Given/New: What do the terms refer to?

Karuk is a non-configurational, polysynthetic, headmarking language spoken near the Klamath River in Northern California (Davis et al., 2020). This paper seeks to answer the following question about Karuk word order: what factors significantly influence the order in which nominal arguments appear with respect to their verbs? Specifically, I examine whether or not the following factors have a significant effect on word order: referential distance, topic persistence, thematic continuity, predicate transitivity, and animacy. Using a logistic regression model, I found that referential distance was a significant predictor of subject position (p < 0.05) and that animacy was a significant predictor of object position (p < 0.05). My findings indicate that for subjects, lower values of referential distance are correlated with a greater frequency of postverbal realizations. In addition, I found that animate objects are more likely than inanimate ones to appear postverbally. With some variations, my findings concerning referential distance are similar to findings from Ute (Givon, 1983a), Klamath (Meyer, 1992), and Chamorro (Cooreman, 1992), and my study supports the prediction that postverbal position has a tendency to encode continuous referents in languages with pragmatically controlled word order (Givon, 1983b). On the other hand, my findings concerning animacy suggest an iconic relationship between the markedness of animate objects in Karuk and the markedness of postverbal word order.

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’.

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

Word order correlates with distinctions of information structure, and Gunther Grewendorf’s work has contributed much to our understanding of what the pertinent regularities are in German and other languages such as Italian or Japanese, and it has also shaped our understanding of how these regularities are linked to grammar. Grewendorf (1980) constitutes one of the first concrete proposals of capturing the impact of informational distinctions on German word order. Grewendorf and Sabel (1994, 1999) developed one of the most detailed models of word order variation in the middle field. Grewendorf has also contributed substantially to recent developments concerning the left periphery of clauses, based on the view that categories like focus and topic are directly represented in the syntax. Rizzi (1997) proposed that there are Topic and Focus heads situated in the higher functional layers of the clauses, and that the specifiers of these heads host topic and focus phrases, respectively if not already in the surface representation, then at least at LF. Rizzi’s view has been elaborated for German by Frey (2004), Haftka (1995), Pili (2000), and, of course, Grewendorf (2005a,b). Such approaches in which information structure is directly coded in the syntax constitute one of two extreme ends of a continuum of models of the syntax-information structure interaction. Correlations between positions and informational functions do not necessarily imply that information structure and word order are directly related by syntactic laws. Rather, informational concepts might be correlated with other properties of phrases (say, their length), which could then be the ones really affected by the forces determining word order, such as processability, see, e.g., Hawkins (1994) for such a view.1 In this paper, I will argue that information structure concepts indeed do not play an immediate role in syntax. While word order can reflect information structure categories, it does so because these categories are encoded phonologically in a certain form (or because of the semantic consequences of information structure distinctions) to which

As the numbers of international teaching assistants (ITAs) continue to increase, cross-cultural communication has become an integral part of academic life in universities. ITA instruction programs recognize that successful communication between ITAs and their students requires an ability to use language appropriate to the classroom context and an awareness of the expectations of native-speaking discourse participants. One area of teaching discourse that is frequently overlooked in this discussion is its intonation structure. This study compares one intonational feature, tone choice, in 12 parallel teaching presentations given by 6 Chinese and 6 North American male teaching assistants (TAs). Naturally occurring presentations were recorded in the classroom, and tone choices were analyzed using instrumental and auditory analysis within Brazil’ s (1997) model of discourse intonation. The results showed that the native-English-speaking TAs systematically exploited their tone choices to increase the accessibility of the lecture material and establish rapport with their students. Conversely, the typical tonal composition of the ITAs’ presentations obfuscated the information structure and frequently characterized these speakers as unsympathetic and uninvolved. These results suggest that tone choice contributes to communication failure between ITAs and their students and prompt the recommendation that tone choice be directly addressed in the linguistic and pedagogical components of ITA instruction programs.

Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical counterparts when presented with discourse contexts that license their information structure constraints. In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the effect of information structure on the online processing of active and passive constructions and whether this effect differed in monolinguals and L1-Spanish–L2-English speakers. In line with previous corpus studies, our results indicated that there was an interaction between word order and information structure according to which passive sentences were much more costly to process with new–given information structure patterns. Crucially, we failed to find evidence that the effect of information structure on word order constraints in comprehension differed between monolingual and L2 speakers.

This article reports on an experiment that examined the comprehension of transitive sentences in Czech children and its relationship to case marking, word order and information structure. A total of 107 Czech children aged 2;9–4;5 were tested for comprehension of noun-verb-noun sentences in which word order and given-new status of individual nouns were manipulated. The results confirmed that noncanonical, object-initial sentences are generally more difficult to comprehend than sentences with the standard word order, but that many children can interpret noncanonical sentences before 4 years of age. Information structure did not have any clear effect on sentence comprehension. Overall, the results indicate that children have some abstract knowledge of word order and case marking when they first show evidence of transitive sentence comprehension, but initially they cannot use this knowledge when word order and case marking signal conflicting interpretations. Information structure is not a major factor in early sentence comprehension.

Word order alternation has been described as one of the most productive information structure markers and discourse organizers across languages. Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that word order is a crucial cue for argument interpretation. Previous studies about Spanish sentence comprehension have shown greater difficulty to parse sentences that present a word order that does not respect the order of participants of the verb's lexico-semantic structure, irrespective to whether the sentences follow the canonical word order of the language or not. This difficulty has been accounted as the cognitive cost related to the miscomputation of prominence status of the argument that precedes the verb. Nonetheless, the authors only analyzed the use of alternative word orders in isolated sentences, leaving aside the pragmatic motivation of word order alternation. By means of an eye-tracking task, the current study provides further evidence about the role of information structure for the comprehension of sentences with alternative word order and verb type, and sheds light on the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We analyzed both “early” and “late” eye-movement measures as well as accuracy and response times to comprehension questions. Results showed an overall influence of information structure reflected in a modulation of late eye-movement measures as well as offline measures like total reading time and questions response time. However, effects related to the miscomputation of prominence status did not fade away when sentences were preceded by a context that led to non-canonical word order of constituents, showing that prominence computation is a core mechanism for argument interpretation, even in sentences preceded by context.

Information structure in Turkish: the word order–prosody interface

Regulation of the Transcriptional Repressor BACH2 Overcomes Tonic Signaling-Driven CAR T Cell Dysfunction

This study examines the ordering of the actor (A), theme (T) and recipient (R) arguments in three-argument clauses, the prepositional ditransitive constructions of Irish. The ordering of the A, T and R arguments in three-argument clauses is an area where linguistic complexity is manifest in the Irish grammar. Across languages, the factors which influence word order adjustments, from a basic word order of A-T-R, are known to include iconicity, information structure and topicalisation, the distinction between given and new information, the effects of the various referential hierarchies, and syntactic weight. We show that some, but not all, of these apply to the Irish data. Under certain conditions, the word order of these Irish three-argument clauses changes in a different alignment. Specifically, if the T is an accusative pronoun then the word order alignment changes and consequently the T occurs after the R in clause final position, yielding an A R-T word order. We argue that post-positioning of the theme PN is due to the alignment effects that can be explained by reference to the nominal and person hierarchies, and their intersection with the principle of syntactic weight. The Irish grammar seems to be disposed to place the accusative object PN T in clause final position in word order, adding an imposed salience. We characterise the effects of the nominal and person hierarchies, and syntactic weight, on word order within these constructions. We use elements of the functional model of Role and Reference Grammar in this characterisation. These word alignment effects raise important questions of the distribution of linguistic complexity across the grammar of Irish, and the interfaces between semantics, and syntax, as well as information structure.

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.

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.

In many languages with flexible word orders, canonical word order has a processing advantage over non-canonical word orders. This observation suggests that it is more costly for the parser to represent syntactically complex sentences. Alternatively, this phenomenon may relate to pragmatic factors because most previous studies have presented non-canonical word orders without felicitous context, which violates participants’ expectations regarding the information structure. The present study conducted an event-related potential experiment to examine the locus of the processing difficulty associated with non-canonical word orders in Japanese by manipulating word order (SOV vs. OSV) and the givenness of arguments. The results showed that OSV elicited a sustained left anterior negativity from O to S and a P600 effect at S compared to that of SOV in the infelicitous but not in the felicitous context. This result suggests that the processing difficulty of non-canonical word orders in Japanese is alleviated by discourse factors.

This chapter presents a concise overview of the linguistic means that express categories of information structure (IS) in Slavic languages. Concentrating especially on (a) the realization of broad vs narrow focus (focus projection); and (b) the expression of given information, topic, and delimitation, the chapter covers intonation and ‘free’ word order—the two most widely discussed ways of IS encoding. It further presents less well studied IS-sensitive devices and phenomena in Slavic: clefts, predicate doubling, topic and focus particles, as well as the interaction of IS with the Slavic clitic systems, in particular, in the expression of positive and negative polarity (or verum) focus.