Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty J. Birner ◽  
Gregory Ward
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Status

Word order in Croatian Sign Language

2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 169-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Milković ◽  
Sandra Bradarić-Jončić ◽  
Ronnie B. Wilbur
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Basic Word ◽  
New Information ◽  
Information Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Head Positions

This paper focuses on the basic word order of Croatian Sign Language (HZJ) and factors that permit alternative word orders to occur in sentences and in context. Although they are unrelated languages, the basic word order in HZJ is the same as in spoken Croatian: SVO. One of the factors allowing alternative word orders in context is information status (old or new), which influences constituent placement, as in other languages. HZJ has a tendency to omit old, previously mentioned information, usually the Subject, and the part that is expressed is the new information (Rheme). When old information is expressed, it appears at the beginning of the sentence, preceding the Rheme. Like other languages, HZJ word order can be influenced by the nature of the arguments (Subject, Object) as well as the type of Verb. Sentences with ‘reversible’ arguments (i.e. both are animate and could be agents) tend to use the basic word order, whereas those with nonreversible arguments allow more variable word order. Basic word order also occurs more often with plain verbs (those that do not agree with their arguments). Agreeing and spatial verbs use other word orders in addition to SVO, including the tendency to position Verbs at the end of sentences. Investigation on the interaction of word order and the grammatical usage of facial expressions and head positions (nonmanual marking) indicates that nonmanual markings have pragmatic roles, and could have syntactic functions which await further research.

Information status and Word Order: An Analysis of English Inversion

Language ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty J. Birner
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Status

Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English

Language ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Dirk Noel ◽  
Betty J. Birner ◽  
Gregory Ward
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Status

scholarly journals Word order and information status in child language

Cognition ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 107 (1) ◽  
pp. 317-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhuvana Narasimhan ◽  
Christine Dimroth
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Information Status

Information status and word order in Croatian Sign Language

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (11-12) ◽  
pp. 1007-1017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Milković ◽  
Sandra Bradarić‐Jončić ◽  
Ronnie B. Wilbur
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Status

scholarly journals Discourse functions at the periphery: noncanonical word order in English

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty J. Birner
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
New Information ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Information Packaging ◽  
The Status ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Discourse Functions

Speakers have a wide range of noncanonical syntactic options that allow them to mark the information status of the various elements within a proposition. The correlation between a construction and constraints on information status, however, is not arbitrary; there are broad, consistent, and predictive generalizations that can be made about the information-packaging functions served by preposing, postposing, and argument-reversing constructions. Specifically, preposed constituents are constrained to represent discourse-old information, postposed constituents are constrained to represent information that is either discourse-new or hearer-new, and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preposed constituent be at least as familiar as that represented by the postposed constituent (Birner & Ward 1998). The status of inferable information (Clark 1977; Prince 1981), however, is problematic; a study of corpus data shows that such information can be preposed in an inversion or a preposing (hence must be discourse-old), yet can also be postposed in constructions requiring hearer-new information (hence must be hearer-new). This information status – discourse-old yet hearer-new – is assumed by Prince (1992) to be non-occurring on the grounds that what has been evoked in the discourse should be known to the hearer. I resolve this difficulty by arguing for a reinterpretation of the term 'discourse-old' as applying not only to information that has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse, but rather to any information that provides a salient inferential link to the prior discourse. Extending Prince’s notion in this manner allows us to account for the distribution of noncanonically positioned peripheral constituents in a principled and unified way.  

scholarly journals Children’s use of prosody and word order to indicate information status in English noun phrase conjuncts

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura De Ruiter ◽  
Bhuvana Narasimhan ◽  
Jidong Chen ◽  
Jonah Lack
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
New Order ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Information Status ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Noun

Our study investigates the influence of information status on word order and prosody in children and adults. Using an elicited production task, we examine the ordering and intonation of noun phrases in phrasal conjuncts in 3-5-year-old and adult speakers of English. Findings show that English-speaking children are less likely to employ the ‘old-before-new’ order than adults and are also not adult-like in using prosody to mark information status. Our study suggests that even though intonation and word order are linguistic devices that are acquired early, their use to mark information status is still developing at age four.

scholarly journals Locality and Expectation Effects in Hindi Preverbal Constituent Ordering

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidharth Ranjan ◽  
Rajakrishnan Rajkumar ◽  
Sumeet Agarwal
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Information Status ◽  
N Gram ◽  
Case Markers ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Constituent Ordering

We investigate the relative impact of two influential theories of language comprehension, viz., Dependency Locality Theory(Gibson 2000; DLT) and Surprisal Theory (Hale 2001, Levy 2008), on preverbal constituent ordering in Hindi, a predominantly SOV language with flexibleword order. Prior work in Hindi has shown that word order scrambling is influenced by information structure constraints in discourse. However, the impact of cognitively grounded factors on Hindi constituent ordering is relatively underexplored. We test the hypothesis that dependency length minimization is a significant predictor of syntactic choice, once information status and surprisal measures (estimated from n-gram i.e., trigram and incremental dependency parsing models) have been added to a machine learning model. Towards this end, we setup a framework to generate meaning-equivalent grammatical variants of Hindi sentences by linearizing preverbal constituents of projective dependency trees in the Hindi-Urdu Treebank (HUTB) corpus of written text. Our results indicate that dependency length displays a weak effect in predicting reference sentences (amidst variants) over and above the aforementioned predictors. Overall, trigram surprisal outperforms dependency length and parser surprisal by a huge margin and our analyses indicate that maximizing lexical predictability is the primary driving force behind preverbal constituent ordering choices in Hindi. The success of trigram surprisal notwithstanding, dependency length minimization predicts non-canonical reference sentences having fronted direct objects over variants containing the canonical word order, cases where surprisal estimatesfail due to their bias towards frequent structures and word sequences. Locality effects persist over the Given-New preference of subject-object ordering in Hindi. Accessibility and local statistical biases discussed in the sentence processing literature are plausible explanations for the success of trigram surprisal. Further, we conjecture that the presence of case markers is a strong factor potentially overriding the pressure for dependency length minimization in Hindi. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the information locality hypothesis and theories of language production.

scholarly journals Word order variation and ba sentences in Chinese

2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 649-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng-hsi Liu
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Multiple Factors ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
New Information ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Order Variation

Despite extensive research on ba sentences in Chinese, the issue of when ba sentences are used in discourse has received little attention. This study examines the word order variation involving ba sentences by comparing three word orders: the canonical postverbal form, the ba form, and the topicalized preposed form. I show that the choice of the ba form depends on multiple factors, including information status, weight and topicality. The ba form is more likely to be used under two conditions: (a) when the ba NP carries old information but is not highly topical, (b) when the ba NP carries new information and is heavy. Further, my findings raise doubts on the ba NP’s role as a topic in discourse.

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