Abstract
The paper argues that a core part of what is traditionally referred to as ‘information structure’ can be deconstructed into genuine morphosyntactic features that are visible to syntactic operations, contribute to discourse-related expressive meanings, and just happen to be spelled out prosodically in Standard American and British English. We motivate two features, [FoC] and [G], and we track the fate of those features at and beyond the syntax-semantics and the syntax-phonology interfaces. [FoC] and [G] are responsible for two distinct obligatory strategies for establishing discourse coherence. A [G]-marked constituent signals a match with a discourse referent, whereas a [FoC]-marked constituent invokes alternatives and thereby signals a contrast. In Standard American and British English [FoC] aims for highest prosodic prominence in the intonational phrase, whereas [G] lacks phrase-level prosodic properties. There is no grammatical marking of newness: The apparent prosodic effects of newness are the result of default prosody.
Highlights
Information structure, as the term is commonly used, covers concepts related to givenness, contrast, and topicality
2 Syntactic evidence for features [FoC] and [G] we present a typological argument against metrical tree or metrically annotated syntactic tree representations of notions related to givenness and focus, or more generally, against any representation of those notions that does not rely on features
To conclude this section as a whole, we have shown that the assumption that FoCus and Givenness are represented by syntactically well-motivated features is compatible with an well-motivated account of the prosodic effects of FoCus and Givenness in Standard American and British English
Summary
Information structure, as the term is commonly used, covers concepts related to givenness, contrast, and topicality. Metrical tree approaches to givenness and focus imply that in English, for example, the computation of meanings has access to the actual metrical trees associated with an expression, and to information about English default prosody While this architecture for the computation of meanings is technically possible, as demonstrated in Büring (2015b), it flies in the face of current views on grammatical architecture that assume that the meanings of complex expressions are compositionally projected from the meanings of lexical items and features and the way they are syntactically arranged. The question is whether the mere fact that languages like Standard American and British English happen to rely on prosody to convey meanings related to givenness and focus forces us to abandon established assumptions about the computation of meaning in grammar. Torrence (2013) analyzes 4(a) to (c) as cleft constructions that are the result of movement of the clefted constituent into the left periphery. Martinovič (2015) maintains that constructions like those illustrated in 4(a) to (c) are not clefts, but genuinely monocausal
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