Pragmatics and Information Structure

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Ward ◽  
Betty J. Birner ◽  
Elsi Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Linguistic Context ◽  
Growing Body

Information structure deals with the question of how—and specifically, in what order—we choose to present the informational content of a proposition. In English and many other languages, this content is structured in such a way that given, or familiar, information precedes new, or unfamiliar, information. Because givenness and newness are largely matters of what has come previously in the discourse, information structuring is inextricably tied to matters of context—in particular, the prior linguistic context—and this is what makes information structure quintessentially pragmatic in nature. While it has long been recognized that various non-canonical word orders function to preserve a given-before-new ordering in an utterance, a great deal of research has focused on how to determine the specific categories of givenness and newness that matter for information structuring. A growing body of psycholinguistic work explores the role that these categories play in language comprehension.

Pragmatics for Latin

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

St’át'imcets intonation contours: a preliminary study

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-155
Author(s):  
Marion Caldecott
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Northwest Coast ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Intonational Meaning ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Preliminary Study ◽  
Interior Salish

AbstractAcoustic research on the prosody and intonation of Northwest Coast languages has until recently been under-researched. This paper joins the growing body of research on the subject and reports on the results of the first study of intonation in St’át'imcets (Lillooet Salish; Northern Interior Salish). It tests the generalization proposed by Davis (2007) that information structure is not correlated with prosody in Salish languages by comparing the intonation contours of declaratives and yes/no questions. Specifically, I ask two questions: is nuclear accent rightmost? And are yes/no questions associated with higher pitch, as predicted by the Universality of Intonational Meaning? Results are comparable to those reported for other Salish languages, namely Koch (2008, 2011) on Nɬeʔkepmxcín, Jacobs (2007) on Skwxwú7mesh and Benner (2004, 2006) and Leonard (2011) on SENĆOŦEN. Nuclear accent is associated with the rightmost stressed vowel, regardless of focus, and while no speaker signals yes/no questions with a final rise, each has higher pitch within typologically common parameters.

scholarly journals A scalable approach for ideation in biologically inspired design

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Vandevenne ◽  
Paul-Armand Verhaegen ◽  
Simon Dewulf ◽  
Joost R. Duflou
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Biological Information ◽  
Reference Database ◽  
Automated Classification ◽  
Biologically Inspired ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Biologically Inspired Design

AbstractThis paper presents a bioinspiration approach that is able to scalably leverage the ever-growing body of biological information in natural-language format. The ideation tool AskNature, developed by the Biomimicry 3.8 Institute, is expanded with an algorithm for automated classification of biological strategies into the Biomimicry Taxonomy, a three-level, hierarchical information structure that organizes AskNature's database. In this way, the manual work entailed by the classification of biological strategies can be alleviated. Thus, the bottleneck is removed that currently prevents the integration of large numbers of biological strategies. To demonstrate the feasibility of building a scalable bioideation system, this paper presents tests that classify biological strategies from AskNature's reference database for those Biomimicry Taxonomy classes that currently hold sufficient reference documents.

Information Structure and Language Comprehension

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elsi Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Reaction Time ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Major Research ◽  
Psycholinguistic Research ◽  
Prosodic Cues ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Syntactic Cues

This chapter explores the relationship between information structure and language comprehension from a psycholinguistic perspective. More specifically, it considers how information structure, when signalled by syntactic or prosodic cues, is processed during language comprehension. It begins with a brief review of some of the key psycholinguistic methods that have been used to investigate questions about information structure, including reaction-time-based measures, attention-based measures, and off-line methods. It then discusses major research findings regarding the comprehension of syntactic cues and prosodic cues to information structure. It also considers the relationship between prosody and information structure and its importance to our understanding of focus and focus alternatives. The article concludes by outlining broader issues and directions for psycholinguistic research on information structure.

scholarly journals Going the Extra Mile: Effects of Discourse Context on Two Late Positivities During Language Comprehension

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Brothers ◽  
Eddie W. Wlotko ◽  
Lena Warnke ◽  
Gina R. Kuperberg
Keyword(s):  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Linguistic Context ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Prior Context ◽  
Preceding Context

During language comprehension, online neural processing is strongly influenced by the constraints of the prior context. Although the N400 event-related potential (ERP) response (300–500 ms) is known to be sensitive to a word’s semantic predictability, less is known about a set of late positive-going ERP responses (600–1,000 ms) that can be elicited when an incoming word violates strong predictions about upcoming content (late frontal positivity) or about what is possible given the prior context (late posterior positivity/P600). Across three experiments, we systematically manipulated the length of the prior context and the source of lexical constraint to determine their influence on comprehenders’ online neural responses to these two types of prediction violations. In Experiment 1, within minimal contexts, both lexical prediction violations and semantically anomalous words produced a larger N400 than expected continuations ( James unlocked the door/laptop/gardener), but no late positive effects were observed. Critically, the late posterior positivity/P600 to semantic anomalies appeared when these same sentences were embedded within longer discourse contexts (Experiment 2a), and the late frontal positivity appeared to lexical prediction violations when the preceding context was rich and globally constraining (Experiment 2b). We interpret these findings within a hierarchical generative framework of language comprehension. This framework highlights the role of comprehension goals and broader linguistic context, and how these factors influence both top-down prediction and the decision to update or reanalyze the prior context when these predictions are violated.

scholarly journals Scalar implicature in Chitonga-speaking children

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Jodi Reich ◽  
Kelly Nedwick ◽  
Teodora Niculae-Caxi ◽  
Yang Liu ◽  
Elena L. Grigorenko
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Scalar Implicature ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Linguistic Context ◽  
Data Collection Methods ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Collection Methods

Research on the acquisition of scalar implicature (SI) has provided evidence that young children interpret SI differently from adults. However, results have varied, and there is now mounting evidence that around six years of age, children are able to derive the pragmatic inferences associated with SI (Foppolo, Guasti, and Chierchia, 2012). Variability in results across studies could be due to factors such as data collection methods and language-specific differences. In order to add to the growing body of literature in a meaningful way, this research investigated the interpretation of sentences that include SI by Chitonga-speaking children (7-15 years old) in rural Southern Province, Zambia, who were notably beyond the key age of six. The results of this study provide valuable insight into the interpretation of SI in a Bantu language and suggest that the acquisition of pragmatic felicity with words on a scale follows the order of acquisition identified in previous research, but may emerge at a later age in this linguistic context.

scholarly journals The use of syntax and information structure during language comprehension: Evidence from structural priming

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayden Ziegler ◽  
Jesse Snedeker
Keyword(s):  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Structural Priming ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Thematic Role ◽  
Priming Effects ◽  
Situational Demands ◽  
Different Levels

Structural priming in comprehension seems to be more variable than in production. Sometimes it occurs without lexical overlap, sometimes it does not. This raises questions about the use of abstract syntactic structure and how it varies across tasks. We use a visual-world eye tracking judgment task and observe two kinds of priming effects. First, participants were more likely to switch to looking at the target referent immediately after the word when the syntactic structure of the target matched that of the prime. Second, participants also looked more to referents that could take on the thematic role that was in sentence-final position in the prime sentence, and thus in discourse focus. Critically, neither effect depended upon lexical overlap. Our results suggest that structural priming in comprehension manifests itself differently depending on situational demands, reflecting the activation of different levels of representation under different pressures.

scholarly journals Noun Phrases as expressions of evidentiality: an analysis of four English abstract nouns and their Spanish equivalents

Kalbotyra ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 69 (69) ◽  
pp. 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Carretero
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
English Abstract ◽  
Linguistic Context ◽  
Comparable Corpora ◽  
Abstract Nouns ◽  
Labelling Function ◽  
Shell Nouns

This paper presents an analysis of the expression of evidentiality with the English nouns evidence, indication, proof and sign and their Spanish equivalents evidencia, indicación, prueba and señal. The nouns are described as shell nouns having the properties of encapsulating, signalling and labelling. The delimitation of their evidential and non-evidential uses is determined by three factors: existence of a qualified proposition (Belief), non-occurrence within an irrealis context and constant value of the evidential qualification when the Belief refers to a plurality of events. The difficulties posed by the delimitation illustrate the problems involved in determining the scope of evidentiality when expressed by lexical devices belonging to the content of a proposition. A quantitative analysis was carried out on 400 occurrences of the nouns, extracted from two comparable corpora. The results reveal that all the nouns except two expressed evidentiality in most cases, that the linguistic context in which they appear shows great variation in terms of syntax and information structure, and that the labelling function is prominent. The results also uncover idiosyncratic evidential expressions with some of the nouns.

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