Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

speaker a: Who has written two new books on linguistics?

speaker b: ?Mary has written TWO books on linguistics.

Speaker B’s contribution to (506) sounds very odd (indicated by the preceding question mark) and might be seen as signalling B’s mishearing or misunderstand-ing of what A has said.

The reason for the oddness of B’s utterance in (506) is intuitively clear: A and B

both know that the conversation is about two books on linguistics and A wants to know the author of two such books. But the reply in (506) makes it sound as if A needs to know the precise number of books on linguistics that Mary has written.

Of course, B’s response in (506) would be a perfectly fine answer to the question in (507):

(507)

How many books on linguistics has Mary written?

Phenomena of this sort are often studied under the heading of information

structure. We can say that B’s utterance in (505) is articulated into two components: MARY, which is new information, and the rest of the sentence, which is old information or given information. We can make this more explicit by

‘translating’ (505) into the representation in (508): (508)

speaker a: Given: x has written two books on linguistics, x = ?

speaker b: Given: x has written two books on linguistics, x = MARY

In (508), we use a variable x to represent unknown information (notice that this is a somewhat different use from that introduced in section 23), and B’s reply is seen as providing a value for that unknown. Clearly, the ‘given’ component comprises old information and is the part that can be safely omitted. Similarly, the question in

(507) can be represented as in (509):

(509)

Given: Mary has written x number of books on linguistics, x = ?

We can now see what is wrong with the dialogue in (506). The answer provided by B is supplying a value for the wrong variable. (Check that you understand exactly how this works by translating the ill-formed dialogue in 506 and comparing it with an appropriate dialogue based on 507.)

Above, we’ve illustrated the contrast between given (old) and new information using the traditional device of question–answer pairs, sometimes called the

‘commutation test’ for given/new information. However, the question part can remain implicit and this is illustrated in (510):

(510)

Hey, I’ve just heard that Mary has written ANOTHER book on linguistics.

An utterance of (510), in which another bears the main emphasis, is only felicitous if the speaker believes that the addressee already knows that Mary has

Using sentences

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written at least one book on linguistics. For this reason, the ‘given’ portions of the representations in (508) and (509) are often known as the presupposition (note that this term has a number of other, slightly different, uses, as we shall see below).

By varying the position of emphasis in a sentence such as (510), we can vary the articulation into given/new information. In principle, any of the content words of a sentence can be emphasised in this way and thereby appropriately convey new information. However, we can emphasise more than just individual words.

Consider (511):

(511)

speaker a: What topic has Mary written a new book on?

speaker b: (Mary has written a new book on) LINGUISTICS.

The information structure appropriate for (511) is essentially the same as that for (505), except that x = linguistics, as indicated by (512).

(512)

speaker a: Given: Mary has written a book on x, x = ?

speaker b: Given: Mary has written a book on x, x = linguistics

But now consider (513):

(513)

speaker a: What has Mary written?

speaker b: (Mary has written) a new book on LINGUISTICS.

Here, the new information is conveyed by the whole phrase a new book on

linguistics. The placement of emphasis in B’s utterance in (513) is exactly the same as in B’s utterance in (511), but the extent of the new information in (513) is the whole phrase, not just a single word. In fact, this extent can constitute a whole utterance, as illustrated in (514):

(514)

Hey, guess what! Mary has written a book on LINGUISTICS

Closely related to the notion of given information is the notion of topic (for the syntactic notion of topicalisation, see section 21). Broadly speaking, the topic of a sentence (or utterance of a sentence) is what the sentence is about. In English, identity of the topic tends to be implicit, though we can sometimes explicitly announce a topic, as in (515):

(515)

As for Mary, she’s written a book on linguistics

We can divide a sentence such as (515) into two parts, the topic, Mary and what we say about Mary, the comment:

(516)

topic:

Mary

comment: has written a book on linguistics

The division represented in (516) is known as the topic–comment articulation.

In some languages, marking of the topic is an obligatory part of the grammar and there are various devices for achieving this. A well-known example is that of Japanese, which uses a particle, wa, after a phrase to mark that phrase as the topic (in 517, o is similar to an accusative case suffix in languages like Turkish and Latin, as described in section 11):

392

senten ces

(517)

Mary wa

gengokaku natsu ite no hon

o

kaita

Mary WA linguistics about

book ACC wrote

‘Mary wrote a book on linguistics’

It might look rather as though wa marks Mary as the subject of (517), but this is misleading. In Japanese, it’s perfectly possible to omit a subject DP if the identity of the subject can be recovered from the context (see the discussion of null subjects in sections 22 and 24). The English sentence in (515) is therefore a reasonably accurate translation of (517). Japanese, like many Asian languages, is often referred to as a ‘topic-centred’ language, as opposed to languages such as English which are ‘subject-centred’. This is because languages such as Japanese require a sentence to have an articulation into topic and comment, though they don’t require that there be any grammatical relation between the topic and the rest of the sentence. This can be illustrated by a famous Japanese sentence (518) (here ga is viewed as a subject marker, and it is sometimes regarded as a nominative case suffix):

(518)

zoo

wa

hana ga

nagai

elephant WA nose SUBJ long

‘As for an elephant, nose is long’ or more idiomatically, ‘Elephants have

long noses’

It’s very difficult to convey the true structure of a sentence such as (518) in a language like English, because English very much prefers there to be some

grammatical relation between the topic and some element in the comment.

Other languages don’t impose such a restriction, however (exercise 3).

Presuppositions

In our discussion of given or old information above, we pointed out

that such information is sometimes identified with presuppositions. We shall now introduce a different, though related, use of this terminology.

In section 12, we encountered the notion entailment in connection with such examples as (519):

(519) a.

Tom managed to finish the book

b.

Tom finished the book

c.

Tom didn’t manage to finish the book

d.

Tom didn’t finish the book

Here, (519a) entails (519b) – in any circumstances in which (519a) is true, (519b) is also true. Similarly, (519c) entails (519d). However, rather different entailment relationships from those we see in (519) are also possible. Consider the examples in (520): (520) a.

Tom stopped reading the book

b.

Tom didn’t stop reading the book

c.

Tom was reading the book earlier