Word Order, Information Structure and Intonation of Discontinuous Nominal Constructions in Cantonese / Ordre des mots, structure de l’information et intonation des phrases nominales discontinues en Cantonais

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Picus Sizhi Ding ◽  
Caroline Féry
Keyword(s):  
Structural Properties ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Order Information ◽  
Discourse Particles ◽  
Information Status

This paper examines the syntactic, intonational and information structural properties of discontinuous nominal constructions in Cantonese. Four different syntactic constructions are identified which are used to indicate different information status of elements in a noun phrase, all involving two full NPs with either overt or covert heads. Discourse particles play a crucial role, not only for the interpretation of information structure, but also as anchoring points for boundary tones. Otherwise, intonation and prosody are not affected by word order changes, with the exception of optional pauses after or before dislocated constituents.
Cet article examine la structure de l’information des syntagmes nominaux discontinus en Cantonais, ainsi que leurs propriétés syntaxiques et intonatives. Quatre constructions syntaxiques distinctes ont été identifiées qui servent à exprimer des rôles spécifiques de structure de l’information sur des parties de syntagmes nominaux. Ces rôles impliquent deux syntagmes nominaux complets et indépendants l’un de l’autre, avec des têtes prononcées ou non. Les particules discursives jouent un rôle essentiel, non seulement pour l’interprétation de la structure de l’information, mais aussi pour l’ancrage des tons de frontière. L’intonation et la prosodie ne jouent aucun rôle en dehors des pauses facultatives avant ou après les syntagmes discontinus. L’intonation n’est pas affectée par les changements d’ordre des mots.


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.

scholarly journals Sõnajärg, infostruktuur ja objekti kääne eesti keeles

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ogren
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Relevant Parameter ◽  
Order Information ◽  
Boundedness Criterion ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Order Variation ◽  
The Relationship

Objekti kääne eesti keeles oleneb eelkõige tegevuse ja objekti piiritle- (ma)tusest, kuid da-infinitiiviga konstruktsioonides leidub palju varieerumist objekti käändes, mida ei ole võimalik seletada piiritletuse mõiste abil. Suur osa sellest varieerumisest on seotud sõnajärjega: da-infinitiivile järgnev objekti on pigem totaalne, infinitiivile eelnev objekt on pigem partsiaalne. Artiklis vaadeldakse seoseid sõnajärje ja objekti käände vahel neljas sagedases da-infinitiiviga konstruktsioonis. Kuna eesti keele sõnajärg sõltub suuresti infostruktuurist, uuritakse, kas ja kuivõrd on sõnajärjega seotud varieerumine seletatav infostruktuuriliste parameetrite abil. Jõutakse järeldusele, et objekti käände varieerumist ei mõjuta mitte infostruktuur, vaid sõnajärg ise. Artikli lõpuosas arutletakse selle üle, miks võiks sõnajärg üldse mõjutada objekti käänet ning miks selle mõju piirdub infiniitsete konstruktsioonidega.Abstract. David Ogren: Word order, information structure and object case in Estonian. While object case in Estonian depends primarily on the boundedness of the action and the object nominal, numerous constructions with da-infinitive verb forms exhibit object case variation that cannot be explained by the boundedness criterion. A considerable amount of this variation is related to word order: VO word order in the da-infinitive phrase favors the use of the total object, OV word order favors the partial object. The article examines the relationship between word order and object case in four common da-infinitive constructions. As word order in Estonian is heavily dependent on information structure, the article also investigates whether the relationship between word order and object case can be explained by information-structural features, and finds that the relevant parameter is in fact not information structure, but rather word order itself. The article closes with a discussion of the possible explanations for the relationship between word order and object case and for why this relationship is found only in non-finite constructions.Keywords: object case, da-infinitive, information structure, word order, variation, analogy

scholarly journals Information structure and referential givenness/newness: How much belongs in the grammar?

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanette Gundel
Keyword(s):  
Structural Properties ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Cognitive Status ◽  
The Other ◽  
Language System ◽  
New Information ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Label Information ◽  
The Way

This paper is concerned with such concepts as topic, focus and cognitive status of discourse referents, which have been included under the label information structure (alternatively information status), as they are related in some sense to the distribution of given and new information. It addresses the question of which information structural properties are best accounted for by grammatical constraints and which can be attributed to non-linguistic constraints on the way information is processed and communicated. Two logically independent senses of given-new information are distinguished, one referential and the other relational. I discuss some examples of linguistic phenomena that pertain to each of these different senses and show that both are linguistically relevant and must be represented in the grammar. I also argue that phenomena related to both senses have pragmatic effects that do not have to be represented in the grammar since they result from interaction of the language system with general pragmatic principles that constrain inferential processes involved in language production and understanding.

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 The acquisition of word order in L2 Norwegian: The case of subject and object shift

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merete Anderssen ◽  
Kristine Bentzen ◽  
Guro Busterud ◽  
Anne Dahl ◽  
Björn Lundquist ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Language Production ◽  
The Other ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Object Shift ◽  
Clear Preference ◽  
Syntactic Movement ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Subject And Object

This article reports on a syntactic acceptability judgement study of 59 adult L2/Ln learners of Norwegian and a group of native controls, studying subject and object shift. These constructions involve movement of (mainly) pronominal subjects or objects across negation/adverbs. Both subject shift and object shift display considerable micro-variation in terms of syntax and information structure, dependent on factors such as nominal type (pronoun vs. full DP), function (subject vs. object), and information status (given vs. new/focused). Previous studies have shown that Norwegian children have an early preference for the unshifted position in both constructions, but that they acquire subject shift relatively early (before age 3). Object shift, on the other hand, is typically not in place until after age 6–7. Importantly, children are conservative learners, and never shift elements that should not move in the adult language. The results of the current study show that L2/Ln learners do not make all the fine distinctions that children make, in that they have a clear preference for all subjects in shifted position and all objects in unshifted position, although some distinctions fall into place with increased proficiency. Importantly, unlike children, the L2/Ln learners are not conservative learners; rather, they over-accept syntactic movement in several cases. The equivalent to this in language production would be to apply syntactic movement where it is not attested in the target language, which would be the opposite behaviour to that observed in L1 children.

scholarly journals Definiteness, Information Structure, and Indirect Modification in the Kunbarlang Noun Phrase

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Ivan Kapitonov
Keyword(s):  
Structure Analysis ◽  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Structural Effects

Kunbarlang shows considerable variation in the word order patterns of nominal expressions. This paper investigates these patterns, concentrating on the distribution of noun markers (articles) and on attributive modification. Based on examination of spontaneous discourse and elicitation, I identify two main contributions of the noun marker: definiteness and predicative reading of modifiers. Furthermore, the order of adjectives with respect to the head noun is shown to correlate with information-structural effects. Taken together, these facts strongly support a hierarchical structure analysis of the NP in Kunbarlang. In the second part of the paper, Kunbarlang data are compared to the typology of determiner spreading phenomena. Finally, I entertain the prospects of a more formal analysis of the data presented and indicate their theoretical and typological relevance, including expression of information structure below the clausal level, typology of adnominal elements, and architecture of attributive modification.

scholarly journals Studying word order differences in a historical parallel corpus: An example from Old Spanish and Old Portuguese

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristine Gunn Eide
Keyword(s):  
Structural Properties ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
New Information ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
Old Portuguese

In this article, I use a parallel corpus from the 13th and 14th century to tease out some of the structural differences that existed between Old Spanish and Old Portuguese. While these two related languages were relatively similar in many respects, and the parallel corpus reflects these similarities, differences in syntax and information structure are also apparent. By comparing the syntactic and information structural properties of the sentences that display different word orders, it is possible to pinpoint more exactly what these differences were. The parallel sentences show that information structural properties of the left periphery, where Spanish allows for new information where Portuguese does not, account for differences in both object and subject placement.

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