Open AccessInformation structure and referential givenness/newness: How much belongs in the grammar?
Author(s) -
Jeanette K. Gundel
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2003.8
Subject(s) - information structure , focus (optics) , linguistics , computer science , grammar , rule based machine translation , cognition , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , psychology , philosophy , physics , neuroscience , optics
This paper is concerned with such concepts as topic, focus and cognitivestatus of discourse referents, which have been included under the labelinformation structure (alternatively information status), as they are relatedin some sense to the distribution of given and new information. It addressesthe question of which information structural properties are best accounted forby grammatical constraints and which can be attributed to non-linguisticconstraints on the way information is processed and communicated. Two logicallyindependent senses of given-new information are distinguished, one referentialand the other relational. I discuss some examples of linguistic phenomena thatpertain to each of these different senses and show that both are linguisticallyrelevant and must be represented in the grammar. I also argue that phenomenarelated to both senses have pragmatic effects that do not have to berepresented in the grammar since they result from interaction of the languagesystem with general pragmatic principles that constrain inferential processesinvolved in language production and understanding.