Abstract
In this paper we would like to explore, within Vallduvi’s (1992, 1993) information packaging theory, how writers’ assumptions about their addressees’ state of knowledge can account for the choice writers make between competing syntactic structures, which we call “allostructures”, to convey the same informational content. The assumed old/new informational status has then an influence on the grammatical choices made by the writers. In particular we investigate here, using the web as corpus, the constraints that govern writers’ choice between the following non-restrictive modifiers of nouns that aim at optimizing the relevance (as defined by Sperber & Wilson) of the referents denoted by the nouns they modify: nominal appositives, appositive relative clauses, non-restrictive pre-modifiers.
Highlights
Within Vallduví’s information packaging amework, we investigate the influence of the hearer new/hearer old informational status on the possibility to use relevance-oriented, non-restrictive modifiers such as appositive relative clauses, nominal appositives, pre-modifiers etc
4 In Loock (2003, 2005, 2007, 2010), we have suggested the existence of three main discourse functions for appositive relative clauses (ARCs) in English, filling in a blank in the vast literature on the subject
We study relevance ARCs alongside other relevance-oriented structures; that is, structures that convey non-restrictive information aimed at optimizing the relevance of a specific referent and, by doing so, the relevance of the subject-predicate relation in the main clause as a whole; the informational status of the referent and the informational content of such relevance-oriented structures is crucially indeterminable
Summary
The aim of this paper is to try and establish the existence of what we call a “fame effect”, which could explain writers’ choices between different syntactic structures to convey the same informational content/logico-semantic meaning. Within Vallduví’s information packaging amework, we investigate the influence of the hearer new/hearer old informational status on the possibility to use relevance-oriented, non-restrictive modifiers such as appositive relative clauses, nominal appositives, pre-modifiers etc. In the first section we expose and define our starting point, that is relevance appositive relative clauses ( ARCs) such as defined in Loock’s (2003, 2005, 2007, 2010) taxonomy of ARCs’ discourse functions, as well as their competing structures. In the second section we list the constraints that govern writers’ choices between ARCs and their competing structures, with special emphasis on what we call the “fame effect”, to which this paper is dedicated. Starting point: relevance appositive relative clauses and their competing structures
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