Transcript Postposing: Information Structure and Word Order Variation

Postposing:
Information Structure and
Word Order Variation
LSA.323
13 July 2007
Postposing

Preposing: the marked constituent represents
information that is ‘given’ in the sense of being
discourse-old.

Postposing: the marked constituent represents
information that is ‘new’ in some sense, varying by
type of postposing construction.

Two types of postposing constructions:
• Existential there-sentences
• Presentational there-sentences

The felicity of there-sentences is sensitive to the
information status of the postverbal NP (PVNP).
Previous Studies

Most previous studies have focused on theresentences with be as the main verb.

Some have argued that there are two
(structurally distinct?) types of there-sentences
(Levin 1993):
• Existential there, restricted to main-verb be;
• Presentational there, restricted to verbs of
‘appearance’ or ‘emergence’.
Existential there
• I would like to concentrate on Florida more
than anything else to show you what we see
there now. Between 1981 and 1983, there
were nine bombings and seven attempted
bombings and one kidnapping carried out by
terrorist groups or alleged terrorist groups in
the Florida area. All 17 of these incidents were
in Miami, Florida.
[Challenger Commission transcripts, 2/7/86]
Presentational there
• Daniel told me that shortly after Grumman
arrived at Wideview Chalet there arrived also a
man named Sleeman.
[Upfield 1946:246]
Two Types of there Constructions

Regardless of any structural differences
between them, the two types of theresentences are pragmatically distinct with
respect to the information status of the
PVNP.
• That is, whether the information is (taken to
be) new to the discourse or new to the
hearer.
Right-Dislocation

The two types of there-sentences are
crucially distinct from a superficially similar
construction that also involves the
noncanonical occurrence of an NP in
postverbal position, namely rightdislocation (RD).
Right-Dislocation
• Can’t write much, as I’ve been away from here for
a week and have to keep up appearances, but did
Diana mention the desk drama? Dad took your
old desk over to her house to have it sent out,
but he didn’t check to see what was in it, and
forgot that I had been keeping all my vital
documents in there – like my tax returns and
paystubs and bank statements. Luckily Diana
thought “that stuff looked important’’ so she took
it out before giving the desk over to the movers.
Phew! She’s a smart cookie, that Diana.
[C. Steinberg to father in personal letter]
Right-Dislocation

The marked NP in an RD represents
information that is familiar within the
discourse.

The information-structural difference
between RD and there-sentences is due to
the presence of the referential pronoun.
Existential there

Existential there-sentences are sensitive to
hearer-familiarity as opposed to discoursefamiliarity.

The PVNP in an existential there-sentence is
required to represent information that the
speaker believes is not already familiar to the
hearer.
Existential there

“There’s a warm relationship, a great respect
and trust” between [United Air Lines]’s
chairman, Stephen M. Wolf, and Sir Colin
Marshall, British Air’s chief executive officer,
according to a person familiar with both sides.
[Wall Street Journal, 8/23/89]

The referent of the PVNP (a warm
relationship…) is being presented to the reader
as new information.
Existential there
• What can happen is a hangup such as Rocky Smith
ran into, as the independent hauler was traversing
Chicago with a load of machinery that just had to
get to a factory by morning. “There was this truck
in front of me carrying giant steel coils, and
potholes all over the place,” he remembers. “This
guy swerves all of a sudden to avoid a big hole.” He
hit it anyway. [Wall Street Journal, 8/30/89]

Similarly, the truck mentioned in this PVNP is new to
the hearer; for this reason, despite the fact that the PVNP
is morphologically definite, it is nonetheless felicitous in
the existential.
Existential there

If the PVNP represents hearer-old information,
on the other hand, the use of existential there is
infelicitous:
• I have some interesting news for you. #At today’s
press conference there was Hillary Clinton.
• President Bush appeared at the podium accompanied
by three senators and Tony Blair. #Behind him there
was the Vice President.

These PVNPs represent entities that are new to
the discourse yet presumably familiar to the
hearer.
Constraints on the PVNP: Syntactic
or Pragmatic?
So, is it the hearer-old information status of the PVNP
that’s responsible for the infelicity?
 Or is it, as others have argued, the morpho-syntactic
definiteness of the PVNP?

A: I’m home. Anything interesting happen today?
B: Not really. There’s the funniest-looking dog running loose
somewhere in the neighborhood.

Here a definite PVNP is being used to refer to an
entity that is nonetheless hearer-new.

That is, the funniest-looking dog is not used to refer to a
particular dog with which the hearer is expected to
be familiar.
The so-called ‘Definiteness Effect’

Our analysis of definiteness and there-sentences is
based on a corpus of several hundred tokens of
existential there-sentences with definite PVNPs.

We found that, indeed, the entity represented by
the PVNP in an existential there-sentence always
constitutes hearer-new information.

However, in certain circumstances this entity may
nonetheless be realized by a definite, due to a
mismatch between hearer-new status and the
constraint on felicitous use of the definite.
The so-called ‘Definiteness Effect’

Our claim: it is not definiteness per se that is
responsible for the infelicity of sentences with
definite PVNPs, but rather the fact that definite
PVNPs typically, but not necessarily, represent
hearer-old information.

It is this tendency that has led to the illusion that
definite PVNPs are themselves disallowed in
existentials.
Summary


Both hearer-old/discourse-new PVNPs and
hearer-old/discourse-old PVNPs are
infelicitous in existential there-sentences.
Hearer-Old
Hearer-New
Discourse-Old
Infelicitous
Does not occur
Discourse-New
Infelicitous
Felicitous
Thus, it is newness with respect to the
hearer’s knowledge that is required for the
felicitous use of existential there-sentences.
Presentational there-sentences

The central difference between existential there and
presentational there is the verb:
• Presentational there-sentences contain a main verb
other than be.

The two sentence-types are also subject to distinct
pragmatic constraints on the information status of the
PVNP.

Presentational there differs from existential there in
being sensitive to the discourse-status, rather than
the hearer-status, of the PVNP.
• Specifically, the felicitous use of a presentational theresentence requires that its PVNP represent information
that is new to the discourse.
Presentational there-sentences
In the vast majority of cases, the PVNP in a
presentational there-sentence is both hearer-new
and discourse-new:
a. After they had travelled on for weeks and weeks past
more bays and headlands and rivers and villages than
Shasta could remember, there came a moonlit night
when they started their journey at evening, having slept
during the day. They had left the downs behind them
and were crossing a wide plain with a forest about half
a mile away on their left. [Lewis 1954:23]
Presentational there-sentences
b.
The volume of engine sound became louder and louder.
Motorcycle police, a whole battalion (or whatever unit they come
in) neared – took over the road – there must have been twenty of
them. Behind them there appeared police vans and police buses,
one, two, four, six, eight of each.And then, at last, behind these, the
American military vehicles began to appear. [Wakefield 1991:94]
c.
Why would Honda locate in Alliston? Why did Toyota pick
Cambridge? Why did GM-Suzuki pick Ingersoll? The answer is,
first, that the Canadian labour force is well educated and capable of
operating the sophisticated equipment of modern industry.
Second, in the Province of Ontario and in the communities of
Alliston, in Waterloo Region and Oxford County, there exists a
tremendous work ethic. We recognize it. The workers recognize it.
More important, industry recognizes it, too.
[token provided by D.Yarowsky, AT&T Bell Laboratories]
Presentational there-sentences

The main verbs in these examples – came, appeared, and
exists – are prototypical verbs of appearance and
emergence (Levin 1993), and thus are also prototypical
in presentational there-sentences.

Moreover, in each case the PVNP represents
information that is new to the discourse.

However, in each of these examples the entity
represented by the PVNP is new to the hearer as well
as to the discourse – i.e., it is hearer-new as well as
discourse-new.
Presentational there-sentences
So, we need to look at cases that distinguish between
the two, specifically those tokens involving information
that is new to the discourse (discourse-new) yet
presumably known to the hearer (hearer-old):
a. There only lacked the moon; but a growing pallor in the
sky suggested the moon might soon be coming.
[adapted from Erdmann 1976:138]
b. Famous men came --- engineers, scientists, industrialists;
and eventually, in their turn, there came Jimmy the
Screwsman and Napoleon Bonaparte.
[Upfield 1950:2]
Presentational there-sentences

So, hearer-old PVNPs are felicitous in presentational theresentences. What about discourse-old PVNPs?

Discourse-old PVNPs are necessarily hearer-old. So, we
would predict infelicity if the PVNP in a presentational
there-sentence represents discourse-old information, and
that is exactly what we find:
For a brief moment we could see among the trees a man and a
woman picking flowers. #Suddenly there ran out of the woods
the man we had seen.
[cf. The man we had seen suddenly ran out of the woods.]
Right-Dislocation

Like existential and presentational there-sentences, rightdislocation (RD) involves the noncanonical placement of
an argument of the verb in postverbal position.

However, in contrast to both existential and
presentational there-sentences, RD does not require the
PVNP to represent new information:
• Below the waterfall (and this was the most astonishing sight
of all), a whole mass of enormous glass pipes were dangling
down into the river from somewhere high up in the ceiling!
They really were ENORMOUS, those pipes. There must
have been a dozen of them at least, and they were sucking
up the brownish muddy water from the river and carrying it
away to goodness knows where.
Right-Dislocation

The sentence-final ‘dislocated’ constituent represents
information that has been evoked, either explicitly or
implicitly, in the prior discourse.

For example, those pipes represent entities that have
been explicitly evoked in the immediately prior
discourse.

Since the relevant information is both hearer-old and
discourse-old, right-dislocation cannot be viewed as
marking information that is new, either to the discourse
or to the hearer, and thus differs crucially from
existential and presentation there-sentences on IS
grounds.
Right-Dislocation

An examination of naturally occurring data indicates that
right-dislocation not only permits, but in fact requires, the
dislocated NP to represent information that is given in some
sense.

RD disallows new information in dislocated position:
• Below the waterfall (and this was the most astonishing sight
of all), a whole mass of enormous glass pipes were dangling
down into the river from somewhere high up in the ceiling!
#They really were ENORMOUS, some of the boulders in
the river. Nonetheless, they were sucked up into the pipes
along with the brownish muddy water.
vs.
• [...] Some of the boulders in the river really were
enormous. Nonetheless, they were sucked up into the
pipes along with the brownish muddy water.
Right-Dislocation

It is not sufficient for felicitous RD that the dislocated
NP represent hearer-old information.

Information that is hearer-old yet discourse-new is
disallowed in right-dislocated position:
• I hear that the Art Institute has a new exhibit on 19th
Century post-Impressionism. #He was a genius, that
Van Gogh.
[cf. That Van Gogh was a genius.]
• A: What would you like to do for lunch?
B: I’m not sure. #It’s really awful, Pizza Hut.
Let’s not go there.
[cf. Pizza Hut is really awful.]
Right-Dislocation kill

When the dislocated constituent represent discourseold information, however, RD becomes felicitous:
• I just saw the newly discovered Van Gogh painting at the
Art Institute; apparently he painted it when he was only
11 years old. He was a genius, that Van Gogh.

Here, the dislocated constituents represent
information that has been explicitly evoked in the
discourse, and the RD is felicitous.

Thus, what is required for felicitous RD is not simply
that the dislocated constituent represent hearer-old
information, but that it represent information that is
discourse-old.
A Comparison of Right-Dislocation
and Postposing

Existential there-sentences, presentational
there-sentences, and RD are subject to distinct
constraints on the information status of their
respective PVNPs.

RD contains a referential pronoun, while theresentences contain non-referential there.
A Comparison of Right-Dislocation
and Postposing

Corresponding to this morpho-syntactic difference
is a pragmatic difference:
• In both types of there-sentences, the
postposed subject is constrained to represent
unfamiliar information.
• However, in RD, the dislocated constituent is
constrained to represent familiar information.
A Comparison of Right-Dislocation
and Postposing

Moreover, it is precisely the presence of this pronoun
that motivates the functional distinction between theresentences and RD.

In RD, the pronoun is required to represent a discourseold entity (as do referential pronouns in general).

Since it is coreferential with the dislocated NP, that NP
must also represent discourse-old information.

Thus, it is not accidental that RD does not serve to keep
unfamiliar information out of subject position; the
presence of the pronoun actually precludes such a
function.