Postposing:Information

Structure and Word Order Variation

Postposing:Information

Structure and Word Order Variation

LSA.32313 July 2007

LSA.32313 July 2007

PostposingPreposing: 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 StudiesMost previous studies have focused on

there-sentences 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 ConstructionsRegardless of any structural

differences between them, the two types of there-sentences 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 right-dislocation (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-DislocationThe 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 discourse-familiarity.

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 thereIf 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.

SummaryBoth hearer-old/discourse-new

PVNPs and hearer-old/discourse-old PVNPs are infelicitous in existential there-sentences.

Thus, it is newness with respect to the hearer’s knowledge that is required for the felicitous use of existential there-sentences.

Hearer-Old Hearer-New

Discourse-Old Infelicitous Does not occur

Discourse-New Infelicitous Felicitous

Presentational there-sentencesThe 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

there-sentence requires that its PVNP represent information that is new to the discourse.

Presentational there-sentencesIn 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-sentencesb. 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-sentencesThe 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 there-sentences. 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-DislocationLike existential and presentational there-

sentences, right-dislocation (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-DislocationThe 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 I hear that the Art Institute has a new exhibit on 19th Century post-Impressionism. #Century post-Impressionism. #He was a genius, that He was a genius, that Van GoghVan Gogh. .

[cf. That Van Gogh was a genius.][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 killWhen the dislocated constituent represent

discourse-old 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 there-sentences contain non-referential there.

A Comparison of Right-Dislocation and PostposingCorresponding 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 PostposingMoreover, it is precisely the presence of this

pronoun that motivates the functional distinction between there-sentences and RD.

In RD, the pronoun is required to represent a discourse-old 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.