not imply the existence of some previously entertained candidate tol
which the referent of the focus NP is the correct alternative.
I
That contrastiveness in Halliday’s sense cannot be the only factor I
explaining the use of accented pronouns is shown also in the following]
Spanish example (from a conversation reported in Silva-Corvaláh'
1982:107; prosodic marking added:
1
(5.51)
Q: Quien hizo eJ queque, tu o tu mamá? - A: Lo hize yo
“Who bcked the cake, you or your mother? - i did"
M
)
it
In (5.51) the assertion that the person who made the cake is the speaker is ■
not a contradiction of some other previously stated or imagined:
alternative. It is a tieutrai reply whereby the speaker picks out one of
two candidates under consideration. In the inversion structure, with the’
focal subject vo following the verb and the topical object lo preceding it,;j
both the topic and the focus argument appear in their respective I
unmarked positions. By its information structure, (5.51) is not an j
argument-focus sentence but a topic-comment sentence in which thqj
object is the topic and the subject in focus.
J
For a sentence to be perceived as contrastive the proposition need no|J
have argument-focus structure. This is shown in example (5.52):
..J
(5.52)
My life was mEan^cless, until I met
vol
■
J
In the second clause of this example, the focus domain is the VP met you, I
rather than the NPyou alone (unless it were known from the context that!
the speaker had met various people before meeting the right one). The'1
Contrastiveness
289
focus domain containing a “contrastive” focus argument may even be the
entire sentence, as in the thetic structure (2.5):
(2.5)
'
1
I
|
I
I
I
J
I
I
|
|
I
|
|
b
b
I
L
[
|f
I
[
"
f
E
I
I
I
L
L
!
Look, here’s me.
Halliday’s notion of contrastiveness does obviously not apply to such
sentences with broad foci since the focus domain covers here not only a
referent (the “alternative candidate”) but also a state of affairs. The verb
phrase met you and the sentence Here's me do not express “predicted or
stated alternatives.”
To account for those occurrences of accented pronouns or nouns with
active referents which are not captured by Halliday’s definition of
contrast, Chafe (1976) develops a notion of conti as livettess that differs
from Halliday’s (besides being more explicit) mostly in that it docs not
take the notion “contrary to some predicted or stated alternative’' to be a
defining criterion. For Chafe, contrastiveness involves three factors: (i) a
background knowledge of some sort, e.g. the awareness shared by the
speaker and the hearer that someone did something (a pragmatically
presupposed open proposition, in the present framework); (ii) a set of
possible candidates for the role played by the element which is being
contrasted; and (iii) the assertion of which of these candidates is the
correct one. Chafe interprets contrastiveness as an exceptional feature
which cancels what he considers to be the normally holding correlation
between the occurrence of anaphoric or deictic pronouns, activeness of a
referent, and low pitch (see Section 3.3). According to Chafe, discourseactive items can receive an accent only when contrastive in this revised
sense.
The problem J see with Chafe’s definition is that the cognitive category
it defines is not reflected in a corresponding grammatical category. The
crux is condition (ii), concerning the set of possible candidates for the
focus role. Chafe writes that “contrastive sentences typically appear on
the surface to be indistinguishable from answers to so-called WH
questions" (1976:36), the latter not being contrastive for him. He then
observes that his model of a contrastive sentence, romld made the
hamburgers, does in fact not need to be contrastive but can be used also
as an answer to the question JKho made the hamburgers?, in which no
limited set of candidates is implied. Chafe's criterion for distinguishing
the two cases is that in the contrastive reading “the speaker assumes that
a limited number of candidates are available in the addressee’s mind”
(p. 34), while in the non-contrastive reading such an assumption is not
"J
290
Pragmatic relations: focus
present. However, sentences uttered with such an assumption on the
speaker's part are formally indistinguishable from sentences in which this
assumption is not made. While in the Spanish example Lo hize yo and in
the Italian example Pago to the number of candidates is indeed limited in
the speech situation (there are exactly two), the same statements would
also be appropriate if no limited number of alternatives were suggested.
In fact, the sentence Las hize ro “I did,” "I made them" (with a plural
feminine object pronoun) could serve as an answer to the above-quoted
question Who made the hamburgers? in its non-contrastive reading.
According to Chafe’s definition, the sentence Lo (las} hize yo would then
be either contrastive or non-contrastive, depending on the situation. But
the difference is not grammatically marked: in either case the pronoun yo
is accented.41
To sum up, the presence of an accent on a constituent with an active
referent cannot be explained in terms of the notion of contrastiveness
(whether in Chafe’s or in Halliday’s sense) but only in terms of focus
structure. Given the problems involved in the definition of the notion
“contrastive," I prefer not to think of this notion as a category of
grammar. Instead I suggest that the impression of contrastiveness which
wc receive when we hear such sentences arises from particular inferences
which we draw on the basis of given conversational contexts. Herein I
follow Bolinger (1961), who views contrastiveness as a gradient notion.
Bolinger writes:
In a broad sense, every semantic peak is contrastive. Clearly in Let's
have a picnic, coming as a suggestion out of the blue, there is no specific
contrast with dinner party, but there is a contrast between picnicking
and anything else the group might do. As the alternatives are narrowed
down, we get closer to what we think of as a contrastive accent.
(1961:87)
This gradient approach to contrastiveness has the advantage of allowing
for clear and for less clear instances of contrastiveness, and it accounts
for our intuition that the clearest instances are those in which a focus
designatum explicitly contradicts a stated or predicted alternative, i.e,
those which Halliday had in mind when he formulated his definition.42
The fact that accented pronouns are especially likely to be perceived as
contrastive finds a natural explanation within the present framework.
Since pronouns are most often unaccented in discourse, due to the
prevalent role they play as the preferred topic expressions in the
Contrastiveness
291
unmarked focus-structure type, instances of accented pronouns, being
departures from the norm, are naturally interpreted as special
communicative signals.
To conclude, contrastiveness, unlike focus, is not a category of
grammar but the result of the general cognitive processes referred to as
“conversational implicatures." In what follows, the term “contrastive"
(in such expressions as “contrastive focus” or "contrastive topic”) is to be
understood in this general, non-grammatica! sense. My conclusion
concerning the nature of contrastiveness is related in spirit to a general
argument made by Horn (1981). Horn argues that the so-called
“exhaustiveness" condition on ir-clefts, which has been claimed by
other linguists to be an entailment or a conventional implicature, is in
fact a generalized conversational implicature which naturally arises with
all "focusing constructions” (read: “argument-focus constructions”) in
the absence of a contextual trigger or block.
5.5.2
Contrastive topics
So far I have looked only at accented pronouns (and lexical constituents
with discourse-active referents) which are in focus. As we know,
however, the referents of accented constituents may also be topics. It is
useful to distinguish between contrastive foci, such as those expressed in
the accented pronouns and nouns mentioned in the previous section, and
what I referred to in Section 4.4.4.2 as contrastive topics. The
distinction between the two types was first hinted at with example
(3.20b):
(3.20b)
I saw Mary and John yesterday
at you.
she
says
helio,
hut he's still
angry
In this sentence, the accented pronouns in the two clauses code two active
topic referents which are contrasted with one another. The function of
such contrastive topics is entirely different from that of contrastive foci,
even though some pretheoretical notion of contrastiveness may apply to
both. Indeed the notion of topic is incompatible with the idea ot
correction or contradiction associated with contrastive foci. Contra­
dicting or correcting a statement entails negating it or some part of it.
However, as we saw in Section 4.3. topics are outside the scope of
negation.4'
292
Pragmatic relations: focus
The difference between contrastive topics and contrastive foci is easy to
discern in languages in which it is expressed not only prosodically but
also morphosyntacticaliy. Consider again our old standby (3 31):
(3.31)
a io pago. - moi je paye.
b. Pago ro. - Cest moi qui paye.
1
In (3.31a) the accented pronouns are contrastive topic expressions; they
are placed in preverbal position and are necessarily followed by a secont)
accented constituent, which indicates the focus. In (3.31b) the accented
pronouns are contrastive focus expressions; they are placed in postverbal
position and the sentences contain no other prosodic peak.
The difference between the two kinds of contrastive elements is
formally expressed also in Japanese, in the contrast between what Kuno
(1972) calls "contrastive wa" and "exhaustive-listing ga" the former
indicating a contrastive topic, the latter a contrastive focus in our terms,
Consider the examples in (S.53):44
(5.53)
,
1
:
;
1
I
(
1
;
■;
te
Roommates Hanako and Mary discussing household chores:
H:Mary-san. anata-wa osoji shite kudasai, watashi-wa oryori shimasu,,J
Mary-VOC you-TOP cleaning do please I-TOP
cooking do
kata.
CO NJ
■ I
"Mary, von do the cleaning, i’ll do the cooking."
Aj
M:Ie, watashi-ga oryori shimasu kara; anata-wa hoka-no koto shite .. j
no I-NOM
cooking do
CONJ you-TOP other thing do ( ■
kudasai.
y.j
please
m
"No. i’ll do the cooking, you do something else ”
1 >
Hanako's utterance is a sequence of two topic-comment clauses. Theja
pronouns anata and watashi are contrastive topics, marked with the lopiqil
particle iva. In Mary's reply, however, the pronoun watashi, which is? 1
marked with the “nominative" particle ga, expresses a contrastive focus, '
the open proposition “x will do the cooking” being now pragmatically'’ .
presupposed. The second clause in Mary’s utterance is again a topic- 1
comment sentence, in which the pronoun anata plays the role of a ,
contrastive topic. A very similar morphosyntactic distinction is made in ’’
spoken French:
M
(5.53')
H
Mary,
ioi
lu fjis les ne noy ages,
Mary sm -Till' wu-SLlf J- the cleanings i-IOP I-SUB do the 'I
cooking
>'•
!#>
Contrastiveness
293
M: Non, e'esi moi qui fais la cuisine, roi lu peux fairs autre chosb.
no it is i who do the cooking you-TOP you-SUB can do other thing
In (5,53’) the clause-initial accented constituents are contrastive topic
expressions while the postverbal accented constituents (whether pro­
nouns or nouns) represent contrastive foci.
In Japanese the first part of Mary’s reply in (5.53) could also take the
form in (5.54):
(5.54)
M: le, oryori-wa watashi-ga shimasu kara.
no cooking-TOP I-NOM do CONJ
"No, the cooking, i’ll do.”
In (5.54), the initial (contrastive) topic NP oryori-wa is followed by the
(contrastive) focus NP watashi-ga, resulting in a structure in which the
[ topic-comment articulation (predicate focus) and the identificationa!
| articulation (argument focus) are combined in a single proposition (see
1 Section 5.2.5). While the English gloss of (5.54), with the NP the cooking
( in topicahzed position, may sound somewhat unnatural, the following
spoken French version matches perfectly the Japanese utterance:
(5.54’)
!
I
i
|
I
M: Nod, la cuisine, e’est moi qui la fais.
no the cooking-TOP it is I who do it
The left-detached NP la cuisine expresses the topic and the defied NP moi
the (argument) focus, corresponding to the go-marked NP in Japanese.
Like Japanese, French distinguishes the two types of contrastive
expression morphosyntactically. French also permits the alternative
version in (5.54”):
f (5.54”)
M: Non, e'est moi qui fais la cuisine.
L Example (5.54”), like (5.53’) and (5.54’), contains a cleft construction,
i marking the defied pronoun moi as a focus argument. But unlike the
. previous versions, the relative clause in (5.54”) carries an accent. The
f information structure of (5.54”) is rather similar to that of (5.54’), except
that in the latter the accented lexical noun phrase appears in initial topic
1 position, with a pronominal anaphor in the relative clause, while in the
f former it appears only as an argument of the relative clause. The accent
I 'on cuisine in the relative clause in (5.54”) is an activation accent,
[ indicating that the slate of affairs expressed in the relative clause is not
| fully discourse-active (the latter formulation will be slightly modifed in
f- Section 5.7).45
294
Pragmatic relations: focus
different type of two-accent sentence is illustrated in the following
a contrastive interpretation arises inside a nominalized
topic NP. The example is taken from an article in the Washington Post, in
which the author talks about his experience as a student of French in an
English high school:
A
text, in which
(5.55)
Our French teacher, a crusty character named Bertram Bradstock, made
clear that speaking French was an unnecessary luxury: foreigners were
expected Io speak English.
(In the original only the word speaking is highlighted.) In (5.55), the
complement clause speaking French was an unnecessary luxury has
predicate-focus articulation, the finite verb phrase expressing a comment
about the topic “speaking French.” (The entire complement clause
functions as a focal argument within the larger VP made clear that
speaking French war an unnecessary luxury, which expresses a comment
about the French teacher; we can ignore that for the point at hand.)
Within the subject constituent speaking French, the denotatum "speak­
ing” is naturally interpreted in (5.55) as contrasting with another
denotatum, i.e. “writing" or “reading.” However, as in the previously
discussed cases of contrastiveness, this interpretation is due to an
inference from the context, perhaps aided by the reader’s own experience
of foreign-language learning; it is not directly determined by the prosodic
structure of the utterance. In the constituent speaking French the accent
falls on the participle by default, due to the fact that the referent
"French” expressed in the object NP is an already activated topic.
The topic-focus articulation of the sentence in (5.55) is made
syntactically explicit in the following (admittedly clumsy) paraphrase:
(5.55’)
(Our teacher made clear that) TOr [ in studying EREnch ] to, [ speaking it ]
red was an unnecessary luxury ].
Example (5.55’) has two topic constituents, one scene-setting adverbial,
one argument; both contain the referent "French." In the first constituent
this referent is being promoted from inactive (or accessible) to active
state; in the second constituent the referent is already active, hence coded
in pronominal form. Notice that there is no necessary' contrastiveness in
the paraphrase in (5.55’). The same is true of (5.55): the reason the accent
falls on speaking is not because the denotatum of the verb is to be
highlighted (although in the context such highlighting is a desirable
consequence) but because the argument constituent following it is
Contrastiveness
295
"unaccentable" in the discourse for pragmatic reasons (see Section 5.3.3).
Since the accent does not fall in the final position assigned by the General
Phrasal Accent Principle, and since lack of prominence on an argument is
a marked prosodic feature (see Section 3.3.1), the accentual pattern
within the subject constituent is perceived as contrastive.4*
The distinction between contrastive topics and contrastive foci has
often been neglected in discussions of contrastiveness centered on
English. As a case in point we may mention Chafe’s (1976:49) analysis
of the English topicalization construction. Chafe argues that in a sentence
like (5.56)
(5.56)
The
play
John saw yesterday. ( = Chafe's (13))
"the so-called topic is simply a focus of contrast that has for some reason
been placed in an unusual position al the beginning of the sentence."
While the noun phrase the play may be intuitively felt to be contrastive, it
cannot be contrastive in the sense intended by Chafe. Among his three
definitional criteria-a background knowledge (a pragmatically presup­
posed open proposition), a set of possible candidates, and the assertion of
which candidate is the correct one-only the second applies. (Recall that
this is precisely the criterion which makes his definition unoperational.)
In the topicalization construction illustrated in (5.56) no background
knowledge is taken for granted, i.e. the open proposition minus the
topicalized argument is not pragmatically presupposed. The focus
domain is the predicate phrase minus the topicalized constituent, the
latter being positionally marked as being outside the focus. The
topicalized NP can therefore not be said to provide a "correct
candidate," i.e. the missing argument m a presupposed open proposition.
Chafe's above-quoted characterization (with the proviso concerning
the second criterion) applies only to the syntactically similar but
prosodicaily different “focus-movement" construction (Prince 1981b),
illustrated in (5.57) (an attested utterance), in which the fronted
constituent indicates an argument-focus domain:
(5.57)
fiftv six hundred DOLLARS we raised yesterday
In (5.57), the initial object NP is in focus, in (5.56) it is a (contrastive)
topic. In neither case, however, is the accented initial NP necessarily
perceived to be contrastive, as Prince (1981b) and Ward (1988) have
convincingly demonstrated.
tmi
296
Pragmatic relations: focus
5.6
Marked and unmarked focus structure
’
*41
In Section 5.2. 1 I introduced the notion of "focus category" and I argued ’
that the facts of focus prosody are best understood by analysing accent.
positions as correlates of a small number of such categories-predicate;
focus, argument focus, and sentence focus-rather than as points on a]
continuum from the narrowest to the broadest focus type. Id the present.]
section, I would like to make a specific proposal as to the way in whichl
these focus categories are prosodically manifested in English, andJ
mutatis mutandis, in other languages with prosodic focus marking. I wily
show that most accent positions are compatible with two focus readings J
one “broad" and one “narrow," and 1 will argue that this compatibility id
best analyzed in terms of the concept of markedness. The predicate-focus!
structure will be analyzed as the unmarked focus structure while thej
argument-focus and the sentence-focus structures will be analyzed asj
MARKED.
,f
Since predicate-focus sentences are unmarked for their focus'
articulation, they systematically have more than one interpretation.!
Alternative readings for given predicate domains are an automatic]
consequence of this unmarked status. Such readings result from]
implicatures drawn on the basis of conversational contexts, not from]
grammatical rules of focus construal. When alternative focus readings ofJ
predicate-accented sentences are to be made formally explicit, prosodic!
focus marking has to be supplemented with, or replaced byj!
morphosyntactic marking, by means of word-order variation or special!
grammatical constructions, such as vanous types of cleft constructions']
dative shift, focus fronting, etc.
1’
The status of the predicate as the unmarked focus domain correlates]
with the status of the topic-comment structure as the unmarked|
pragmatic articulation (see Section 4.2.1). Unless special circumstances 1
obtain, a VP-accented sentence will be interpreted as having topic- i
comment structure. In order to preclude topic-comment interpretation of'
a sentence, the predicate domain must be prosodically marked via J
absence of prominence. This in turn entails in most cases presence of an.1
accent on the subject. For simplicity’s sake, I will deal in this section.;
mostly with the pragmatic articulation of asserted propositions, ,
However, the principles of accent placement described here apply to,,
pragmatically construed semantic domains in general, whether asserted
or presupposed
Marked and unmarked focus structure
297
I
5.6.)
I
I
■
■
I
E
■
E
E
As we have seen earlier, it is often possible to determine the focus of a
proposition by asking an information question whose WH-constituent
corresponds to the presumed focus constituent in the answer. This kind
of question-answer test is analogous to the test used for determining the
topic of a sentence by asking a question in which the presumed topic
referent is a matter of inquiry (see Section 4.1.1). Comrie (1981:57), in his
discussion of the role of focus in language typology, uses the following
question-answer pairs to illustrate certain major differences in focus
structure (his examples (13) through (16); accent markings added:
f (5.58)
f
P
t
[
L
I
L
I
■
|'
B
b
I
L
f
I
f
i
l
;
I
"
'
Predicate focus and argument focus
a.
b.
c.
d.
Who saw Bill?
Who did Bill see?
What did Bill do?
What happened?
- john saw Bill/him.
- Bill/he saw john.
- Bill/he went straight home.
- bill went straight home.
According to Comrie, the foci (or, in our terminology, the focus domains)
in the replies in (5.58) are John in (a) and (b), went straight home in (c),
and Bill went straight home in (d). Example (5.58) illustrates the wellknown fact that sentence accents may mark semantic domains which are
larger than that of the accented constituent: while in (a) and (b) the
intended focus domain is coextensive with the accented word, in (c) and
(d) the accented w-ord represents only part of the focus domain, which,
according to Comrie, is the verb phrase in (c) and the entire sentence in
(d). (Comrie does not mention the issue of the accented subject in (d),
which I will discuss later on.)
There is an important difference in focus interpretation between (5.58)
(a), on the one hand, and (b), (c), and (d), on the other. In (a), where the
accent falls on the subject, there is only one interpretation, with "John”
as the argument focus of an identificational sentence; the information
structure of this sentence is the same as that of (5.11) (My car broke
down) analyzed in Section 5.2.3. In sentences (b), (c), and (d), on the other
hand, where the accent falls on the (last syllable of the) verb phrase, there
is more than one possible interpretation depending on the context
provided. For example, sentence (b), which is analyzed as an argumentfocus sentence by Comrie, would be equally appropriate as an answer to
the context question in (c), i.e. it can also receive a predicate-focus
interpretation. (The apparent incompatibility between the question in (c)
and the reply in (b) is purely semantic, having to do with the agentive case
role associated with the verb do but not see: it is not a matter of
298
Pragmatic relations: focus
information structure.) Sentence (b) could also answer the question in
(d); the question What happened does not necessarily require a sentence­
focus reply but is in principle compatible with any focus type in the
answer (e.g. it could also be answered with (c)). Furthermore the reply in
(c) does not need to have predicate focus but could have argument focus,
e.g. if used to answer the question “Where did Bill go?" Finally the
answer in (d), even with a secondary accent on the subject, is compatible
with the question in (c) as well, given an appropriate context. (Such a
context could be created e.g. by adding the follow-up sentence But his
s/st/sk stayed at the party). Sentence (d) can receive either a sentence­
focus or a predicate-focus interpretation; the subject may be a contrastive
topic or it may be in focus.
Thus in (b), (c), and (d) of (5.58) the different focus construals
mentioned by Comrie are not uniquely determined by the prosodic
structure of the various sentences. Rather they are, in part at least,
determined by the expectations created with the context questions.47 This
observation leads us to an important generalization. Since (b), (c), and (d)
are ambiguous, or vague, but (a) is not, we can tentatively conclude that
sentences in which the predicate phrase is accented permit two or more
focus readings, while sentences in which the predicate is unaccented
permit only one. (For the time being, 1 will ignore the issue of possible
sentence-focus construal of subject-accented sentences.) The availability
of alternative readings for VP-accented sentences is a consequence of the
competition between the inherent ¡conicity of prosodic prominence,
according to which any accented constituent can be interpreted as focal,
and the General Phrasal Accent Principle, which is non-iconic (or only
partially iconic), and which allows the domain signaled by an accent to
extend over preceding non-accented constituents. The fact that such
alternative readings are found with predicate domains rather than
arguments is of course a consequence of the status of predicators as
unmarked for the activation states of their denotata (Section 5.4.2).
The focus structures of the different replies in (5.58) are represented in
(5.58’). Item (d) represents the topic^comment reading and (d’) the
eventive reading of the subject-accented sentence:
(5.58’)
a.
b.
c.
d.
d’.
,«4 John J saw
Bill/him ].
tw[ BiU/he 1
[ saw
( john ]
ror[ BiU/he ] „■<[ went
straight home j.
™( BILL ] w[ WCM f,< ( Straight HOMF ]
reef bill went straight home ]
Marked and unmarked focus structure
299
The above-mentioned focus ambiguity of (b), (c), and (d) in (5.58”) is
represented by the repeated focus labels on the verb phrase constituents.
The focus can be either the predicate, or the argument within the
predicate. (Later on I will argue that the embedded focus label is in fact
unnecessary.) Concerning the separate representations in (d) and (d’), 1
am not claiming that the difference between the topic-comment reading
and the eventive reading is formally marked in sentence (5.58d). Rather,
the same prosodic structure is compatible with two focus construals. In
sentences in which both the subject NP and the VP are accented, the
accent on the subject may indicate either that the referent is in focus or
that it is topical but inactive
in the discourse (see Sections 4.4, 5.4, etc).
Let us look at some additional data. An amusing example of focus
ambiguity is provided by Jackendoff (1972:225) with the question-answer
pairs in (5.59) (JackendofFs (6.51) through (6.53)):
(5
59}
a. Was The Sound Pattern of English reviewed by the New York times?
b. No, it was reviewed by the Reader’s digest.
c. No. it was made into a movie.
Both answers are compatible with the question, but they rely on
different pragmatic presuppositions. In (b) the presupposition created by
the question is taken to be "The SPE was reviewed by x"; tn (c) it is taken
to be "Something was done with the SPE" or simply “The SPE is the
topic for a comment.” The reply in (5.59b) is playful only because of its
semantic content, given what we know about the nature of the book in
question and the nature of the Reader's Digest. The answer in (5.59c) is
playful both because of its semantic content and because of the fact that
the pragmatic presupposition chosen for (he answer clashes with the most
likely presupposition of the question, i.e that the medium for
promulgation is publication in book form
A playful exploitation of focus ambiguity is found also in the example
in (5.60), a first-grader joke told by my daughter. Notice that A’s first
utterance is a WH-question, hence the proposition expressed in the
sentence minus the WH-element is taken to be shared knowledge at the
time the question is asked, the accentuation facts in this utterance are
thus a matter of reactivation or "second-instance focus" (see Sections
5.1 2 and 5 4 4):
(5 601
A: Dad. why do birds fly vii.iit"
fl ] give up
A Because it’s too far to wmk.
300
Pragmatic relations: focus
The (mildly) funny effect of the answer to the question in (5.60) is due to J
the fact that the information structure of the reply is not consistent with J
that of the question. (The joke is thus built on uncooperative fl
conversational behavior.) By uttering her question, A activates in B’s
mind the referent of the presupposed proposition “Birds fly south." Since 1
the predicate phrase is accented it allows for two readings: one “narrow,”d|
in which the matter of inquiry is the direction of the flight-south4
contrasting e.g. with north-the other “broad," in which the matter of,l
inquiry is the behavior of birds in the fall-flying south contrasting e.g. J
with staying home. In the narrow reading, the principle of accent j
interpretation is iconic, the focus coinciding with the smallest accented; fl
constituent. In the broad reading, the interpretation is based on the J
General Phrasal Accent Principle.
■■■fl
In both readings, the denotatum of the directional argument south isj]
being activated in the question together with that of the verb. The force fl
of the joke is that the answer given by A requires a pragmatic situation in J
which the direction of the birds’ migration has in fact already been fl
activated and in which the matter of inquiry is instead the manner offl
locomotion. The required presupposition would be properly evoked by J
the alternative question in (5.60’):
:’fl
(5.60-)
Why do birds fly south?
Both in (5.60) and in (5.60’) the question presupposes knowledge of theq
entire proposition “Birds fly south." However in (5.60’) it is not this,!]
entire proposition that is being activated by the question but only part of.)
it. The sentence requires a discourse situation in which the directionaid
argument has been activated prior to the time the question is uttered. -*4
Let us take a closer took at the interpretation of the two prosodic J
patterns in the questions in (5.60) and (5.60'). To simplify matters, I will,]
use the declarative counterparts of the two sentences in (5.61):
d
(5.61)
a. Birds fly south.
b. Birds fly south
As stated above, sentence (5.61a) has two readings. It could answer the
question “What do birds do’" or “Where do birds fly?’’ But what about
(5.61b)? According to the generalization mentioned above, we also expect
this sentence to have two interpretations since the accented verb phrase
indicates an unmarked focus domain This expectation is indeed borne
out. The first reading, w hich comes to mind most readily, is the “narrow"
J
fl
fl
fl
.1
a
Marked and unmarked focus structure
301
reading, in which flying is taken to contrast with some other kind of
locomotion, as suggested in the joking answer in (5.60). In this reading,,
the sentence could be used e.g. to correct the previously expressed
mistaken belief that birds migrate on foot. In the second-“broad”reading the sentence could be used e.g. to contradict someone's Haim that
birds have stopped migrating altogether, in which case the interpretation
of the sentence is similar to Birds do fly south.
The second reading is perhaps easier to grasp in a different discourse
setting. Imagine a traveler in a New York airport walking up to an airline
ticket counter and asking for a flight to Dallas. The airline employee
might give the answer in (5.62):
(5.62)
L’m sorry, Sir, we don't
fly
south.
The point of the utterance in (5.62) is not to contrast flying with some
other manner of transport (“We don’t fly south, we only use buses for
those destinations”) but to convey general information about the airline.
It is a topic-comment sentence whose predicate-focus domain contains a
topic element with an active referent. The two readings of (5.61b) are thus
analogous to the two readings of (5.19) John doesn't read books or of
(5.55) speakjng French war an unnecessary luxury. In each case, an
accented verb is followed by a topic argument inside a predicate domain.
In the case of (5.61a), the two readings are easily explained as a result
of the fundamentally different behavior of verbs and nouns with respect
to sentence accentuation, as described in Section 5.4.2. While unaccented
arguments must be topics, the pragmatic status of unaccented predicators
is left open. Hence the two possible interpretations. More remarkable is
the fact that (5.61b) also has two interpretations, even though the
accented verb is the only focal element in the predicate domain. In fact,
the sentence would have two readings even if it were simply Birds fly.
It is important Io see that this focus ambiguity (or rather vagueness) of
predicate-accented sentences is not simply a result of the fact that the
denotatum of a verb phrase is semantically “more complex" than that of
a subject, thereby leaving room for a greater range of focus
interpretations. Similarly, the non-ambiguity of subject-accented
sentences is not a simple consequence of the fact that being the leftmost
element in the sentence the focus domain cannot include anything
preceding it. Rather the difference in focus construal is inherent in the
two focus-structure types. This is confirmed by languages which permit
subject-verb inversion, like Italian. Sentences like (5.11) Si e rotta lamia
302
Pragmatic relations: focus
"My car broke down” or Ha mangiato giovanni “john ate”
predicate-focus readings, even though the NP is not the leftmost
constituent in the sentence (and even though, according to some linguists,
the inverted NP is part of the verb phrase). Thus the fact that Birds fly
has two readings while r/rds fly has only one (ignoring, again, a possible
thetic reading of that sentence) is a natural consequence of the inherent
markedness difference between the subject domain and the predicate
macchiha
have no
domain.
The above-stated generalization concerning the inherent ambiguity of
predicate-focus sentences contradicts a widely held belief. Consider e.g.
the following statement made by Ladd (1978:75) in his discussion of the
notion of “normal stress." Referring to work by Halliday (1967),
Chomsky (1970), and Jackendoff (1972), Ladd writes:
The most important point that emerges from these works is that while
most of the possible accent placements in a sentence signal a narrow
focus, one leaves the focus broad or unspecified. While focus is hardly a
well-defined concept, its effect in dialogue provides hard data for those
unsatisfied by intuitive definitions. Halliday’s examples will illustrate. In
(8) John painted the shed yesterday the focus can be the shed, or painted
the shed, or the whole sentence, etc. Thus (8) could be used to reply to a
range of questions like What's new. What did John do. What did John
paint yesterday, etc. By contrast, other possible accent placements
narrow the focus, so that for example (9) /rw.v painted the shed yesterday
could only answer the question Who painted the shed yesterday, and (10)
John painted the shed yesterda v could only answer When did John paint
the shed.
While the interpretation of Ladd’s example (9), in which the accent falls
on the subject, seems uncontroversial, his example (10) does not confirm
the “most important point" mentioned at the beginning of the quote. It is
true that (10) can have the indicated function, with the accented
constituent yesterday as an argument-focus domain. But (10) also has a
predicate-focus reading. For example (10) could be used in a reply to
someone complaining that John doesn’t take good care of the shed in his
backyard: What do you mean. John's not doing anything about the shed.
He just painted it yesterday! (In this case, the verb painted may receive a
secondary accent, but this accent is non-distinclive.) On this reading,
sentence (10) is parallel to example (5.20) f'm going to Crete tos/orroii-.
To take another example, upon seeing a a strange-looking person in the
street I can say I saw that guv yesterday, without necessarily contrasting
yesterday with today or some other day
Marked and unmarked focus structure
303
As in earlier-discussed cases (examples (5.19) or (5.62) and others), the
tendency to interpret the focus of such sentences as “narrow" or
"contrastive" is not due to a rule of focus interpretation but to a
generalized conversational implicature. Since the presence of the
unaccented topical element within the predicate-focus domain causes
the actual focus designatum to be narrower than the syntactic structure
would allow it to be, and since contrastiveness implies relative
narrowness of a semantic domain, the contrastive interpretation tends
to be the one that comes to mind first. In Ladd’s example (10), as in
(5.20), the tendency towards narrow-focus construal is reinforced by the
fact that deictic adverbs like yesterday or tomorrow are most often
unaccented and tend to have a topic relation to the proposition.
Sentences in which they are accented and focal are therefore perceived as
special. And anything special is potentially perceived as contrasting with
a norm. Such observations do not alter the basic fact that predicateaccented sentences have two focus readings, one of which is necessarily
“broad.”
At the risk of overstating my case, I would like to argue that the
situation is in fact the opposite of the one claimed by Ladd. Instead of
saying that “while most of the possible accent placements in a sentence
signal a narrow focus, one leaves the focus broad or unspecified" we can
say, with greater justification, that while most of the possible accent
placements in a sentence leave the focus broad or unspecified, one signals
a narrow focus. This narrow focus placement is the one on the subject.
An interesting question, which I cannot pursue here in any detail, is
why adverbs like yesterday or tomorrow may occur unaccented in "outof-the-blue" utterances while other adverbial phrases require prior
activation of their denotata in the discourse in order to occur without
an accent. In a discussion of this issue. Halliday (1967:20711) suggests that
the difference between John saw the Pt.iY yesterday (no prior activation of
the adverbial denotatum needed) and John w the enr in June (pnor
activation required) can be explained by saying that the deictic yesterday
is equivalent to a deictic pronoun. However, deictic status alone does not
seem sufficient to explain these accentuation facts. For example, the
temporal postposition ago is deictic, but a sentence like John ran- the pl
three hours ago seems to require prior activation ot the temporal referent.
I must leave this issue for future research
The above quote from Ladd contains another often-heard statement
which needs clarification. According to Ladd, it Halliday s sentence John
JU-*
rragmalic relations. Jociis
j
painted the shed yesterday is used io answer the question "What's new?’^
its focus is "the whole sentence.” The same belief is expressed in Comrie’-ffl
statement that sentence (5.58d) (Bill went straight home) has senten<je|
focus when used as a reply to the question "What happened?” HowevejJ
as I observed earlier, context questions do not require specific focuy
structures for their replies; they merely suggest preferred readings. If thd
subjects John and Bill in the two sentences above are unaccented, theju
necessarily function as topics, even if these sentences are uttered in replug
to the question “What happened?” As a result, these sentences cannoli
have sentence-focus structure, i.e. their subjects cannot be in focus. T{j
take another example, 1 can use the sentence / lost my wallet either as.
reply to “How are you doing?” or to “What happened?" In botM
situations, I am using a sentence with topic-comment articulation andj
predicate-focus structure The preferred “eventive” interpretation isj
merely a function of the semantic content of the proposition; it is noy
determined by the prosodic structure of the sentence. For a sentence toj
qualify as having sentence focus its subject must be marked via prosodic!
prominence. But subject accentuation is not a sufficient condition for|
sentence-focus construal, as we have repeatedly seen before. In EnglishJ
only sentences which have both accented subjects and non-accente$.j
predicates can, under certain semantic conditions, be said to belong to ¡y
formal category “sentence-focus structure” (see Section 5.6.2 below). J
On the basis of the above observations, 1 would like to propose thd
following general principle of interpretation for VP-accented sentence^
(5.63)
verb]
phrases carry an accent have predicate-focus structure. The predicated
focus structure is the unmarked focus structure and allows fo?j
alternative focus readings. Such alternative readings are contextual!)^
determined.
¿a
the principleor predicate focus INTERPRETATION. Sentences whose
•>: ‘-jj
In VP-accented sentences, the semantic and the pragmatic predicate^
coincide (entirely or in part), while in subject-accented sentences the Cwyy
levels of interpretation diverge (sec Section 5.2.3 above). The status of thejl
predicate as the unmarked locus goes band in hand with the status of th^i
subject as the unmarked topic, i.e. as a constituent which is normally^
topical but which allows for nun-topic construal o! its denotatum.
■Among the possible aliern.iti'. e readings for VP-accented sentences are
not only the earlier-mentioned argumcni-fi.Kus readings out also readings
in which the predicate is m locus w ilhoui the subject being a topic, as in
Marked and unmarked focus structure
305
the case of non-referential or quantified subjects (see Section 4.3) or of
empty subjects in event-central thetic sentences (see Section 4.2.2).
Finally, as we saw with example (5.41), VP-accented sentences may have
construals in which the entire VP denotatum is in the presupposition. In
all cases, however, sentences with such alternative focus readings have the
grammatical form of topic-comment sentences.
An important claim embedded in the principle in (5.63) is that
alternative focus construals of VP-accenled sentences are not determined
by alternative focus structures, i.e. do not result from conventional
form-meaning pairings. Rather they are the natural consequence of the
unmarked nature of the predicate domain. Such readings do therefore
not have to be accounted for with rules of information structure. In the
case of argument-focus construal of a VP-accented sentence it would
therefore be misleading to say that the pragmatic articulation of a given
sentence has “changed” from predicate focus to argument focus. The
accent on the argument constituent does not mark the argument as the
focus. The given accent position, which is motivated for independent
reasons, is merely compatible with an alternative-iconic-reading which
is conversationally induced. Instead of speaking of “focus ambiguity” of
predicate domains it .is therefore more accurate to speak of “focus
vagueness.
To better understand the nature of the interpretive principle that
allows for alternative pragmatic construals of an unmarked prosodic
structure let us compare the facts of focus construal with the
interpretation of unmarked syntactic configurations (cf. the discussions
in Sections 1.3.2 and 1.4.2). A simple English example of an unmarked
and a marked syntactic structure is the contrast between the canonical SV
pattern and the corresponding auxiliary-inversion pattern with respect to
the mood feature “declarative." A canonical SV sentence like She is
beautiful may be said to be unmarked with respect to this feature, since it
can also be used in an interrogative or exclamative function, given
appropriate changes in intonation (see the interrogative She is beautiful?
and the exclamative She is beautiful!). The inverted sequence Is she
beautiful, however, is negatively marked for the feature in question since
it cannot be used as a simple declarative sentence, no matter how the
intonation is modified. (Instead of saying that the canonical pattern is
unmarked for the feature “declarative." we could also say that the
relevant feature is “non-declarative,” and that the inversion pattern is
positively marked for this feature.)
306
Pragmatic relations: focus
Notice that in the example of syntactic markedness mentioned above it
would seem counterintuitive to characterize the canonical SV pattern as
"ambiguous” between a declarative and a non-declarative reading. A
more insightful characterization would be to say that the SV structure is
semantically vague or underspecified with respect to the given
distinction. A speaker who uses a canonical SV structure in an
interrogative function does not exploit a separate form meaning
correspondence. She merely exploits a vagueness. The principle of
interpretation at work here is similar to that used in the interpretation of
such well-known lexical pairs as dog and bitch or German Katze “cat"
and Xdter “tomcat.” The first members of these pairs are unmarked with
respect to the sex of the animal while the second members are positively
Specified in this respect. If I use the word dog to refer to a female animal I
am not using the word in a different sense as when I use it to refer to a
male dog. I am merely using a lexical structure which leaves the semantic
distinction unspecified in a particular way.
I suggest, then, that the principle of semantic interpretation which is at
work in such syntactic or lexical markedness oppositions is also at work
in the case of alternative focus construals of predicate-accented sentences.
Consider again sentence (5.61 a) Birds fly south. Whether I utter this
sentence with the intent to correct someone's mistaken belief about the
direction of the flight of birds, or with the intent to inform someone of
their migratory behavior, the information structure of the sentence is
the same. My sentence is vague, not ambiguous. The difference in
interpretation does therefore not have to be accounted for with a rule.
Thus in order to represent the two readings of (5.61a) we do not need the
two structures in (5.64):
(5.64)
a. to, [ Birds ] roc [ fly south ]
b. to, [ Birds ] fly FOc [ south ]
The representation in (5.64b) is unnecessary, since the represented
reading is included in (a). Similarly, among the two representations for
the alternative focus readings of Ladd's example (9), given in (5.65):
(5.65)
a. to,[ John ] TC[ painted Toe[ the shed ]
b. rori John ] painted Tor[ the shed 1 r._. [
yesterday
yesterday
].
).
only (a) is needed. The interpretation represented in (b) “comes for free,"
given the general role of predicates m sentence prosody (Section 5.4.2).
Marked and unmarked focus structure
5.6.2
307
Sentence focus
In the preceding section, I established the distinction between marked
and unmarked focus structure and I observed that predicate-accented
sentences, as the unmarked type, systematically have more than one focus
interpretation. Since predicate accentuation is a necessary condition for
predicate-focus structure, prosodic marking of any other focus structure
entails absence of prominence on the predicate phrase. This is
tantamount to saying that in non-predicate-focus sentences the subject
must be accented. Now since the topic-comment articulation (predicate
focus) contrasts not only with the identificational articulation (argument
focus) but also with the event-reporting or presentational articulation
(sentence focus), sentences with unaccented predicates will in principle be
ambiguous between the last two readings in languages like English,
although semantic and pragmatic factors usually preclude ambiguity.
The principle of interpretation which accounts for argument-focus
construal of a sentence with an unaccented verb phrase has been
repeatedly discussed in this book and needs no further elaboration (see
especially the discussion of the relationship between presupposition and
activation in Section 5.4.3). What remains to be explained is why the
same prosodic structure which expresses argument focus on the subject
also expresses sentence focus, contradicting the general rule according to
which a predicate phrase with a focal designatum must be prosodicaliy
prominent. The following sections are devoted to this last issue.
5.6.2.i The theoretical issue
In a remarkable early essay comparing the variable position of sentence
accents in English with the variable position of phrasal constituents in
Spanish. Bolinger (1954) illustrates the major accent positions in English
with the sentences in (5.66):
(5.66)
Why didn't she come In work today’’ (Bolinger 1454)
3 Her husband is sick.
b. Her husband made a scene
c. Her husband is to blame.
d. Her husband fell off a ladder
e. Her husband broke his neck,
f Her husband had an accident
g Her husband died
h. Her husband is responsible.
JUS
Pragmatic relations: Jocus
i. Her husband is irresponsible.
j. Her husband is in jail.
2
Bolinger notes that, given the minimal context created by the question!
“prosodic stress” in the answers will most likely fall on the subject noum
husband in (a), (c), (g), and (h), but on the sentence-final words (scend
ladder, neck, accident, irresponsible and jail, respectively) in the si3
remaining answers. The two patterns are contrasted in (5.66’) anffl
(5.66”):
j'j
(5.66’)
a.
c.
g.
h.
(5.66") b.
d.
e.
f.
i.
j.
Her husband is sick.
Her husband is to blame.
Her husband died.
Her husband is responsible.
Her husband made a scene
Her husband fell off a ladder.
Her husband broke his neck
Her husband had an accident
Her husband is irresponsible
Her husband is in jail.
.3
3
m
1
J
, .<!
.’j
j
It is clear that the subject-accented sentences in (5.66’) must 'bd
subdivided into two sets: (c) and (h) have argument focus, and (a) andl
(g) sentence focus. In (c) and (h) the denotata of the predicates are
pragmatically recoverable since the notion that someone or something ¡3
responsible for (or to blame for) the woman’s absence is implied by the.
question. We can say that the accented subjects identify the missing
element in the proposition “She is absent for x reason.” In (a) and (g), ojgJ
the other hand, the predicates are in no way predictable. The two!
sentences have an event-reporting function. The various replies in (5.661
may then be divided into the following three sets:
’J
(5.67)
(5.68)
PREDICATE FOCUS:
a. Her husband made a scene.
b. Her husband fell off a ladder
c. Her husband broke his neck
d. Her husband had an alliulni
e. Her husband is irklsi-unsibi f
f. Her husband is in iaii
ARGUMENT FOCUS:
a Her husband is Io blame
b Her husband is respisnsibk
":wl
J
1
1
4
i
s
j
Marked and unmarked focus structure
(5.69)
309
SENTENCE focus:
a. Her husband is sick.
b. Her husband died.
' With respect to the predicate-focus sentences in (5.67) it should be noted
I that in the mimimal context provided both the predicates and the subjects
f are likely to be accented, given the fact that the subject referent is not
r discourse-active (see Sections 5.4.1, 5.4.2, 5.6.1). Parallel to (5.67) (a), (b),
E (c), etc. there are also the versions in (5.67‘):
(5.67’)
a. Her husband made a scene.
b. Her husband fell off a ladder.
c. Her husband broke his neck..
etc.
t Notice that the phonetic difference between the two-accent sentences in
(5.67’) and their single-accent counterparts in (5.67) is perceptually much
f less clear-cut than that between the predicate-accented sentences in (5.67)
r and (5.67’) on the one hand and the single-accent structures in (5.69) on
t the other. This perceptual difference has to do with the different
[ functional impact of activation marking and focus marking. In predicatef accented sentences, the presence or absence of a second accent on the
I subject does not have the same category-defining effect as the presence or
1 absence of an accent on the predicate in subject-accented sentences. For
I example, changing (5.67a) into (5.67’a) does not entail a change of focus
I Structure; it merely marks the subject referent as inactive in the discourse
[ (making it possible to use the sentence in a relatively context-independent
’ way). However, adding an accent to (5.69a), i.e. changing it into Her
| husband is stCK, entails changing the focus category. The latter sentence is
[ construed as a topic-comment sentence with an inactive (or contrastive)
f topic referent, not as a sentence-focus sentence with an inactive (or
| contrastive) predicate.
;
To take another example, while the contrast between the two versions
in (5.70a) is one of activation only, that between the two versions in
f (5.70b) is a contrast between two focus categories:
(5.70)
a. Johnson died./Johnson died.
b. Johnson died ..Johnson died.
While both versions in (a) have predicate focus, the versions in (b) do not
both have sentence focus. This is so because in predicate-focus sentences
the category-defining feature is the accent on the predicate, leaving open
310
Pragmatic relations: focus
the possibility of an activation accent on the subject argument. In marked
sentence-focus sentences, on the other hand, the category-defining feature
is both the accent on the subject and the absence of an accent on the
predicate. The contrast in (5.70) confirms the existence of a grammati­
cally relevant category boundary between predicate focus and sentence
focus in English.
The contrast in (5.70) also confirms the observation, which 1 discussed
at the end of Section 5.3.3, that prosodic focus construal is often
determined by the contrast with potential prosodic allosentences. Since
Her husband is sick or Johnson died have possible event-reporting
readings, the VP-accented allosentences Her husband is sick or Johnson
died are necessarily interpreted as having a focus structure other than
sentence focus. Eventive construa! of the two-accent sentences is
preempted by the existence of the eventive single-accent sentences. This
explains the subtle difference in interpretation between Her husband is
sick and Her husband had a heart attack. The second sentence is easier to
construe as eventive since it does not have an eventive single-accent
allosentence (Her husband had a heart attack can only have argument
focus).
The contrasts in Bolinger’s examples above raise two distinct
theoretical questions. The first is a question of interpretation: why do
the various propositional contents in (5.66) favor or force the focus
readings in (5.67) through (5.69), and in particular why do the predicates
in (5.69) permit “eventive” construal of the propositions while those in
(5.67) and (5.68) do not? The answer to this question involves a number
of factors, which include the lexical nature of the predicators, the number
of arguments associated with these predicators, and the morphological,
semantic, and pragmatic constraints on these arguments (see Lambrecht
forthcoming). The issue is too complex to be dealt with satisfactorily here
(see the preliminary remarks in the section on thetic propositions in
Chapter 4). There is no doubt a relationship between the class of
predicates permitting eventive readings of subject-accented sentences and
the class of “unaccusative" predicates (Perlmutter 1978), but the two are
not coextensive. I should also point out that the class of "eventive
predicates" is much larger than has been assumed by most linguists who
have dealt with the focus structure of such sentences (see the summaries
below). In fact, it seems to be an open class. For illuminating discussions
of this issue the reader is referred to the analyses in Fuchs 1980 and Faber
1987.
i
j
■
*
I
1
j
i
<
Marked and unmarked focus structure
311
The second theoretical question, which is the one I am concerned with
in this section, is that of the relationship between interpretation and
form in sentence-focus sentences. It can be formulated as follows: given
the existence of a universal semantic and pragmatic category of thetic
(presentational and event-reporting) propositions, why do sentences
expressing such propositions have the prosodic form they do (in
languages in which the category is expressed prosodically), i.e. how
does their prosodic form relate to their meaning? I will argue that the
principle which governs the interpretation of prosodic sentence-focus
marking is of an entirely different sort as that which accounts for the
interpretation of the predicate-focus and the argument-focus structure.
To the three principles which I have shown to motivate the location of a
sentence accent, i.e. iconicity, rule, and default (see Section 5.3), I will add
a fourth one: the systemic contrast between canonical and inverted
sequences.
5.6.2.2 Previous approaches
In his discussion of the examples in {5.66), Bolinger observes that in the
sentences which I grouped under example (5.68) (Her husband is to
blame. Her husband is responsible} the predicates "are logically only
repetitions of the initial question 'why.'” i.e. he implicitly categorizes
these sentences as argument-focus structures Concerning the sentence­
focus structures in (5.69) Bolinger then writes:
[The predicates in (5.66) (a) and tg)] do give some information. The
information that they give, however, is of a hackneyed sort - sickness
and death are major causes of absenteeism, and one or the other could
almost be expected as an excuse for absence The real information lies in
the identity of the person who was sick or who died...The remaining
predicates all relate to some occurrence which is out of the ordinary making a scene, falling off a ladder, landing in jail (Bolinger 1954:152)
It is unclear to me why the death of one's husband should count as an
ordinary, hackneyed, event compared to e g. his making a scene or falling
off a ladder. It is also unclear why the identification of the husband is to
be considered the "real information" in (5 66) (a) and (g) but not in the
other subject-accented sentences.
The flaw in Bolinger's explanation is that he interprets the prosodic
peak of the sentences ¡conically as the "information point," as he calls it
(see the summary in Section 5.11). He interprets husband in (5.66) (a) and
(g) as more informative than in (b). (d). (el. (fl. and (j) only because this
J12
Pragmatic relations: focus
noun has relative prosodic prominence in the former but not in the latterj
sentences. Since the sentence-focus and the narrow-focus patterns are!
formally identical, he concludes that they must be interpreted in the samel
way. If they were not, i.e. if two identical prosodic patterns could have]
two different meanings, the iconic principle of accent assignment would]
be jeopardized. It is important to be aware of this view because ifl
reappears, under one form or another, in many of the subsequent!
analyses, including more formally oriented ones.
The next analysis which deserves to be mentioned is the one by]
Halliday (1967). Halliday does not discuss the sentence-focus pattern per’
se, but it is clear that the rules he formulates cannot account for this]
pattern. As indicated in the quote at the beginning of this chapter,!
Halliday defines the “information focus" as “that whereby the speaker!
marks out a part (which may be the whole) of a message block as tbat|
which he wishes to be interpreted as informative.” Halliday is careful to]
observe that the focus may sometimes be "(the whole) of a message!
block," i.e. he in principle allows for sentence focus. However, his accent!
placement rule (quoted in Section 5.3.2), according to which “the tonica
falls ... on the last accented syllable of the item under focus," does not!
allow for the sentence-focus pattern since it prevents the subject frotnj
being accented if the predicate is also under focus.
The same problem mars Jackendoffs (1972) analysis, which isj
influenced by Halliday’s (see Section 5.1.1). Jackendoff attempts to'9
reconcile the Nuclear Stress Rule of Chomsky and Halle (1968) with the!
insight that accent assignment correlates directly with the mental states of
speakers and hearers His accent rule, which I quoted in Section 5.3.2, is
formally more explicit than Halliday’s in that the “item under focus” ofi
Halliday’s definition is now characterized in terms of phrase structure)
Like Halliday, Jackendoff does not deal w-ith sentence-focus structures
per se. It is clear, however, that his stress-assignment rule fails to account I
for the sentence-focus pattern, for the same reason as Halliday’s toniJ
placement rule fails to do so. The "regular stress rules" which Jackendoflr
refers to would assign stress to the final syllable of the verb phrase, not to)
the subject noun This is so because these rules do not make ttit
distinction between verbs and nouns, or predicates and arguments, lateiBi
postulated by Schmerling and Selkirk (see Section 5.4.2}.
' 1
Ladd’s (1978) approach to accent placement avoids the pitfalls of th(
nuclear-stress-based approach by posi ijLiimg the theoretical construct ol
the “default accent" (see Section 5 3.31. Tins construct allows Ladd to1
s
Marked and unmarked focus structure
■
i
■
'
313
preserve the basic insight of Halliday’s approach while avoiding its flaws.
The default accent principle allows the “most accentable syllable” of the
focus constituent to be located further towards the beginning of the
constituent, if the syllable which would normally carry the accent is
“deaccented” for pragmatic reasons (see example (5.19) and discussion).
However, Ladd’s approach does not account for the accent pattern in
sentence-focus sentences. Unlike the unaccented object nouns in topiccomment sentences like John doesn't read books, the unaccented
predicates in sentence-focus sentences are not “deaccented.” Their
denotata are not discourse-active or otherwise recoverable from the
discourse.
The next analysis which I would like to mention is the one by Culicover
& Rochemont (1983). These authors follow the Chomsky-Halle tradition
in that they treat stress assignment as a purely formal matter. Focus stress
assignment takes place in the syntactic component of the grammar, by
means of a silent morpheme or placeholder which gets phonologically
realized at the level of surface structure (comparable to the silent
syntactic question morpheme of some early versions of transformational
generative grammar). The authors claim that “the identification of the
constituent in focus cannot be stated in terms of either the prosodic
pattern, or the contextual beliefs that are implicated in the interpretation
of focus; and the assignment of stress cannot be a function of the
contextual beliefs" (1983:123).
Culicover & Rochemont’s argument - whose mam goal is to defend a
hierarchical and “modular” approach to grammatical theory against the
evidence from focus prosody adduced by other linguists-is loo complex
to be summarized here. For the purposes of the present discussion, it is
sufficient to quote the following observation which the authors make in a
footnote:
An unfortunate consequence of this characterization of generalized
presentational focus is that it allows (a), below, in contexts where the
sentence is used to initiate a discourse, but excludes cases like (b-c) in
similar contexts:
(a) The construction crew is dynamiting.
(b) A strange thought just occurred to me.
(c) A man appeared.
... In (b e), the predicate cannot be prescntationally focused, since it is
not stressed ... However, in a context where, e.g . (b) is being used to
314
Pragmatic relations: focus
initiate a discourse, the predicate of appearance meets our conditions for
interpretation as presentational focus. In our terms, then, it should be
stressed...Examples like [(b)] might lead us to the conclusion that true
verbs of appearance, like occur or appear need not be focused in order to
be introduced. In other words, in [(b)] used to initiate a discourse, it
must be c-construable [ = context-construable] that something has just
occurred to the Speaker, in order for the predicate not to be focused.
Given our definition of "‘c-construable,” this proposition must be
inferrable from the mutual beliefs of Speaker and Hearer. Let us say
that the mutual beliefs of speaker and hearer include a set of principles
of discourse, along the lines of Grice's conversational maxims (1975).
We might then assume that the c-construable proposition associated
with [(b)] in the context with which we are concerned falls under some
version of Grice's Cooperative Principle. (Culicover & Rochemont,
1983:156)
The above footnote says essentially the same thing as Bolinger in the
earlier-quoted passage, except that this time Gricean principles of
interpretation are invoked. The lack of accent on the predicate in the
two sentences in question, which constitutes an exception to their rules, is
explained by Culicover & Rochemont by saying that the denotata of
these predicates are “context-construable,” i.e. pragmatically recoverable
from the discourse context.
Besides the fact-established beyond doubt by Schmerling (1976),
Fuchs (1980), Faber (1987), and others-that the sentence-focus pattern
is by no means restricted to what Culicover & Rochemont (following
Gueron 1978) call “natural verbs of appearance," I do not see how
Grice’s Cooperative Principle can be used to justify the claim that the
denotata of such verbs can be considered context-construable. The
weakness of the approach to sentence-focus construal in terms of Gricean
maxims is apparent also in Culicover & Rochemont’s discussion of the
following example:
(5.71)
My stereo exploded. ( = Culicover & Rochemont’s (64))
The authors claim that (5.71) is appropriate only in a context in which the
previous occurrence of a loud noise is “mutually believed” by the speaker
and the addressee. This is clearly false. The falseness of this claim
appears, for example, in the fact that, in the appropriate universe of
discourse, the corresponding negated proposition can also have
sentence-focus construal:
(5.71’)
Guess what! My stereo didn't explode!
Marked and unmarked focus structure
315
It seems clear that the appropriateness of the utterance in (5.71') cannot
be considered contingent upon the mutually-believed non-occurrence of a
loud noise in the speech situation.
The next analysis which I would like to mention here is the one by
Selkirk (1984:Ch. 5). Selkirk postulates a “Basic Focus Rule," according
to which “any constituent to which a pitch accent is assigned is a focus”
(p. 206). (Selkirk’s expression “a constituent is a focus” is equivalent to
my “the denotatum of a constituent is in focus.”) To account for the fact
that a single accent can signal focus domains of varying length, Selkirk
proposes the “Phrasal Focus Rule" in example (5.72):
(5.72)
Selkirk’s phrasal focus rule (1984:207):
A constituent may be a focus if (i) or (ii) (or both) is true:
(i) The constituent that is its head is a focus.
(ii) A constituent contained within it that is an argument of the head
is a focus.
The Phrasal Focus Rule, which has a recursive effect, allows the domain
of a focus accent to “spread" from smaller to larger constituents.
Condition (ii) of (5.72) is motivated by the need to account for the
asymmetry between arguments and predicates with respect to the
interpretation of prosodic prominence (see the quote from Selkirk in
Section 5.4.2 above). To take a simple example, the Phrasal Focus Rule
accounts for the fact that the sentence in (5.73) can have the two focus
interpretations in (a) and (b):
(5.73)
She watched “kojak."
a. She watched foc( ''kojak" ]
b. She fc<( watched “kojak" ]
In (5.73a), the object argument Kojak alone is interpreted as the focus by
virtue of the Basic Focus Rule, according to which any accented
constituent “is a focus” (and presumably also by virtue of condition (i) in
(5.72), since the noun Kojak is the head of the NP Kojak). In (5.73b), both
the argument and the predicate are in focus by virtue of condition (ii) of
the Phrasal Focus Rule. The accented NP is able to include under its
focus the predicate of which it is an argument.'19
Selkirk's Phrasal Focus Rule makes the wrong predictions in the case
of the sentence-focus pattern. Consider the structure in (5.74):
i
jiv
rragmattc relations: focus
(5.74)
Selkirk’s rule predicts that in the sentence Her husband died only tht
subject NP may be a focus, i.e. it allows only for argument focus and
excludes the sentence-focus interpretation. The focus of the subject NE
cannot spread to the verb since the accented subject is neither the head oi
the VP nor contained within the VP as an argument of V. Noticing ths
problem, Selkirk makes the following comment:
1
It has been claimed that some sentences having a prosodic prominence
only within the subject NP, like these [i.e. The sun is shining. Afw
umbrella's been found, My mother's coming], are perfectly appropriate!
when uttered out of the blue...Does their appropriateness when ulterem
out of the blue require us to consider the VP to be focused here, attjij
therefore to allow for the possibility that a focused argument nod
contained within the constituent with its head [sic] may focus that!
constituent? We think not. It may simply be that it is possible in*&’
felicitous discourse to utter sentences out of the blue where only the
subject NP, and not the entire sentence, is being focused. (Selkirk!
1984:217)
Selkirk’s comment embodies the same claim as the one made in the quotgj
from Culicover & Rochemont above. By suggesting that it may bgl
“possible in a felicitous discourse to utter sentences out of the blue where!
only the subject NP, and not the entire sentence, is being focused” Selkirk!
claims in fact that a non-focused constituent can constitute “new!
information” and “old information" at the same time, invalidating her!
own focus definition/0
■jvti
The last analysis which 1 would like to mention here is the one byj
Gussenhoven (1983). Gussenhoven characterizes focus “as a binary?
variable which obligatorily marks all or part of a sentence as?
[ +focus] ...[+focus] marks the speaker's declared contribution'toj
the conversation, while [-focus] constitutes his cognitive starting point"j
(pp. 380, 383). Gussenhoven then formulates the “Sentence Accent!
Marked and unmarked focus structure
317
■
I
I
I
Assignment Rule" (SAAR) in (5.75), which “operates over focus
domains.” A focus domain is defined by Gussenhoven “as one or more
constituents whose [ +focus) status can be signaled by a single accent”
(1983:391)51:
I
I
(5.75)
|
I
Gussenhoven’s "Sentence Accent Assignment Rule” (SAAR)
(a) Domain assignment: P(X)A -» [P(X)A]
A(X)P - [A(X)P]
V -[Y]
(b) Accent assignment: [ ] -♦ [*]. In AP/PA, accent A.
f
I
(A = argument, P = Predicate; X,Y - any of these;
bold face = [ +focus]; [ 1 = focus domain; * - seoience accem.)
t
■
i
’Example (5.75) says, among other things, that in any focus domain
involving a predicate and an argument the argument receives the accent,
This is meant to capture the difference between predicates and arguments
l
with respect to accentability. The X in parentheses in the domain| assignment lines allows for topical arguments within accented focus
k domains of the kind discussed in Section 5.3.3. Gussenhoven illustrates
I the application of the SAAR with example (5.76):
(5.76)
I
|
'
ii
i
f
Example: AP
[A* P] Our dog’s disappeared. (Gussenhoven’s (30))
Given the argument our dog and the predicate has disappeared, and given
sentence-focus construal of the proposition, the two constituents form a
single focus domain, in which the accent falls on the argument.
Gussenhoven’s analysis faces difficulties in the case of two-accent
sentences of the type discussed earlier. Since both the argument and the
predicate may receive an accent, as in (5.58d) or (5.67’) above, or as in the
examples in (5.77) (from Faber 1987)
(5.77)
a. trespassers will be prosecuted.
b. John’s working
c. john protested, etc.
such sentences will have to contain two focus domains in order to receive
two accents.53 While this is formally easy to accomplish-the first focus
domain contains only an argument (using option Y in part (a) of (5.75)),
the second only a predicate-it begs the question of why the predicate
constitutes a separate focus domain in (5.77) but not in (5.76).
Gussenhoven’s analysis, though formally correct, is notionally inad­
equate in that it leaves unexplained how a single argument constituent
can constitute a focus domain. Even though Gussenhoven does not
318
Pragmatic relations: focus
appeal to the notion of “new information’* to characterize the function of
sentence accents, his analysis is marred by the same notional problems as
those by Chafe, Jackendoff, Selkirk., and many others, who define focus
in terms of new information. By treating the subject in a two-accent
i
>
sentence as a separate focus domain the author implies that a single
referent, such as e.g. the subject trespassers in (5.77), can by itself
constitute “a speaker’s declared contribution to the conversation." This
is, to say the least, confusing. A referent can be said to be a focus, hence
to "contribute to the conversation,” only if it is pragmatically construed
as a predicate, as explained in Section 5.2.3. A single proposition cannot
have two foci. I will return to this point in more detail below (example
(5.85") and discussion). Gussenhoven, who criticizes Schmerling’s
distinction between “news-sentences” and “topic-comment cases" as
circular, in fact confirms implicitly the need for such a distinction. To
state that a focal predicate needs an accent in some sentences but not in
Others is tantamount to recognizing the existence of two separate focus-
stnicture types.
To sum up, it appears that none of the analyses summarized above,
whether formal or pragmatic, or involving a combination of both
approaches, can satisfactorily explain the prosodic structure of the
sentence-focus type. The weakness of these various analyses is the implicit
assumption that the grammatical mechanism whereby a prosodic
structure is paired with a focus meaning must be the same for all
sentences, i.e. that all focus types can be accounted for with a single rule.
In the next section, I will present an analysis in which the sentence-focus
structure is treated as a separate formal category or, as 1 would like to
call it, a prosodic construction. A "prosodic construction" is the
prosodic equivalent of a "grammatical construction" in the sense of
|
]
|
1
(
i
I
!
5
Construction Grammar (see the definition in Section 1.4.3).
(
5.6.2,3 Prosodic inversion
j
Let us consider again the various pairs of sentence-focus and predicate­
focus sentences in (4.10), which I repeat here for convenience as (5.78):
(5.78)
A.
a.
b.
c.
What’s the matter?
My neck hurts.
Mi fa male ¡1 collo
J’ai le cou qui me fait
d. KUBI ga VTAt.
mu.
B. How's your neck doing?
a. My neck hurts.
h fl coho mi fa male
c Mon cou i) me fait mal.
4 Kubi wa ITA1.
Marked and unmarked focus structure
319
As I observed in the discussion of these examples in Section 4.2.2, the
common feature of the sentence-focus constructions in the four languages
is that the NP is formally marked as a non-topic, i.e. as included in the
focus domain.
Concerning the morphosyntactic focus-marking devices in the Italian,
French, and Japanese sentence pairs in (5.78), few linguists, if any, would
argue nowadays that the contrasting structures in each pair are related to
each other by some transformational or other grammatical rule
explaining their similarity in meaning. The members of these various
sentence pairs are independently generated structures, each with their
own semantic properties. The same is true of the information-structural
properties of the various sentences. The different pragmatic interpreta­
tions given to an SV and a VS sequence in Italian, a wa-marked and a gamarked NP in Japanese, or a detachment construction and a cleft
construction in French, cannot be captured with any kind of rule. Instead
the interpretation of each member of a pair is based on the formal
contrast which distinguishes it from the other member. Each member is
interpreted in terms of some grammatical feature which is absent in the
other, one member being typically taken to be the unmarked one.53
The same reasoning concerning the pragmatic interpretation of the
pairs of morphosyntactic allosentences in (5.78) (b), (c), and (d) must be
applied to the pair of prosodic allosentences in (a). There is no single rule
or principle which could account for the interpretation of the two focus­
accent positions in English. The way we understand the difference
between the two members is by way of contrast. Now if we look at the
way in which the contrast between predicate-focus and sentence-focus is
formally coded in English and Italian, we notice an interesting formal
■ parallel. In both languages, an element appears in a position in which it is
not found in the other member of the pair. In Italian, this element is a
syntactic constituent; in English, it is a feature of prosody. Symbolizing
the subject with the letter "S" and the predicate with the letter "P,” and
symbolizing prosodic prominence with an acute accent, the system of
contrasts in the two languages can be summarized as in (5.79):
(5.79)
Predicate
Italian:
English
Focus
SP
SP
Sentence Focus
PS
SP
Both languages resort to the system of permutation traditionally referred
to as ‘'inversion." where the non-mverted sequence is interpreted as
j_U
t'ruj’mutie rclalions: /ocus
unmarked. In both languages, the sentence-focus pattern is a formal^
of the unmarked predicate-focus pattern. The only difference ¡$1
that in Italian the syntactic sequence is inverted and the accent stays pu(,tf
while in English the accentual sequence is inverted and the syntax stay«
put. 1 suggest therefore that we refer to the formal pattern of the EnglisM
sentence-focus construction as prosodic inversion. Both types,¡oM
inversion, syntactic and prosodic, are formally highly distinctly«
indicators of a contrast between a marked and an unmarked memb.^n
of a pair.
The above analysis of the interpretive mechanism which determines
interpretation of pairs of expressions which are perceived as related-^«
based on the intuition which traditional grammarians tried to captur«
with the notion of “inversion," which was applied to various phenomena
involving the reversal of sequences which were perceived to be ”normalijfl
This traditional view of inversion is fundamentally different frotjJ
(though not necessarily incompatible with) the now common viewa
associated with the so-called “unaccusauve hypothesis,” according tpl
which certain VS structures in Italian and other languages are in fact VQ1
structures at a deeper level of analysis. While the traditional vietyJ
emphasizes the idea that an inversion construction marks a deviations
from some structural norm, the unaccusative view emphasizes the idepjj
that an apparent structural deviation can in fact be reduced to.
underlying formal regularity. Even if the latter view is correct, it cannQh]
replace the traditional analysis since it does not capture the perceptualj
nature and communicative function of inversion.
¿.n
It should be noted that while the interpretation of the accent position*]
in the sentence-focus pattern is not predictable by rule, it is nevertheless!
not arbitrary but formally highly motivated. The minimal distinctive
feature of a predicate-focus structure in English (and many othgrs
languages) is the presence of an accent on some element of the predicated
phrase. In order to mark the absence of predicate focus tn a sentence it is^
therefore necessary to alter this minimal distinctive feature by removing’’
the accent from the predicate phrase. Since the minimal constituents in a'V
sentence-focus construction are a subject and a predicate, marking theij
absence of predicate focus requires the presence of an accent on the
subject. In a flexible-accent language like English, the mapping of subject!
position and sentence accent position can be achieved by changing the!
position of the accent, In a llexihle-ss max language like Italian it can t*e!
achieved by changing the position of ¡he subject, ?\nd in a language like 1
reversal
>>1
Marked and unmarked focus structure
I
1
|
1
K
I
■
I
■
I
[
ft
r
v
I
■
|
I
L
I
k
|
I
!
r'
LL
r
(
'
I
t
r
I
I
k
321
French, which has neither syntactic nor prosodic flexibility, it can be
achieved by reorganizing the syntactic structure of the sentence in such a
way that both clause-final accent position and clause-initial subject
position are preserved (see Lambrecht 1988a). In all cases, the
relationship between the structure of the sentence and its pragmatic
construal is not provided by rule but is ©ven as a property of the
grammatical construction as a whole.54
To sum up, in the English sentence-focus pattern the subject is
accented and the predicate unaccented not because the subject is
“newer," more “important," or more “focusworthy” than the predicate, as Bolinger and other linguists have it, but because accenting the
predicate would necessarily result in predicate-focus construal of the
proposition. Since sentence focus is pragmatically defined by the absence
of a topic-comment relation between the subject and the verb, accenting
the verb phrase in a sentence-focus structure would result in intolerable
ambiguity. The fact that ambiguity is tolerated between sentence-focus
and argument-focus structures can be explained as a result of two
factors. The first is that these two articulations have one crucial
pragmatic feature in common which sets them off against the
predicate-focus articulation, i.e. the non-topical relation of the subject
to the proposition (see the feature representation in Section 5.2.5, Table
2). The second factor is the unmarked status of predicates with respect to
activation, allowing unaccented verbs to be interpreted as either focal or
non-focal, depending on the construction (see Section 5.4.2).
The formal identity of sentence focus and argument focus in English
does not entail that subject-accented sentences are vague, in the way in
which we said that predicate-accented sentences are vague between
"narrow" and "broad" focus construal. This formal identity is better
characterized as an instance of homophony, where two distinct meanings
are encoded in one form. Partial or total homophony of sentence-focus
and narrow-focus sentences is a common occurrence across languages. It
can be observed for example in Japanese, where the subject of both types
is marked with ga. Unlike English, however, Japanese does permit
accentuation of the predicate in sentence-focus sentences, since in this
language the formal variable is morphological, not prosodic (a common
example is (4.19d) de.vum ga natte iru yo "The phone’s ringing," where
the predicate nattc is accented). Similarly, in Italian VS structures the
predicate may be prosodically prominent in addition to the subject, given
that in Italian the variable is not prosodic but syntactic (compare e.g.
322
Pragmatic relations: focus
(5.78b) with the possible variant Mi fa male il collo). Since in the
Italian construction absence of prominence on the verb
is not functionally distinctive, fluctuation in the prosodic pattern does
not lead to intolerable ambiguity, as it would in English.
To sum up, in the analysis I propose here, the basic cognitive
principle which determines the interpretation of the prosodic contrast
between subject-accented and predicate-accented sentences is the same
as that which operates in the pragmatic construal of the pairs of
allosentences in Italian, French, and Japanese. The interpretation of the
English sentence-focus pattern is determined neither by formal rules, i.e.
by rules defined on some structural property of the sentence, nor by
¡conicity, e.g. by weighing the relative communicative importance of the
various designata in a sentence. The cognitive mechanism for the
interpretation of the sentence-focus structure is of an entirely different
sort. The meaning of the accent on the subject, rather than being
interpreted solely on the basis of a given structure, is interpreted against
the background of an unused alternative structure in which the accent is
on the predicate. It is a function of the existence of one or more
prosodic allosentences provided by the grammar of the language. This
land of interpretive mechanism requires a “structuralist” rather than
“generativist" approach, i.e. an approach in which the interpretation of
a given structure is viewed as being determined within a system of
formal oppositions rather than by a set of rules.
Japanese and the
5.7
A unified functional account of sentence accentuation
In this chapter, I have repeatedly emphasized two facts about the
grammar of focus. The first is that the focus of a proposition may be
marked not only by prosodic but also by morphosyntactic means. The
second is that not all sentence accents are focus accents; accents may also
mark the activation state of a referent. It is now time to address a general
theoretical issue which arises as a result of this functionally non-unitary
analysis of sentence accentuation. Since focus and activation are different
■information-structure categories, why are they often expressed by the
same, or a similar, phonetic form? Phrased differently, given that the two
categories have the same, or a similar, phonetic manifestation, is this
phonetic similarity the expression of a common functional basis? In the
present section, I will argue that the answer to this question is "yes" and I
A unified functional account of sentence accentuation
323
will propose a unified account of the function of sentence accents in
general.
5.7.1
Activation prosody revisited
To make such an account possible, it will be necessary to reformulate
parts of the analysis presented in Chapter 3 concerning the relationship
between prosody and the activation states of discourse referents. The
need for such a revision was hinted at repeatedly in the course of this
chapter in the form of a recurring exception to the simple correlation
between prosodic prominence and referent activation. This exception is
the occurrence of sentence accents on constituents whose referents are
clearly discourse-active in the utterance context, in particular on
pronouns (see Section 5.5). It is clear that the function of prosodic
prominence on a pronoun cannot be that of referent “activation” proper,
if activation is understood as in Section 3.3.1 as the cognitive process
whereby a previously inactive discourse referent is "lit up” in the
consciousness of an addressee, as Chafe puts it. Since pronouns by their
nature are assumed to have active referents, independently of their
prosodic manifestation, the function of an accent on a pronoun cannot be
to activate the referent in the hearer’s mind.
To understand the function of accents on constituents with alreadyactive referents, in particular pronouns, it will be useful to emphasize
again the theoretical distinction between, on the one hand, the cognitive
properties of the mental representations of discourse referents in given
discourse situations and, on the other hand, the pragmatic relations
which these mental representations enter into with given propositions (see
in particular the discussion in Section 4.4.1). While in the case of accented
pronouns the cognitive state of the referents as discourse-active is
already established at the time they are verbalized, allowing them to be
coded pronominatly, their role as topics or foci in the proposition is
established only via the utterance itself. The accent can therefore strictly
speaking not be a function of the assumed state of the referent in the
interlocutor’s mind. Rather it must be a function of the pragmatic role of
the referent in the given proposition. The function of an accent on
constituents with active referents, whether pronominal or nominal, is
then to establish the role of a given referent as a topic or a focus
argument in a pragmatically structured proposition.
J
(
।
i
I
j
r
j
j
I
i
i
324
Pragmatic relations: focus
Now since there is no reason to assume that an accent on a consLituenjj
with an active referent has a different function from an accent on.aj
constituent with an inactive referent, we can extend the above]
explanation to all constituents carrying activation accents. This leads]
us first to a revised definition of the category of “activation." Tcu
activate a referent is then not simply to conjure up a representation ofiU
in the mind of the addressee but to establish a relation between it and’Jy
proposition. The assumed mental state of a referent is only'Q
precondition, not the reason for accenting the constituent expressin)
it. Referent activation is then not only a psychological but also a properl'
linguistic fact.
.4
This revised account of the nature of activation accents makes^
necessary to reformulate the conditions under which a referen
constituent may occur without an accent. Since accenting a constituej]
entails establishing a relation between its referent and a proposition, n<
accenting a given constituent entails considering this relation to
already established. Instead of saying, as Chafe does, that a constituent
unaccented if its referent is discourse-active, we must postulate the TV(
conditions in (5.80):
DISCOURSE CONDITION ON UNACCENTED CONSTITUENTS: A Teferenti
constituent is unaccented if and only if the speaker assumes: (i) that,«
mental representation of the referent is active in the addressee's mind (a
can be accommodated by the addressee as such); and (ii) that the
addressee expects this referent lo be a topic in the proposition at the
time of utterance.
■1
The formulation in (5.80) requires a modification of my earlier,
characterization of unaccented referential constituents as bein
“marked for the feature active” (see Sections 3.3.1 and 3.4). Strictly
speaking, such constituents are not marked for the feature “active” but
for the feature established topic. This analysis is consistent with ti
definition of unaccented pronominals as the “preferred topic expre;
sions” (see Section 4.4.3). It lends further support to my claim th
“topic” is indeed a formal grammatical category in English.
Given the revised formulation of the condition for non-accentuation
referential constituents we can now characterize the occurrence'^?
sentence accents in general in terms of the notion of default: uni
(5.80) applies, a constituent will carry an accent, whether it is in focus'
in the presupposition. This characterization implies that in all instanc
(5.80)
A unified functional account of sentence accentuation
325
of sentence accentuation the accent marks a non-recoverable pragmatic
relation between a denotatum and a proposition. By "non-recoverable
relation” I mean a relation which an addressee cannot be expected to take
for granted, in one sense or another, at the time a proposition is
verbalized. The general discourse function of all sentence accents can now
be characterized as in (5.81):
(5.81)
the discourse function of sentence accents: A sentence accent
indicates an instruction from the speaker to the hearer to establish a
pragmatic relation between a denotatum and a proposition.
According to (5.81), sentence accentuation is relational by definition.
We can then distinguish two major kinds of accents: focus accents and
topic accents. Both can be characterized as “activation accents,” if
activating a denotatum is understood as establishing a relation between a
denotatum and a proposition. In the case of a focus constituent, the
relation being established is that between the focus and the non-focal
portion of the proposition (which may be null). The accent marks the
designatum of the accented constituent as entering a focus relation with
the proposition, i.e. it marks it as the element whose presence makes a
proposition into an assertion (see Section 5.1.1). In the case of a topic
constituent, the relation being established is that between the topic
referent and the proposition. The accent marks the referent of the
accented constituent as entenng a topic relation with the proposition, i.e.
as being the element which the proposition will be about or which serves
to establish the temporal, spatial, or instrumental framework within
which the proposition holds (see Section 4.1.1). In both cases, the
sentence accent symbolizes an instruction from the speaker to the hearer
to establish a relation between a denotatum and a proposition. Notice
that a topic accent necessarily cooccurs with a focus accent in a sentence
while a focus accent does not require a cooccurring topic accent.
The establishment of a pragmatic relation between a denotatum and a
proposition includes the marking of a shift from one already-activated
designatum to another (such a shift may or may not be perceived as
contrastive). In the case of topic constituents with active referents, in
particular pronouns, prosodic prominence may be seen as an iconic signal
of some sort of discontinuity in the expected anaphoric relations in the
sentence. The prosodic marking of a topic shift is related to the
phenomenon of switch reference.56
¡-I
I'!'!
w
Pragmatic relations: focus
326
5.7.2
The
Topic accents andfocus accents: some examples
establishment of a common functional basis for topic accents and
focus accents allows us to better understand certain cases of information-
structure underspecification in sentences in which the topic-focus
distinction is not made by morphosyntactic means. One such case of
underspccification, which I mentioned before, is found in sentences in
which both the predicate and the subject receive an accent (see e.g.
example (5.67") and discussion). As we saw, such sentences have in
principle two readings, an eventive reading, in which the subject is part of
the focus, and a topic-comment reading, in which the subject is a topic
with a non-active referent. As we saw with example (5.41), such sentences
may in principle also have a third reading, in which the subject is focal
and the predicate presupposed but inactive; I will ignore this possibility
here. Let us look at another (attested) example:
(5.82)
That was
a student of mine. Her
husband
had a heart attack.
The purpose of the utterance in (5.82) was to explain why the speaker had
left a discussion among colleagues in order to talk to the student in
question. In the given situation, the proposition expressed in the second
sentence in (5.82) was not to be construed as conveying information
about the subject referent since this referent was not topical at the time of
utterance. What was topical was the student, expressed in the possessive
determiner her. But the same sentence, in a different utterance context,
could be used to convey information about the husband (IVha! about her
family? - Her husband recently had a heart attack but her kids are doing
fine). In this case, the first of the two accents would be a topic accent,
serving to establish the referent as the topic with respect to which the
proposition is to be interpreted as relevant information. What both
readings have in common is that the accent on the subject indicates the
establishment of a pragmatic relation between the referent of the subject
constituent and the rest of the proposition. It is this relation that is
expressed by the accent, not the topic focus distinction. The latter is left
underspecified by the structure of the sentence/7
The formulation of the appropriateness conditions for the use of
unaccented referential expressions in example (5.80) and the functional
distinction between topic accent and focus accent allow us also to
account in a straightforward fashion for a class of sentences which have
posed problems for previous analyses (see Ladd 1978:78ff). 1 have in
A unified functional account of sentence accentuation
327
mind the bi-accentual pattern referred to by Ladd as "reciprocal.”
Consider example (5.83) (Ladd’s (17)):
(5.83)
A: Hey, come here.
B: No, you come here.
In B’s reply the accent on you is a topic accent, i.e. it serves to establish
the role of the referent as the topic of the proposition. This accent is
required because the referent of the topic expression you is not the same
as that of the understood topic “you” in A's utterance. Since it is
different, it cannot be considered the established topic. The accent on
here, on the other hand, is a focus accent. It is required because its
absence would mark the designatum of the open proposition "x come
here" as pragmatically presupposed. Since the referent of the deictic
‘‘shifter’’ here is different in the two sentences, this presupposition would
not hold. As in previously mentioned cases, it is the implicit contrast with
a possible aliosentence with a different in formation-structure that
determines the presence of the accents in (5.83).
A similar situation obtains in the hackneyed example in (5.84):
(5.84)
John hit bill and then he hit him
In (5.84), the preferred interpretation of he as referring to "Bill” rather
than “John" follows directly from the topic-establishing function of the
accent. Since the accent on he marks this constituent as a not-yetestablished topic, the topic referent is naturally interpreted as different
from that of the preceding clause (i.e. “John"). If he were not accented it
would be interpreted as referring to John, by virtue of (5.80), since
“John” is the already-established topic for the proposition and since
continuation of the same topic is the expected strategy The accent on
him, on the other hand, is a focus accent of the same kind as that on here
in (5.83). If this accent were absent, i.e. if the sentence were ... and then he
hit him, an open proposition "x hit him" would be understood as being
pragmatically presupposed. Since such a presupposition would be
inherited from the preceding clause, and since in that clause the person
being hit is Bill, an unaccented him would naturally be interpreted as
referring to Bill. To preclude this unnatural interpretation, the pronoun
must be accented. Notice that 1 am not claiming that the interpretation of
the two accented pronouns is necessarily the one indicated above. My
accentuation principles only account for the fact that such an
interpretation is the preferred one
328
Pragmatic relations: focus
A related example is the following, taken from an article in the
Washington Post about traveling in France:
(5.85)
The American travel writer Paul Theroux once defined an Englishman
as someone who apologizes if you tread on his foot. To extend the
analogy, a Frenchman could be defined as someone who expects you to
apologize if he treads on your foot.
Unlike in (5.84), no pragmatic inferencing is required in this example to
interpret the referents of the pronouns since the second and third persons
have different forms, but the general information structure of the
sentences is the same in the two examples. The accents on the various
pronouns in (5.85) are motivated by the fact that in each case the referent
of the pronoun is not the one most naturally expected to fill the given
argument role in the propositon, given generally accepted rules of
politeness. In each case, the accent signals that the relation between the
referent and the proposition cannot be taken for granted from preceding
discourse.
The use of topic-shifting accents is not restricted to contexts in which a
given topic is different from that of a preceding sentence or clause. The
discontinuity marked by the accent may be the unexpected selection of an
already established topic referent over some other, more expected,
referent which is available in the universe of discourse. Consider first the
exchange in (5.86):
(5,86)
A: What is Mary’s job going to be?
B: She’s going to do the cooking.
The lack of pitch prominence on the subject pronoun she in the reply
signals the speaker's assumption that the role of the referent as the topic
of the proposition is expected or taken for granted by the addressee. (The
topic referent was mentioned in the preceding sentence.) Now consider
the alternative version in (5.86’):
(5.86’)
A: What is Mary's job going 10 be?
B: she's going to do the cookinc
As in the previous examples, the pitch accent on the subject pronoun in
the reply in (5.86’) signals that the role of the subject referent as the topic
of the sentence is not yet established at the time of utterance. However,
since the referent is in fact an already-established topic (it was mentioned
in the preceding sentence), the accent gres rise to an implicature: the
referent "Mary" is being selected over some potential alternative
A unified functional account of sentence accentuation
329
candidate in the universe of discourse. The implicature in question is
quantity-based (an “R-based implicature," in Hom’s 1984 terms) in that
the accented pronoun says more than is needed to designate the given
referent.56
It is necessary to mention an alternative analysis of the two-accent
sentences in (5.83) through (5.86), which-though appealing—is excluded
by my theory of focus, correctly, I believe. This analysis, which is
proposed by Selkirk (1984:200ff) and by Gussenhoven (1983:380ff),
among others, is based on the assumption that a single clause may
express more than one focus, hence may have more than one focus
accent. We may call this the “multiple-focus analysis.” The occurrence of
multiple foci in a single clause is not allowed for by my focus definition,
since a given assertion cannot have more than one focus and since a given
proposition cannot express more than one assertion. (However, nothing
in the present framework prevents the occurrence of multiple-accent
sentences or clauses, since there is no one-to-one relationship between
“accent” and “focus.") A multiple-focus analysis of the last clause in
(5.85) could be represented as follows;
(5.8 5’)
Sentence:
Presupposition:
Assertion:
Focus:
Focus Domain:
he treads on your foot.
“x treads on y’s foot"
“x - he; y = you”
“he; you"
NP; NP
One possible argument in favor of the analysts in (5.85') is the fact that
the sentence in (5.85’) could be conceived of as an answer to the multipleWH question H ’/io treads on whose foot? Since a WH-word in a question
can be used to determine the (argument) focus portion of an answer
(Section 5.4.4), one could argue that those denotata in (5.85) which
correspond to the two WH-words in the question must be foci.
The main reason why the multiple-focus analysis is to be rejected is
that the Assertion line in (5.85’) is ill-formed. A single proposition cannot
express two assertions, therefore it cannot have two foci (see the criticism
of Gussenhoven's sentence-focus analysis in Section 5.6.2.2 above). My
rejection of the analysis in (5.85’) is supported by two grammatical
observations The first is that a single sentence cannot be defied twice.
For example, a structure like (5.87) is ill-formed:
(5.87)
"Il is sot r foot that it is hf. that treads on.
WTfr m 11
330
Pragmatic relations: focus
I believe that the ungrammaticality of sentences like (5.87) is at least in
part explained pragmatically, as a result of the information-structure
violation which it presents. A single proposition, here the proposition
“He treads on your foot,” cannot be clefted twice because it cannot
contain two pragmatic assertions.59 The second grammatical observañon, which is related to the first one, is that a multiple-WH question
cannot contain a cleft construction.60 This constraint is perhaps more
naturally illustrated in French than in English, since French makes much
freer use of cleft constructions in questions. Consider the following
examples:
(5.88)
a. C'est qui qui a mangé le fromage? "Who ale the cheese?”
it is who who has eaten the cheese
b. Qui a mange quoi? “Who ate what?"
c. *C’est qui qui a mange quoi? “It is who who ate what?"
(5.88c) shows that it is impossible to use a c'esr-cleft construction if the
relative clause contains a question word. However the same sentence is
perfectly natural if the object in the relative clause is a lexical NP, as
(5.88a) shows. Like (5.87), sentence (5.88c) is ungrammatical because it is
impossible to construe a single proposition as expressing two assertions,
hence as containing two foci. One of two or more WH-words in a
question necessarily corresponds to □ topic, not a focus, in the answer.
The grammatical facts in (5.87) and (5.88) confirm that multiple WHquestions cannot be used to argue for the existence of multiple-focus
sentences.
The analysis represented in (5.85') must therefore be rejected. Instead,
the relevant sentence in (5.85) is to be interpreted as a predicate-focus
structure, in which the subject is the topic and the predicate the comment.
The correct information-structure representation of the sentence in (5.85)
is given in (5.85"):
{5.85”) Sentence:
Presupposition:
Assertion:
Focus:
Focus Domain:
he treads on your foot.
“referents "be" and “foot" are topics for comment x"
"x = treads on your (fool)"
"treads on your (foot)"
VP
The parentheses around the designatum “foot" in the assertion and the
focus lines indicate that this denotatum is a topical constituent within the
focus domain, whose presence is required for the semantic and syntactic
well-formedness of the predicate. As in previously discussed examples,
A unified functional account of sentence accentuation
331
the contrastiveness effect conveyed in (5.85) is a consequence of the
unusual state of affairs described, not of the information structure of the
sentence. The subject pronoun he is accented because it is not yet the
established topic of the sentence. The NP your foot is accented because it
is a referential expression located in the focus domain. Within this focus
NP the determiner your is accented by default since the referent “foot”
satisfies the condition in (5.80), being a topic expression with an active,
i.e. expected, referent.
The category “topic accent" allows us to better understand another
accentual pattern which has often been discussed in the literature on
focus in English. This is the pattern found in sentences in which the VP in
a predicate-focus sentence contains two prosodic peaks. Consider the
contrast in (5.89). which is discussed by Selkirk (1984:21 Iff)'-
(5.89)
a. She sent a book, to Mary, (Selkirk's (5.6))
b. She sent a,'the book io mary. (Selkirk’s (5.7))
Selkirk argues - against what she refers to as the “NSR-Focus analysis"
represented by Chomsky, Jackendoff, and others-that the pragmatic
difference between the two sentences in (5.89) requires an approach to
focus structure in which focus domains (such as the VP in this example)
are allowed to contain argument constituents which may or may not
themselves be in focus. Her argument is in agreement with the analysis J
presented in the section on default accentuation above (see examples
(5.19). (5.20) and discussion). Nevertheless I believe that Selkirk’s
account of the contrast in (5.89) is flawed. Recall that for Selkirk,
whose framework includes neither the concept of topic nor that of
activation, any constituent to which a pitch accent is assigned is a focus
constituent by virtue of her “Basic Focus Rule" (see Section 5.6.2.2
above), a focus constituent being defined as one which “contributes ‘new
information’ to the discourse" (1984:206) Selkirk does not allow for
accented constituents which do not express foci.
To account for contrasts such as that m (5.89). Selkirk uses her
“Phrasal Focus Rule" (see example (5.72) above and discussion), whsch
allows for the embedding of focus constituents within larger focus
constituents. In her analysis of ¡5.89a). both a book and Mary are
necessarily in focus, the former being embedded in the larger focus
constituent sent a hook to Marr It is true that the accented direct object
NP tn (5.89a) is most naturally interpreted as being part of the focus
domain. The sentence seems an appropriate reply only to the question
Pragmatic relations: Jocus
"What did she do?" and not “Who did she send a book to?" The latter
question seems appropriate only in the context of (5.89b). In (5.89a), both
accented constituents are then in focus. Within the present framework.,
these accents are predictable on the basis of the principle in (5.80), since
the referents of both constituents have a pragmatically non-recoverable
relation to the proposition.
But the pragmatic construal of (5.89a) in which both accented NPs are
in the focus domain is not the only possible construal of the sentence. The
reason this construal is strongly preferred is that the object NP is
indefinite and therefore most likely to be interpreted as having a "new"
(i.e. unidentifiable) referent. Since unidentifiable referents cannot serve as
topics, the accent on the NP cannot be a topic accent. But topic construal
of an accented object NP is not impossible. To see that the prosodic
structure of (5.89a) is in principle compatible with an interpretation in
which the direct object is in the presupposition let us compare (5.89) with
the exchange in (5.90):
(5.90)
Q: What are you going to do with the dog and the cat while you’re
away?
A: I'll leave the dog with my parents and the cat can stay outside.
j
i
■;
•
.<
•<
i
1
w
'
1
j
,
i
In the reply in (5.90) both the dog and the cat are (contrastive) topic .
expressions with active referents. The only difference is that the topic is a j
direct object in one clause and a subject in the other. The first clause is j
about the relation between the speaker and her dog; the second clause is ,
about the cat only. (In spontaneous speech, the first clause might be more
natural if the direct object were topicalized- The dog f'll leave with my j
/mrewts-but this is not an absolute requirement in English.)
1
In the reply in (5.90), both topic expressions must be accented, even 1
though their referents were mentioned in the preceding sentence: since
there are two referents competing for argument status in the proposition
jk
the relation which the one chosen enters into with the proposition is nonJ
recoverable at the time the sentence is uttered. It is true that by the time '3
the referent “the dog" is mentioned in the first clause, the referent “the 3
cat” has in a sense become a predictable topic for the second clause.
$
However, it cannot be considered an established topic from the point of
*
view of information structure. This is shown by the following
observation. If the NP the cat in the second clause were replaced by .
the anaphoric pronoun it. this pronoun would naturally be interpreted as
jj
referring to the already established topic ot the preceding clause, i.e. the <3
A unified functional account of sentence accentuation
333
dog. For the purpose of the principle in (5.80), the relation of the referent
to the proposition does therefore not count as established at the time of
utterance. In the reading under consideration, the two nouns dog and cat
are not focus expressions but topic expressions. The focus accents in the
sentences are the final ones, i.e. those on parents and outside.
In the analysis I am proposing, Selkirk's recursive focus-embedding
rule quoted in (5.72) becomes unnecessary, even for the alternative
interpretation of (5.89a) in which both book and Mary are in focus. In the
latter case, even though book is in focus, the focus domain, which is the
predicate, is marked by the final accent on Mary alone. The accent on
book is required by virtue of (5.80), since this constituent does not express
an established topic with an active referent. In the analysis of focus
adopted here, a clause can have only one focus domain. It would be
redundant to mark this domain more than once.