Professional Documents
Culture Documents
October 3, 2007
11-721 Grammars and Lexicons
Based on slides by Alicia Tribble
1
A Joke based on topic and focus
• Gundel and Fretheim, page 175, citing Chao (1968)
– A. We are now passing the oldest winery in the
region.
– B. Why?
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Pragmatic Roles
“The flow of given and new information”
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How to mess up the encoding of new
information (Comrie, page 56)
• A. Who saw Bill? perceiver: who/John (new)
• B. John saw Bill/him. perceived: Bill/him (old)
– Stress on “John”
• A. Who saw Bill? perceiver: who/John (new)
• B. #John saw Bill/him. perceived: Bill/him (old)
– Stress on “Bill/him”
• A. Who did John see? perceiver: John/he (old)
• B. John/he saw Bill. perceived: who/Bill (new)
– Stress on “Bill”
• A. Who did John see? perceiver: John/he (old)
• B. #John/he saw Bill. perceived: who/Bill (new)
– Stress on “John” 6
Focus Using Cleft Constructions
(Kroeger)
• English can express new information with a cleft
sentence: It's x that ...
• The cleft sentence may take on a reading of
contrastive focus.
– Contrastive focus implies that the focused
item is being chosen from a delimited set
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Why is it called a cleft?
• “Cleft” is the past participle of “cleave”, to cut.
1. cut here
2. add “it’s” and “who/that”
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Why is it called a cleft?
To cleave off a non-subject.
1. cut here
2. move the piece you cut off
3. add “it’s” and “who/that”
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Meaning of clefts
• Note that these mean the same thing in the sense that
the noun phrases have the same semantic roles:
– John saw Bill.
– It’s John who saw Bill. (subject is cleft)
– It’s Bill who John saw. (object is cleft)
• Perceiver: John
• Perceived: Bill
• The cleft word order is not encoding semantic roles or
grammatical relations. It is encoding new information.
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How to express new information in
English
• A. Who saw Bill? perceiver: who/John (new)
• B. It’s John that/who saw Bill/him.
– “John” is clefted. perceived: Bill/him (old)
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How to mess up the encoding of new
information (Comrie, page 56)
• A. Who saw Bill? perceiver: who/John (new)
• B. It’s John who saw Bill/him.
perceived: Bill/him (old)
13
Pseudo-cleft
• What did John give to Mary?
• What John gave to Mary was a bunch of flowers.
• #(The person) who John gave flowers to was
Mary.
14
Topic-Comment
• These constructions separate “what the
sentence is about” (topic) from a statement that
should be interpreted in that domain (comment).
• Used when the speaker wants to emphasize this
contrast.
16
Syntax of Extracted Topics
In this construction, the topic phrase is
syntactically linked to the comment by taking the
grammatical relation of the gap.
17
Topic Using Left-Dislocation
• Used to change topics
• Topic provides antecedent for a pronoun in the
comment (resumptive pronoun):
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External Topic
• Signals a return to a previously mentioned topic
• Bears little or no syntactic link to the comment,
only a semantic link: As for x ...
19
Topic and “givenness”
• A topic cannot be indefinite. It has to be
something the hearer is familiar with.
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Layers of Structure
• Building Blocks / Coding Mechanisms:
Case marking
Word order (and phrase structure)
Agreement (e.g., verb agrees with subject)
Intonation
• Information Content / Functions of NPs
Grammatical relations (SUBJ, OBJ, OBL)
Semantic or Thematic Roles (Agent, Patient, Theme)
Pragmatic Roles (Topic and Focus)
Languages use building blocks in different ways to
encode content 21
Cross-Linguistic Variation
Russian
Case Marking
Grammatical Relations
Italian
Agreement
English Semantic Roles
Hungarian
22
Focus in Russian
(Comrie, p78)
• English word order codes grammatical relations.
Russian word order seems free by comparison:
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Focus in Russian
(Comrie, p78)
• Although GR’s are the same for all, Pragmatic
Roles are different.
a. Ki l´atta Zoli-t?
who saw Zoli
Who saw Zoli?
b. Zoli-t ki l´atta?
Zoli who saw
Who saw Zoli? Perceiver: Vili/who (new)
c. Vili l´atta Zoli-t. Perceived: Zoli (old)
Vili saw Zoli
Vili saw Zoli
d. Zoli-t Vili l´atta.
Zoli Vili saw
Vili saw Zoli.
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Hungarian
a. Ki-t l´atta Zoli?
who saw Zoli
Who did Zoli see?
b. Zoli ki-t l´atta?
Zoli who saw
Who did Zoli see? Perceiver: Zoli (old)
c. Zoli Vili-t l´atta. Perceived: Vili/who (new)
Zoli Vili saw
Zoli saw Vili.
d. Vili-t l´atta. Zoli
Vili saw Zoli
Zoli saw Vili
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Cross-Linguistic Variation
Russian
Case Marking
Grammatical Relations
Italian
Agreement
English Semantic Roles
Hungarian
27
Cross-Linguistic Variation
Russian
Case Marking
Grammatical Relations
Italian
Agreement
English Semantic Roles
Hungarian
28
Topic in Mandarin
• Coded using word order: topic is fronted
• Topic can serve as antecedent for a resumptive
pronoun
• Topic Establishes domain for the comment
• Topic is incompatible with question words (i.e.
focus)
31
Topic-Controlled Coreference
(Li, p26)
• Evidence that Mandarin is Topic-Prominent, not Subject-
Prominent.
a Nà ke shù yèzi dà, suǒyi wǒ bu xǐhuān [ ].
that tree leaves big so I not like
‘That tree, the leaves are big, so I don’t like (it).’
33
Note: clefts can be used for old
information too
• Gundel and Fretheim, page 186
– The federal government is dealing with AIDS
as if the virus was a problem that didn’t travel
along interstate highways and was none of its
business. It’s this lethal national intertia in
the face of the most devastating epidemic
of the late 20th century that finally prompted
one congressman to strike out on his own.
(Minneapolis Star and Tribune, cited in
Hedberg 1990)
34
Note: Topicalization construction used
for information focus (new information)
• Gundel and Fretheim, page 183
– Which of these clothes should we give to the
Salvation Army?
– That COAT you’re wearing, I think we can
give away.
35
Topicalized specific indefinite
• Gundel and Fretheim, page 181, citing Prince
(1985):
– An old preacher down there, they augured
under the grave where his wife was buried.
• The indefinite is not familiar to the hearer.
Reinhart (1981) argues that topics only have to
be referential, not familiar.
36
Topic (opposite of comment) is not the
same as backward-looking center
• Gundel and Fretheim, page 180
• Tomlin (1995), wa can mark noun phrases that
are referentially new, and therefore not the
backward-looking center (continuing topic of
conversation).
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