Fundamental Sentential Level Issues of English Information Structure.pdf (original) (raw)
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Fundamental Issues of English Information Structure at Discourse Level.pdf
VNU Journal of Foreign Studies, 2013
This paper discusses fundamental issues of English information structure at discourse level. Issues related to information structure at discourse level are numerous and are viewed from various perspectives. The selection of the issues to be explored in this paper originates from what are considered as beneficial for L2 learners in the cognitive meta-linguistic approach to the teaching of reading and writing skills to L2 learners. The issues selected include: the basic attributes of information at discourse level, linking relations, the clause relational approach to text analysis, and information structure from genre analysis perspective. The three basic attributes of information structure are evidentiality, mutuality, and textuality. The issues discussed within the clause relational approach includes the concept of clause relations, clause relation cohesive devices, basic clause relations, clause relations and their signals as important factors of textual coherence, and basic textual patterns. Genre analysis encompasses various text types. In the scope of this paper, only information structure of academic texts is investigated. Two issues related to the information structure of academic texts from genre analysis perspective dealt with in this paper are the rhetorical structures and features of academic texts.
On the discourse impact of subordinate clauses
2006
The present article investigates the discourse status of subordinate sentences, i.e., it considers the context change potential of dependent clauses. It is argued that (subordinate) clauses are associated with certain grammatical phenomena that mark them as anaphoric (i.e., familiar) or as focal, introducing new information into the discourse. As with noun phrases, these phenomena are: (i) morphological marking on the head (choice of verbal mood), (ii) phonological stress pattern, and most importantly syntactic position (iii), in the sense that discourse-old and discourse-new clauses are associated with different positions, an idea that comes close to a Mapping Hypothesis, as originally proposed for noun phrases by Diesing (1992). The claim is that dependent indicative verb second clauses in German undergo extraposition which is not semantically vacuous. This movement step places them into a quasi-paratactic position from which the relevant clauses act as assertions. Thus in contrast to complementizercontaining verb-final, i.e., canonical, subordinate clauses, these dependent verb second clauses have illocutionary force and mark new information. It is furthermore argued that related phenomena can be observed in other languages: for example, the Romance languages signalize the new information-givenness distinction and the presence vs. absence of illocutionary force (partly) by the use of verbal mood-a factor which plays an important role in German(ic) as well.
Nomi Erteschik-Shir. 2007. Information structure: The syntax–discourse interface
Functions of Language, 2009
This book is of interest to those studying, researching, and teaching in the variously labelled field of 'information structure' (IS) (Halliday 1967), 'information packaging' (Chafe 1976), or 'information flow' (Chafe 1979), which explores the strategies whereby information is expressed to meet the communicative demands of a particular situation, a central topic in linguistics, computer science, cognitive science, information science and philosophy. In spite of its importance in the 'information age' , there is no consensus in modern linguistics on the place of information structure in the grammar, nor on what a theory of IS should look like. Two factors contribute to this controversy. One is the fact that, for better or worse, IS is rife with theoretical frameworks, each with its own focus, with the effect that a considerable range of definitions, identificational criteria and terminology for IS categories have mushroomed in a myriad of studies. The second reason is the wide coverage of the field. For IS not only relates to virtually all the established levels of linguistic description, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and semantico-pragmatic, but also, in order to achieve explanatory adequacy, IS accounts integrate cross-disciplinary insights from rhetoric, sociology, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, computing science, literary studies, and cultural or ethnographic studies. And, still further, there is an enormous variation in the particular IS devices attested by cross-linguistic investigations. A theory on IS is therefore bound to be multifaceted and complex (see Gómez-González 2001) and any survey of the field cannot but be seen as a rather bold undertaking. Nomi Erteschik-Shir has had the courage to tackle this tricky task in a book published in a series of Oxford 'surveys' conceived as accessible, critical, balanced and up-to-date overviews of major topics in linguistics. Accordingly, the book is meant 'to introduce the reader to IS methodology with an emphasis on both descriptive and theoretical rigor' (p. 6), with the hope that it 'will help further a more constructive dialogue leading to a better understanding of the division of labor between syntax and IS' (p. 79). Nevertheless, potential readers should be warned that the volume seems to be closer to a monograph on Erteschik-Shir's (1997, 2006) and Erteschik-Shir and
Discourse Structure and Sentential Information Structure. An Initial Proposal
Journal of Logic, Language and …, 2003
Abstract. I this article we argue that discourse structure constrains the set of possible constituents in a discourse that can provide the relevant context for structuring information in a target sentence, while information structure critically constrains discourse structure ambiguity. ...
Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics
Semantics and Pragmatics, 2012
A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein -modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions -constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context.
The goal of this paper is to compare appositive relative clauses (henceforth ARCs) to other structures that convey the same information, in order to determine the morphosyntactic, semantic and above all pragmatic factors conditioning the choice of structure. Alternatives to ARCs examined here include sentential parentheticals, juxtaposed/coordinated independent clauses, adverbials or noun modifiers which, along with ARCs, can be considered competing allostructures representing the different possible syntactic realizations of the same informational, logico-semantic content. Setting register-related phenomena aside so that they do not interfere with the results, the paper investigates several parameters like the hierarchization of the informational contents (and discourse coherence as a whole), the (non) existence of an open proposition (as defined in Prince 1986), the influence of a familiarity constraint (‘fame effect’) among others as constraints accounting for the choice of structure. The identified constraints will be paralleled with the discourse functions of ARCs defined in previous research, justifying the suggested typology.
Pragmatic versus Syntactic Identification of Thematic information in Discourse
Scientific Bulletin of the Politehnica University of …, 2006
The identification of thematic information in a text helps to establish the links between Themes and Rhemes and implicitly to account for the coherence and cohesion of the text. Existing syntactic theories used for the identification of thematic information fail when it comes to establishing the length of Themes at sentence level and to justifying the logical links between Themes and Rhemes. The paper hypothesizes that a model based on pragmatic components can lead to a more accurate identification of thematic information in a text and tests this hypothesis in a comparative analysis of a text using both the syntactic and the pragmatic approaches.
On the Blurred Boundaries Between Superordinate and Subordinate Clauses in English
Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies, 2018
The paper addresses superordinate and subordinate clauses in English. It focuses on how blurred the distinction between the two categories becomes when syntactic criteria are paired with discourse ones-the structures that are syntactically superordinate may turn out to be "discourse subordinate", and vice versa. More generally, the paper aims to show that the various aspects of linguistic analysis, in this case primarily the syntactic and discourse ones, are tightly intertwined, and that viewing syntactic structures in terms of their discourse functions may help us perceive the gradient and fuzzy nature of the boundaries of linguistic categories, and point to their gradient contribution to overall discourse progress.