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Information Structure and Referential Givenness/Newness: How Much Belongs in the Grammar?

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Information Structure and Referential Givenness/Newness: How Much Belongs in the Grammar? Information Structure and Referential Givenness/Newness: How Much Belongs in the Grammar? Jeanette Gundel University of Minnesota Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Michigan State University Stefan Muller¨ (Editor) 2003 CSLI Publications pages 122–142 http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/HPSG/2003 Gundel, Jeanette. 2003. Information Structure and Referential Givenness/Newness: How Much Belongs in the Grammar? In Muller,¨ Stefan (Ed.), Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Michi- gan State University, 122–142. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Abstract This paper is concerned with such concepts as `topic`, `focus` and `cognitive status of discourse referents’, which have been included under the label ‘information structure’, as they relate in some sense to the distribution of given and new information. It addresses the question of which information structural properties are best accounted for by grammatical constraints and which can be attributed to non-linguistic constraints on the way information is processed and communicated. Two logically independent senses of given-new information are distinguished, one referential and the other relational. I argue that some phenomena pertaining to each of these senses must be accounted for in the grammar, while others are pragmatic effects that do not have to be represented in the grammar, since they result from interaction of the language system with general pragmatic principles that constrain inferential processes involved in language production and understanding. 1. Introduction I will be concerned in this paper with such concepts as `topic`, `focus` and `cognitive status of discourse referents’, which have been included under the label ‘information structure’ (alternatively ‘information status’), as they relate in some sense to the distribution of given and new information. As an invited speaker at this conference, I was asked to address the question: What do we know about information structure that would bear on what a grammatical theory like HPSG needs to take into account? With this in mind, I will focus on the question of which aspects of information structural concepts and their properties are grammatically constrained and which are constrained by general cognitive and communicative principles that are independent of grammar. These are broad questions, and I obviously cannot hope to answer them fully and completely here. Instead, I will outline the kind of framework that I think needs to serve as the background for asking these questions and will make some tentative proposals for selected informational structural facts and properties within that framework. The approach to pragmatics I will assume here is that of Relevance Theory (henceforth RT). Within this framework, pragmatics is construed as an account of the inferential processes involved in understanding utterances, processes which take as their input the result of linguistic decoding and ‘enrich’ that input by way of pragmatic inferences for those aspects of a speaker’s intended meaning that are left underspecified by linguistic form, e.g. reference and ambiguity resolution and conversational implicature. Language generation and interpretation is thus seen as 123 constrained by the interaction of two independent systems, one grammatical the other pragmatic, where constraints imposed by the latter follow from the Principle of Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1996). The fundamental goal of relevance theoretic pragmatics is to explain how the hearer is able to access the appropriate cognitive context for interpreting an utterance, i.e. which of the grammatically constrained, but still grossly underdetermined set of assumptions available to her is the one she is intended to use in processing the utterance. The distinction within HPSG between CONTENT and CONTEXT (Pollard and Sag 1994), where the value of the latter is the locus of pragmatic information, might at first seem anomalous on such an approach since, within RT, all linguistic input is viewed as constraining the context in which an utterance will be relevant. But the anomaly is only apparent, as it results from equivocation in the use of the terms ‘context’ and ‘pragmatics’, specifically whether these are construed as fully cognitive or not. For the purpose of this paper, I will take the formal construct CONTEXT within HPSG in a narrow sense to include those aspects of linguistic form represented by attributes whose values make direct reference to the utterance act and its participants. I take no position here on the question of whether the CONTEXT-CONTENT distinction is still necessary or even feasible under the relevance theoretic view of pragmatics outlined above, but this should have no bearing on the arguments presented. The main question will be what needs to be represented in the grammar and what doesn’t, independent of where and how it is represented. 2. What is Information Structure? Referential vs. Relational Givenness. ‘Information structure’ is a cover label for a number of distinct , though partly overlapping, concepts that have often been conflated in the literature. While many researchers have recognized that there are distinct notions involved here (cf. Birner and Ward 1998, Chafe 1976, Gundel 1988, Halliday 1967, Lambrecht 1994, Prince 1992, inter alia), there is as yet no general agreement on what the linguistically relevant constructs are, how many of them there are, and how and if they are related (see Gundel 1999a and Gundel and Fretheim 2003.) The situation is confounded by the fact that the different concepts all relate in one way or another to the distinction between given and new information, but in different ways; and even those who recognize the distinction between different informational structural concepts, treat the given-new distinction (at least implicitly) as if it were a unitary phenomenon. As Birner and Ward note (1998, p. 9) this work shares “a general approach based on the degree to which information is assumed to be available to the hearer prior to its evocation.” Their own work, following Prince (1992), recognizes a three-way distinction between what is old/new to the hearer, what is old/new to the discourse, and an 124 ‘open proposition that is shared knowledge’ and ‘represents what is assumed by the speaker to be salient (or inferable) in the discourse’ (p. 12). But these three senses of givenness-newness are not logically independent. An ‘open proposition that is shared knowledge’ as well as anything that is Discourse Old is, by definition, also Hearer Old; these concepts differ only in the source of the givenness/newness (the discourse or general knowledge) and the nature of the object that has the givenness/newness property (a discourse entity or an open proposition). Since it is the link to given and new information that has been assumed to tie the various information structural concepts to ‘contextual/pragmatic’ information, a clear distinction between different senses of givenness/newness is crucial for understanding how and if various information structural properties are constrained by the grammar. In my own work (e.g. Gundel 1988, 1999 ) I have argued that there are two distinct and logically independent senses of givenness-newness, one referential and the other relational. Referential givenness describes a relation between a linguistic expression and a corresponding non-linguistic (conceptual) entity in (a model of) the speaker/hearer’s mind, the discourse, or some real or possible world, depending on where the referents or corresponding meanings of these linguistic expressions are assumed to reside. The relevant parameters are whether or not it already exists in the model, its degree of salience and, for some authors (e.g. the distinction made by Prince 1992 and Birner and Ward 1998), how it got there and what kind of entity it is. Some representative examples include existential presupposition (e.g. Strawson 1964), various senses of referentiality and specificity (e.g. Fodor and Sag 1982, Enç 1991), the familiarity condition on definite descriptions (e.g. Heim 1982), the accessibility levels of Ariel (1988), the activation and identifiability statuses of Chafe (1994) and Lambrecht (1994), the familiarity scale of Prince (1981), and the cognitive statuses of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993). Relational givenness-newness, by contrast, involves a partition of the semantic/conceptual representation of a sentence into two complementary parts, X and Y, where X is what the sentence is about (the topic, theme, ground, logical/psychological subject) and Y is what is predicated about X (the comment, rheme, focus, logical/psychological predicate). X is given in relation to Y in the sense that it is independent, and outside the scope of, what is predicated in Y. Y is new in relation to X in the sense that it is information that is predicated (asserted, questioned, etc.) about X. Unlike referential givenness, this sense is a relation between two elements on the same level of representation, and can be defined independent of a speaker’s assumptions about the hearer’s knowledge or attention state. The relation may be construed as logico-semantic, a subject – predicate relation, or as conceptual/psychological/cognitive, the relation between an 125 entity represented in the hearer’s memory (a file card to use a common metaphor) and what is added in relation to that entity. In either case, the distinction can be taken to reflect how the informational content of a particular event or state of affairs expressed by a sentence is represented and how its truth value is to be assessed. Examples of relational givenness-newness pairs include traditional notions of logical/psychological subject and predicate (e.g. van der Gabelenz 1868) presupposition-focus (e.g. Chomsky 1971, Jackendoff 1972, 2000), topic- comment (e.g. Gundel 1974/89, Reinhart 1981), theme-rheme (e.g. Mathesius 1928, Kuno 1972, Sgall et al 1973, 1986, Vallduví 1992), and topic-predicate (Erteschik-Shir 1997). Referential and Relational Givenness-Newness are logically and empirically independent of one another.
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