On Pure Syntax (Uncontaminated by Information Structure)

Reviewed by: Particle verbs in English: Syntax, information structure and intonation by Nicole Dehé Timothy Baldwin Particle verbs in English: Syntax, information structure and intonation. By Nicole Dehé. (Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 59.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. 305. ISBN 1588113086. $144 (Hb). This book, an expanded and reworked version of Nicole Dehé’s 2001 dissertation, analyzes the syntax of transitive particle verbs (PVs) in English. D observes that PVs can occur with either continuous (I gave up my job) or discontinuous (I gave my job up) word order, and analyzes factors that govern which of these word orders is adopted in a given context. Through an impressive survey of the data and two speech-production experiments, D motivates the claim that the continuous word order is the unmarked order, and goes on to propose a syntactic analysis of PVs which uses information-structure theory to capture the effects of word-order variation. The book consists of six chapters. Ch. 1 (1–14) presents a basic overview of the data and existing PV classifications. Ch. 2 (15–74) outlines and extensively critiques proposed syntactic analyses of PVs, drawing particularly on modification, coordination, and nominalization data in identifying shortcomings in the different approaches. Ch. 3 (75–102) reviews syntactic factors that have been suggested as affecting PV word order, notably the category of the direct object, length/syntactic complexity of the direct object, and particle modification. Ch. 4 (103–207) introduces information-structure theory and topiccomment structure, and details their relevance to the determination of PV word order. D then presents two speech-production experiments, in which information-structure theory is shown to be a reliable predictor of PV stress and word order. Ch. 5 (209–78) details D’s proposed analysis of PVs, which encodes D’s claim that the continuous word order is basic, and derives the discontinuous word order from it based on interaction with information structure, avoiding arbitrary ‘rearrangement’-type movement in doing so. The proposed analysis is extensively tested over examples cited in the PV literature, and information structure is shown to be a powerful holistic predictor of PV word order. The book is well written and provides a one-stop shop for those interested in PVs, reviewing a broad section of the literature and also covering the phonological, syntactic, and focus/information aspects of PVs. It assumes a high level of familiarity with the minimalist program, but through data-intensive argumentation remains accessible to those lacking this background knowledge. D touches upon but fails to reach a definite conclusion about the syntax-semantics interface. D dismisses claims that existing classifications of semantic compositionality can be used to predict word order, but at the same time acknowledges that compositionality appears to have an impact on the determination of word order with some PVs. Given the interaction with word-order effects, the book would have benefited from a developed discourse on the precise nature of the syntax-semantics interface and its implications for D’s information-theoretic analysis of PVs. This minor reservation aside, the book is characterized by clear argumentation, an extensive bibliography, and excellent use of examples, and is a valuable contribution to the PV literature. Timothy Baldwin University of Melbourne Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of information structure on word order in Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, and whether these two languages differ from each other. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies. In a parallel text corpus study, we compared the frequency of the word order patterns ‘why’SV and ‘why’VS, as well as the distribution of focal and non-focal subjects in the two languages. In order to get a deeper understanding of the impact of the information structural categories focus and givenness on word order in ‘why’-interrogatives, we conducted a forced-choice experiment. The results indicate that word order is affected by focus in Italian, while it is not determined by any information structural category in Peninsular Spanish. We show that Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differ from each other in two ways. First, non-focal subjects occur preverbally in Italian, while they occupy the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish. Second, Italian reveals a lower level of optionality with respect to word order patterns. Even though we find a high preference for the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish, we argue that this limitation is related to a higher flexibility regarding word order in Peninsular Spanish than in Italian which does not allows for ‘why’VSO in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.

This paper studies quantitatively intransitive constructions in Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, and their implications for Neo-Aramaic word order typology (historically, ‘subject-verb-object’). Though not considered previously, transitivity proves to be a significant factor in Neo-Aramaic word order variation. The differences between the intransitive Subject and the transitive Agent in Neo-Aramaic are a product of their divergent information-structural tendencies, as well as, it would seem, their basic syntactic preferences. Unidentifiable (i.e. indefinite, old) Subjects largely follow the verb, which fits with the larger tendency for pre-verbal arguments to be topical. Identifiable arguments, however, have roughly equal pre- and post-verbal frequencies in the corpus, when jointly considered. A deeper analysis considers referential distance and lexical-pragmatic factors. I propose that VS for identifiable Subjects is more likely for functions associated with ‘discourse discontinuity’, being less likely for foreground events. This distribution in Neo-Aramaic hints at a functional versatility of the VS structure, which is thus not restricted to a single construction such as sentence focus. By contrast, in (co-territorial Qəltu) Arabic, transitivity and topicality are less significant for word order variation. Finally, comparative data from Neo-Aramaic varieties of different word order profiles reveal the instability of the VS clause amidst larger word order changes. The cross-dialectal data show that the loss of the VS clause correlates very closely with the ‘verb-object’ to ‘object-verb’ shift. While Aramaic would have started as ‘(Agent-)verb-object’, some Neo-Aramaic dialects show increasing rates of ‘object-verb’.

The Kazakh language is an under-researched Turkic language spoken in the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan and some neighbouring countries. While the grammar of this language is fairly well described, its information structural characteristics have not been examined in detail in the literature to date. This thesis aims to start filling this research gap by providing detailed descriptions of: the relation between information structure and word order; topic markers; and a pragmatically significant particle. Original, contextualised language examples are used to reject previous limited and rigid understanding of the relation between information structure and word order in Kazakh. It is shown that the information structural configurations of a Kazakh sentence are far more diverse than had been assumed. This conclusion is not only a revelation in its own right, but can also serve as a foundation for further research on the information structure of Kazakh, and other under-researched Turkic languages. This thesis also provides the first detailed descriptions of the three Kazakh topic markers. Numerous examples of their uses are presented in order to demonstrate the differences in these markers’ distribution and meaning. Several grammaticalisation processes related to these topic markers are revealed; it is proposed that these processes are currently at different stages of progress. Pragmatically significant particle goj is examined in detail for the first time: its distribution and meaning are illustrated with contextualised examples from various sources. It is posited that there are two syntactically diverse variants of this item which do, however, share the same existential semantics. The theoretical framework of Dynamic Syntax is employed throughout the thesis to underpin the first formal analyses of the phenomena under discussion.

This chapter discusses the relationship between syntax and information structure (IS), focusing on the variation between verb-second (V2) and non-V2 word order in Middle English. It incorporates recent insights from first language acquisition in varieties of Norwegian, where variable V2 word orders are very similar to those found in the history of English, and follows up recent work that shows that IS is an important factor in determining word order choices in Old English. It traces the variation between V2 (subject-verb inversion) and non-V2 (X-subject-Vf word order) for nominal and pronominal subjects in some detail over the various subperiods in Middle English, pinpointing the role of syntax and of IS in shaping the variation attested. Core issues are the mapping between specific syntactic positions and IS sensitivity as well as the mutual impact of IS and syntax. Several small changes in the process from V2 to non-V2 are attested, and these are analyzed within a model of micro-cues, where small steps in the process are considered to be grammar changes in the I-language.

This paper presents an examination of syntactic constructions that are associated with the mirative interpretation of marking propositional content as being surprising or unexpected to the speaker. I report experimental evidence showing that certain options of marked word order in German are particularly suitable in mirative contexts. Cross-linguistic evidence offers good reasons to assume that mirative marking is also reflected in word order patterns. Having identified word order variation as one option to trigger mirative interpretations of utterances, I discuss the issue of distinguishing between information-structural and mirative effects of marked syntactic configurations.

Three experiments are reported that studied the priming of word order in German. Experiment 1 demonstrated priming of the order of case-marked verb arguments. However, order of noun phrases and order of thematic roles were confounded. In Experiment 2, we therefore aimed at disentangling the impact of these two possible factors. By using primes that differed from targets in phrase structure but were parallel with regard to the order of thematic roles, we nevertheless found priming demonstrating the critical impact of thematic roles. Experiment 3 replicated the priming effects from Experiments 1 and 2 within participants and revealed no evidence for a modulation of priming by phrase structure. Consequently, our findings suggest that word order priming crucially depends on the structural outline of thematic roles rather than on the linearization of phrases.

Within early generative grammar as developed in the sixties, grammatical rules and principles were exclusively formulated in terms of constituent structure, and there was no reference at all to grammatical functions like subject and objects, these terms being defined as the NP immediately dominated by S and VP, respectively (cf. e.g. Chomsky 1965). This fundamental claim of early generative grammar had some important implications for the linear ordering of constituents and words, because tangled trees were banned. Consequently, the theory made the prediction that the sequence “Object-Subject-Verb” could not show up, at least as a base structure, as no element which is not dominated by the VP can be positioned between two constituents of the VP. Linguists were very well aware of the existence of languages showing a considerable degree of freeness of constituent order, that are nowadays called nonconfigurational, like Japanese, Turkish, Warlpiri, Hungarian or German. For these languages, a special transformational device was invented, viz. the well-known scrambling rule permuting the elements of a fixed base word order in some random fashion, or governed by thematic or other non-grammatical regularities. The most outstanding property of this treatment of free word order is its claim that there is no connection at all between grammar and linear order in non-configurational languages.

Bare nominals, information structure and word order

Language is an important mean of communication and it is constantly changing. During the language change a lot of words become out of use and many other new words become part of lexicon . The lexicon of the language is constantly enlarging and one important way to enlarge a language is by word formation. In German and Albanian Languages word formation is defined as a process of forming new words. In both, German and Albanian Languages an important contribution in word formation is given by compounding. In German Language compound words make up 2/3 of lexical language. The dominant part of compound words is the formation of compound nouns. German Language has got a lot of compound nouns so it has the ability to create new compounds between the connection of nouns or the connection of a noun with the other parts of discourse. In most cases the compounds of German Language find their equivalent in Albanian Language in simple words or phrases. In both languages a compound noun consists of two or more (lexical parts) components; they can have subordinate and coordinate relations. The majority of compounds is done by coordinate relations (determinate compositions). The composition components have a strict word order. If the word order changes in German Language, the meaning of composition will change, it will take a new meaning. (Of course there are exceptions in a few cases). If the word order changes in Albanian Language, the word becomes meaningless. In Albanian language the components of a compound noun are connected without fugues. Compound nouns with connecting vowels (o / a) are very few, while in German linking elements (fugues : e-, -s-, -es-, -n-, -en-, -er-, -ens-, -o-, ) are typical.

The article introduces a comparative analysis of the word order in the communicative structure of the sentence in Russian and Persian. The research also covered means and methods of expressing communicative structure, as well as the rules and patterns of word order on the communicative level. In both languages, the communicative aspect of the sentence is closely related to the word order, which is the main tool of expressing the semantic division of the sentence. However, the communicative word order patterns are different. In the neutral speech, both languages put the theme (background information) in front of the rheme (actual information). In expressive speech, the Russian rheme is placed at the beginning of the sentence while the theme follows it. In other words, the thought moves from the actual information to the background information. When the communicative division of the sentence changes, the word order also changes. Based on the analysis of the word order in neutral and expressive speech, direct and inverted word orders are associated with the function that these components perform in the theme-rheme relationship. Persian, however, has a fixed word order, and allows for no inversion: the theme and the rheme are fixed, and the background information always precedes the new one. In the Russian language, any part of the sentence can be the theme or the rheme. In Persian, the function of the theme or the rheme belongs to particular sentence components.

Reviewed by: Handbook of pragmatics. 2002 installment by Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ala Östman, Jan Blommaert, and Chris Bulcaen Roberta D’Alessandro Handbook of pragmatics. 2002 installment. Compiled by Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ala Östman, Jan Blommaert, and Chris Bulcaen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. vi, 402. ISBN 1588114104. $150 (Hb). The Handbook of pragmatics, prepared under the scientific auspices of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), consists of two components: The manual (1995), which contains the essential background information, and the looseleaf annual installments that provide a state-of-the-art record of pragmatics with comprehensive articles on the approaches and applications of pragmatics. The Handbook [End Page 698] of pragmatics is now also an electronic product of John Benjamins Publishing Company. The 2002 installment package contains a cumulative table of contents (from 1995 to 2002), a user’s guide that replaces the 2001 version completely, and fourteen contributions to the thematic main body of the looseleaf part. In the user’s guide, the compilers briefly explain the format of the handbook. The user’s guide also contains a detailed labeled index, with a useful explanation of the abbreviations in use and an indication of the part in which the entries are to be found. In the first of the fourteen contributions, Jef Verschueren and Frank Brisard discuss ‘Adaptability’, claiming that biology and social interaction are indissolubly linked to each other. According to Verschueren and Brisard, a theory of pragmatics also needs to refer to the capacity for reflexiveness of the human brain, which provides a metapragmatic guidance for the individual’s choice-making operations. The second contribution, ‘Appraisal’, by Peter R. R. White, concerns the language of evaluation and provides a detailed descriptive outline of the key resources of evaluation and stance. ‘Émile Benveniste’, by Tine Van Hecke, is a thorough introduction to Benveniste’s life and work. Gerda Eva Lauerbach’s ‘Emphasis’ addresses traditional studies on emphasis in several fields of linguistics. She also provides an account of the strategies that speakers employ in order to achieve emphasis in discourse. The contribution by Jeanette K. Gundel and Thorstein Fretheim, ‘Information structure’, concerns the division between given and new information in a sentence and topic-focus structures. In ‘Intertextuality’, Slef Slembrouck examines in depth Julia Kristeva’s theory of text. Steven Gillis and Dorit Ravid present the current state of the art as to theories of ‘Language acquisition’. Also listed are methodologies that are relevant to the study of language acquisition. Paul Chilton’s chapter, ‘Manipulation’, is concerned with techniques of persuasion and rhetorical strategies to obtain the addressee’s agreement. According to Chilton, manipulation is not inherent to language, but it is rather a prerogative of the speakers. The next chapter is written by one of the major experts in the theory of metaphor, Miriam Taverniers. Taverniers focuses on the conception of metaphors in linguistics. She thoroughly illustrates all types of linguistic metaphors, disregarding altogether the study of metaphors as linguistic process. Lluís Payrató’s chapter, ‘Non-verbal communication’, analyzes strategies of nonverbal communication, such as paralinguistic vocal communication and gesture. Robert Binnick discusses the pragmatics of ‘Tense and aspect’. Jocelyne Vincent Marrelli’s chapter, ‘Truthfulness’, precedes the summary and commentary by Joachim Leilich on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and work. Last, Miriam Fried addresses the issue of ‘Word order’. Roberta D’Alessandro University of Cambridge Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

Functional grammars include pragmatic information within formal grammar. Information structure refers to how languages keep track of the topics and introductory material of a text, and how they pre-sent the salient main points of a text. There are differences between normal handling of topical material and special marking of topical material. Likewise, there are default ways of presenting the main points and specially marked ways. The Functional Grammar of Si-mon Dik is helpful in pointing out constituents that carry pragmatic marking through word order. This facilitates reading for meaning in the biblical languages so that readers may recognize special presentations of material in text. The linking of sentences together in a text with marked Topics, recognizing Focus constituents, some unit discontinuities in a text and some rhetorical features in a text can be described. Functional Grammar describes how audiences may perceive these features in various languages and process them rapidly. This adds both to the accuracy and enjoyment of listening to a text or reading it. Extensive application and illustration are provided in Hebrew with additional application to Greek. Modern readers of ancient languages, where normal processes of language internalization may not have taken place, may receive a special ben-efit from considering the interactions of Functional Grammar and information structure. Key Words: Topic; Focus; Functional Grammar; Word Order; He-brew; Greek