Seminar on Information Structure and
Word Order Variation
Preposing
Gregory Ward
Northwestern University
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa
18 Xuño 2008
Preposing
• Preposing is a class of constructions
sharing a common syntactic structure:
• The occurrence of a lexically-governed
postverbal phrasal constituent occurring in
preverbal position.
• Under this definition, subcategorized NPs,
APs, VPs, and PPs are included; various
adverbials and adjuncts are not.
NP (most common)
• Colonel Bykov had delivered to Chambers in
Washington six Bokhara rugs which he directed
Chambers to present as gifts from him and the Soviet
Government to the members of the ring who had
been most co-operative. One of these rugs
Chambers delivered Ø to Harry Dexter White.
Another he gave Ø to Hiss – but not as a routine
“payment on rent.” In the classic tradition of
espionage operations, Hiss had parked his car on a
street corner, and Chambers had driven to a point
nearby.
[Nixon, R. Six Crisis. 1962:58]
PP
• To back up Wattenberg’s contention that American
women are getting what they wanted – with or
without the ERA, there are statistics offered, statistics
about how many married women are now in the labor
force, statistics about the number of women in “good’’
jobs. “With better jobs and more education,” he
writes, “women are also moving forward on the dollar
front.” For that last bold assertion there are no
statistics Ø. That’s because they wouldn't back up the
argument, not even a little.
[Philadelphia Inquirer]
VP
• And the end of the term I took my first schools; it was
necessary to pass, if I was to stay at Oxford, and
pass I did Ø, after a week in which I forbade
Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with
iced black coffee and charcoal biscuits, cramming
myself with the neglected texts. I remember no
syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient, lore
which I acquired that term will be with me in one
shape or another to my last hour.
[Waugh E. Brideshead Revisited. 1945:45]
AP (least common)
• The plan is to purchase the quaint fishing village of
Ferness and replace it with a giant new refinery. The
villagers – who’ve been farming, fishing, raising
families and pub crawling in splendid isolation for
generations – offer amazingly little resistance.
Humble they may be Ø. But daft they ain’t Ø. If the
Americans are all that eager to turn a few industrious
Scotsmen into instant millionaires, they should not be
denied the privilege.
[Philadelphia Inquirer movie review]
Preposing: General Constraints
• All felicitous preposings require:
• a salient set relation between the trigger in
the prior context and the link of the
proposing;
• a salient open proposition whose
instantiation represents the focus of the
utterance.
• Together, these constitute necessary and
sufficient conditions for felicitous
preposing. Other factors affect the
observed distribution.
Subcategorized PPs vs. Adjunct
PPs
• Subcategorized PP:
• [Discourse-initially]
#In a basket, I put your clothes Ø.
[cf. I put your clothes in a basket.]
• Adjunct PP:
• In New York, there’s always something to
do.
[cf. There’s always something to do in NY.]
Preposing and Information
Structure: The Link
• The discourse entity corresponding to the
preposed constituent (or a subconstituent
within the preposed constituent) must be
anaphorically linked to the trigger of the
preceding discourse via a salient set relation;
this set is called the anchoring set.
• Although there need be no link in a canonicalword-order (CWO) utterance, preposing
necessarily marks the preverbal constituent
as a link to the prior discourse.
Preposing and Information
Structure: The Anchoring Set
• The notion of anchoring set subsumes both
explicitly evoked and inferentially related links.
• Customer: Can I get a bagel?
Server: No, sorry. We’re out of bagels.
A bran muffin I can give you Ø.
[service encounter, Philadelphia diner]
• Here, the link (a bran muffin) and the trigger
(bagels) stand in a salient set relation as
alternate members of the inferred anchoring
set {breakfast baked goods}.
Preposing and Information
Structure: The Anchoring Set
• The link itself can also be explicitly evoked in the prior
discourse:
A: Can I get a bagel?
B: Sorry — all out.
A: How about a bran muffin?
B: A bran muffin I can give you Ø.
• Here, the link (a bran muffin) is coreferential with one
of the triggers explicitly mentioned by A.
Preposing and Information
Structure: The Anchoring Set
• Facts about the world thus come in twice on the
road from meaning to truth: once to determine the
interpretation, given the meaning, and then again to
determine the truth value, given the interpretation.
This insight we owe Ø to David Kaplan’s important
work on indexicals and demonstratives, and we
believe it is absolutely crucial to semantics.
[Barwise & Perry 1983:11]
• Here, the link exhausts the anchoring set,
consisting of a singleton member; note the absence
of any sense of contrast here.
Preposing and Information
Structure: The Anchoring Set
• Another example of a link to an anchoring set
with a single member is Proposition Affirmation:
• The other half of the double bill is “Sister Mary
Ignatius”. Whereas Lohrmann has to overcome a
poor script to be bright, Durang has handed
Ginny Brown Graham, via Sister Mary Ignatius, a
fantastic script, and all she has to do is shine.
And shine she does Ø. [Au Courant, 4/1/85]
• Here, the link shine is explicitly mentioned in the
preceding sentence.
• The anchoring set consists of a singleton
member, evoked by the trigger and referenced in
the link.
Preposing and Information
Structure: The Form of the Link
• However, the link of Proposition Affirmation is sensitive
to the linguistic form of the trigger:
• The other half of the double bill is “Sister Mary Ignatius”.
Whereas Lohrmann has to overcome a poor script to be bright,
Durang has handed Ginny Brown Graham, via Sister Mary
Ignatius, a fantastic script, and all she has to do is glow. #And
shine she does.
• Here, although shine and glow could be seen as standing in a
relation of semantic identity, infelicity results because the
salient relation between the link and trigger is not one of
morphological identity.
• Thus, the relation between the link and trigger in proposition
affirmation is more constrained than in other types of
preposing.
Preposing and Information
Structure: The OP
• The second constraint on preposings is that they require a
salient or inferable open proposition (OP) in the discourse.
• An OP is a sentence that contains one or more variables;
in a felicitous preposing, this OP represents what is
assumed by the speaker to be salient or inferrable at the
time of the utterance.
• The variable in the OP is instantiated with the focus, which
constitutes the ‘new’ information of the utterance, and is
constrained to be a member of a contextually licensed set.
Prosodically, the focus is realized with a nuclear pitch
accent.
Preposing and Information
Structure: Two Major Types
• Our examination of NOD reveals that preposings can be classified
into two major types based on their intonation and information
structure (Prince 1981, Ward 1988):
• Focus Preposing
• Topicalization
• The preposed constituent of focus preposing contains the focus of
the utterance, and bears nuclear accent; the rest of the clause is
typically deaccented.
• Topicalization, on the other hand, involves a preposed constituent
other than the focus and bears multiple pitch accents: at least
one on the preposed constituent and at least one on the (nonpreposed) focus.
• Nonetheless, both types of preposing require a salient or inferable
OP at the time of utterance for felicity.
Focus Preposing
• I made a lot of sweetbreads. A couple of pounds I think I made
for her.
[C. Ward in conversation]
[sweetbreads = mollejas/lechecillas]
• A: Where can I get the reading packet?
B: In Steinberg. [Gives directions] Six dollars it costs.
[two students in conversation]
FP marks the utterance as a focus-presupposition
construction,with the preposed constituent, six dollars,
containing the nuclear accent, representing the focus of the
utterance.
Focus Preposing
• To construct the relevant OP, the preposed constituent
containing the focus is first returned to its canonical
argument position. The focus is then replaced with a
variable, which is restricted to be a member of some
contextually licensed set. The focus instantiates the
variable in the OP and represents a member of that set.
• OP = It costs X, where X is a member of the set {prices}.
• It costs some amount of money.
• Focus = six dollars
Focus Preposing
• Here, six dollars serves as the link to the preceding
discourse
• Its referent is a member of the set {prices}, which is part of
the inferrable OP. In this example, the OP can be inferred
on the basis of the prior context; from mention of a reading
packet, one is licensed to infer that the packet costs some
amount of money.
• While the anchoring set {prices} is discourse-old, the
preposed constituent itself represents information that has
not itself been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse.
Topicalization
• The focus in a topicalization, on the other hand, is not
contained in the preposed constituent but occurs
elsewhere in the utterance.
• Intonationally, preposings of this type contain multiple
(2+) accented syllables:
• one occurs within the constituent that contains the focus
• one occurs within the preposed constituent, which typically
occurs in a separate intonational phrase
• G: Do you watch football?
E: Yeah. Baseball I like a lot better.
[G. McKenna to E. Perkins in conversation]
Topicalization
• Here, the preposed constituent is not the focus; better is.
The preposed constituent baseball serves as the link to
the inferred set {sports}.
• This anchoring set can be inferred on the basis of the link
(baseball) and the trigger (football), explicitly evoked by
G in the prior utterance.
• Note that baseball is accented not because it is the focus but
because it occurs in a separate intonational phrase in
sentence-initial position.
• While all foci are accented, not all accented items are foci;
typically a single utterance contains a variety of pitch accents,
each making a distinct contribution to utterance interpretation.
Topicalization
• The OP of Topicalization is formed in much the
same way as in the case of focus preposing,
except that the anchoring set member
represented by the preposed constituent is
replaced in the OP by the anchoring set itself.
• OP = I like-to-X-degree {sports}, where X is a
member of the set {degrees}.
• I like sports to some degree.
• Focus = better
Topicalization
• Here, the OP includes the variable corresponding
to the focus, but note that the link baseball has
been replaced by its anchoring set {sports}, i.e.
the set that includes both the trigger and the link.
• The OP that is salient here is not that the speaker
likes baseball per se, but rather that he likes
sports to some degree. This OP is salient given
the prior context in which E is asked if he
watches football, from which it can be inferred
that G is asking more generally about E’s interest
in sports.
Evidence for the Notion ‘Link’
• Someone broke into the garage last night. #My
father I need to talk to.
• I’m really tired tonight. #Maybe a movie I’ll
rent.
• Here, there is no plausible set relation between
the preposed constituent and anything evoked in
the prior context.
• Indeed, an examination of 747 tokens reveals that
in all cases there is a salient set relation between
the link of the preposed constituent and something
in the prior discourse.
Left-Dislocation
• What distinguishes left-dislocation (LD) from
preposing is the presence of a referential
pronoun in the initial constituent’s canonical
position.
• This guy I met on the train, I talked to him
for over an hour.
• Here, the direct object pronoun him is
coreferential with the ‘dislocated’ NP this guy I
met on the train.
Left-Dislocation
• Moreover, LD is not only syntactically distinct from
preposing, but is functionally distinct as well.
• The preposed constituent of preposing consistently
represents information standing in a contextually licensed
set relationship with information evoked in or inferrable
from the prior context.
Left-Dislocation
• No such requirement holds for LD. Thus, the
formal distinction between the two types of
construction corresponds to a functional
distinction, while the formal similarity within the
class of preposing constructions corresponds
to a functional similarity.
Left-Dislocation
• Prince (1997) argues that there are in fact three types
of LD, distinguishable on functional grounds. Of
relevance here is the type of LD that Prince calls
‘simplifying LDs’:
• A ‘simplifying’ [LD] serves to simplify the discourse
processing of discourse-new entities by removing
them from a syntactic position disfavored for
discourse-new entities and creating a separate
processing unit for them. Once that unit is processed
and they have become discourse-old, they may
comfortably occur in their positions within the clause
as pronouns (1997:124).
Left-Dislocation
• That is, LDs of this type are reserved for
entities that are new to the discourse and that
are being introduced in a dispreferred (i.e.
subject) position.
• This stands in stark contrast to true preposing
constructions, in which the preposed
constituent must represent a discourse-old
link to the prior discourse.
Summary
• Thus far, we have examined a range of
sentence-types in which a subcategorized
phrasal constituent appears in a marked
preverbal position.
• Our corpus-based study has revealed that
such preposing, like other marked syntactic
constructions, serves an informationstructuring function.
Summary
• First, preposing effects the instantiation of a
salient or inferable open proposition; second,
the preposed constituent represents a
discourse-old link that serves to situate the
information presented in the current utterance
with respect to the prior context.
• Such links are related to previously evoked
information via a salient set relationship.
Summary
• In addition, we have identified and analyzed two
major types of preposing in English:
• Focus preposing
• Topicalization
• These are distinguishable on the basis of whether or
not the focused constituent appears in preposed
position.
• In the case of focus preposing, the preposed
focus constitutes the link to the prior discourse,
while in the case of topicalization the focus
remains in canonical position, with the (nonfocused) preposed constituent providing the link.
Summary
• On the other hand, these properties do not hold for
left-dislocation, in which a pronoun that is
coreferential with the marked constituent appears in
that constituent’s canonical position.
• This formal difference was shown to correspond to a
functional difference, while the formal similarity found
within the class of preposing constructions was
shown to correspond to a functional similarity.