Seminar on Information Structure and Word Order Variation Preposing Gregory Ward Northwestern University Universidade de Santiago de Compostela Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa 18 Xuño 2008

Preposing Preposing is a class of constructions sharing a common syntactic structure: The occurrence of a lexically-governed postverbal phrasal constituent occurring in preverbal position. Under this definition, subcategorized NPs, APs, VPs, and PPs are included; various adverbials and adjuncts are not.

NP (most common) Colonel Bykov had delivered to Chambers in Washington six Bokhara rugs which he directed Chambers to present as gifts from him and the Soviet Government to the members of the ring who had been most co-operative. One of these rugs Chambers delivered Ø to Harry Dexter White. Another he gave Ø to Hiss – but not as a routine “payment on rent.” In the classic tradition of espionage operations, Hiss had parked his car on a street corner, and Chambers had driven to a point nearby. [Nixon, R. Six Crisis. 1962:58]

PP To back up Wattenberg’s contention that American women are getting what they wanted – with or without the ERA, there are statistics offered, statistics about how many married women are now in the labor force, statistics about the number of women in “good’’ jobs. “With better jobs and more education,” he writes, “women are also moving forward on the dollar front.” For that last bold assertion there are no statistics Ø. That’s because they wouldn't back up the argument, not even a little. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

VP And the end of the term I took my first schools; it was necessary to pass, if I was to stay at Oxford, and pass I did Ø, after a week in which I forbade Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced black coffee and charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts. I remember no syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient, lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour. [Waugh E. Brideshead Revisited. 1945:45]

AP (least common) The plan is to purchase the quaint fishing village of Ferness and replace it with a giant new refinery. The villagers – who’ve been farming, fishing, raising families and pub crawling in splendid isolation for generations – offer amazingly little resistance. Humble they may be Ø. But daft they ain’t Ø. If the Americans are all that eager to turn a few industrious Scotsmen into instant millionaires, they should not be denied the privilege. [Philadelphia Inquirer movie review]

Preposing: General Constraints All felicitous preposings require: a salient set relation between the trigger in the prior context and the link of the proposing; a salient open proposition whose instantiation represents the focus of the utterance. Together, these constitute necessary and sufficient conditions for felicitous preposing. Other factors affect the observed distribution.

Subcategorized PPs vs. Adjunct PPs Subcategorized PP: [Discourse-initially] #In a basket, I put your clothes Ø. [cf. I put your clothes in a basket.] Adjunct PP: In New York, there’s always something to do. [cf. There’s always something to do in NY.]

Preposing and Information Structure: The Link The discourse entity corresponding to the preposed constituent (or a subconstituent within the preposed constituent) must be anaphorically linked to the trigger of the preceding discourse via a salient set relation; this set is called the anchoring set. Although there need be no link in a canonical- word-order (CWO) utterance, preposing necessarily marks the preverbal constituent as a link to the prior discourse.

Preposing and Information Structure: The Anchoring Set The notion of anchoring set subsumes both explicitly evoked and inferentially related links. Customer: Can I get a bagel? Server: No, sorry. We’re out of bagels. A bran muffin I can give you Ø. [service encounter, Philadelphia diner] Here, the link (a bran muffin) and the trigger (bagels) stand in a salient set relation as alternate members of the inferred anchoring set {breakfast baked goods}.

Preposing and Information Structure: The Anchoring Set The link itself can also be explicitly evoked in the prior discourse: A: Can I get a bagel? B: Sorry — all out. A: How about a bran muffin? B: A bran muffin I can give you Ø. Here, the link (a bran muffin) is coreferential with one of the triggers explicitly mentioned by A.

Preposing and Information Structure: The Anchoring Set Facts about the world thus come in twice on the road from meaning to truth: once to determine the interpretation, given the meaning, and then again to determine the truth value, given the interpretation. This insight we owe Ø to David Kaplan’s important work on indexicals and demonstratives, and we believe it is absolutely crucial to semantics. [Barwise & Perry 1983:11] Here, the link exhausts the anchoring set, consisting of a singleton member; note the absence of any sense of contrast here.

Preposing and Information Structure: The Anchoring Set Another example of a link to an anchoring set with a single member is Proposition Affirmation: The other half of the double bill is “Sister Mary Ignatius”. Whereas Lohrmann has to overcome a poor script to be bright, Durang has handed Ginny Brown Graham, via Sister Mary Ignatius, a fantastic script, and all she has to do is shine. And shine she does Ø. [Au Courant, 4/1/85] Here, the link shine is explicitly mentioned in the preceding sentence. The anchoring set consists of a singleton member, evoked by the trigger and referenced in the link.

Preposing and Information Structure: The Form of the Link However, the link of Proposition Affirmation is sensitive to the linguistic form of the trigger: The other half of the double bill is “Sister Mary Ignatius”. Whereas Lohrmann has to overcome a poor script to be bright, Durang has handed Ginny Brown Graham, via Sister Mary Ignatius, a fantastic script, and all she has to do is glow. #And shine she does. Here, although shine and glow could be seen as standing in a relation of semantic identity, infelicity results because the salient relation between the link and trigger is not one of morphological identity. Thus, the relation between the link and trigger in proposition affirmation is more constrained than in other types of preposing.

Preposing and Information Structure: The OP The second constraint on preposings is that they require a salient or inferable open proposition (OP) in the discourse. An OP is a sentence that contains one or more variables; in a felicitous preposing, this OP represents what is assumed by the speaker to be salient or inferrable at the time of the utterance. The variable in the OP is instantiated with the focus, which constitutes the ‘new’ information of the utterance, and is constrained to be a member of a contextually licensed set. Prosodically, the focus is realized with a nuclear pitch accent.

Preposing and Information Structure: Two Major Types Our examination of NOD reveals that preposings can be classified into two major types based on their intonation and information structure (Prince 1981, Ward 1988): Focus Preposing Topicalization The preposed constituent of focus preposing contains the focus of the utterance, and bears nuclear accent; the rest of the clause is typically deaccented. Topicalization, on the other hand, involves a preposed constituent other than the focus and bears multiple pitch accents: at least one on the preposed constituent and at least one on the (non- preposed) focus. Nonetheless, both types of preposing require a salient or inferable OP at the time of utterance for felicity.

Focus Preposing I made a lot of sweetbreads. A couple of pounds I think I made for her. [C. Ward in conversation] [sweetbreads = mollejas/lechecillas] A: Where can I get the reading packet? B: In Steinberg. [Gives directions] Six dollars it costs. [two students in conversation] FP marks the utterance as a focus-presupposition construction,with the preposed constituent, six dollars, containing the nuclear accent, representing the focus of the utterance.

Focus Preposing To construct the relevant OP, the preposed constituent containing the focus is first returned to its canonical argument position. The focus is then replaced with a variable, which is restricted to be a member of some contextually licensed set. The focus instantiates the variable in the OP and represents a member of that set. OP = It costs X, where X is a member of the set {prices}. It costs some amount of money. Focus = six dollars

Focus Preposing Here, six dollars serves as the link to the preceding discourse Its referent is a member of the set {prices}, which is part of the inferrable OP. In this example, the OP can be inferred on the basis of the prior context; from mention of a reading packet, one is licensed to infer that the packet costs some amount of money. While the anchoring set {prices} is discourse-old, the preposed constituent itself represents information that has not itself been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse.

Topicalization The focus in a topicalization, on the other hand, is not contained in the preposed constituent but occurs elsewhere in the utterance. Intonationally, preposings of this type contain multiple (2+) accented syllables: one occurs within the constituent that contains the focus one occurs within the preposed constituent, which typically occurs in a separate intonational phrase G: Do you watch football? E: Yeah. Baseball I like a lot better. [G. McKenna to E. Perkins in conversation]

Topicalization Here, the preposed constituent is not the focus; better is. The preposed constituent baseball serves as the link to the inferred set {sports}. This anchoring set can be inferred on the basis of the link (baseball) and the trigger (football), explicitly evoked by G in the prior utterance. Note that baseball is accented not because it is the focus but because it occurs in a separate intonational phrase in sentence-initial position. While all foci are accented, not all accented items are foci; typically a single utterance contains a variety of pitch accents, each making a distinct contribution to utterance interpretation.

Topicalization The OP of Topicalization is formed in much the same way as in the case of focus preposing, except that the anchoring set member represented by the preposed constituent is replaced in the OP by the anchoring set itself. OP = I like-to-X-degree {sports}, where X is a member of the set {degrees}. I like sports to some degree. Focus = better

Topicalization Here, the OP includes the variable corresponding to the focus, but note that the link baseball has been replaced by its anchoring set {sports}, i.e. the set that includes both the trigger and the link. The OP that is salient here is not that the speaker likes baseball per se, but rather that he likes sports to some degree. This OP is salient given the prior context in which E is asked if he watches football, from which it can be inferred that G is asking more generally about E’s interest in sports.

Evidence for the Notion ‘Link’ Someone broke into the garage last night. #My father I need to talk to. I’m really tired tonight. #Maybe a movie I’ll rent. Here, there is no plausible set relation between the preposed constituent and anything evoked in the prior context. Indeed, an examination of 747 tokens reveals that in all cases there is a salient set relation between the link of the preposed constituent and something in the prior discourse.

Left-Dislocation What distinguishes left-dislocation (LD) from preposing is the presence of a referential pronoun in the initial constituent’s canonical position. This guy I met on the train, I talked to him for over an hour. Here, the direct object pronoun him is coreferential with the ‘dislocated’ NP this guy I met on the train.

Left-Dislocation Moreover, LD is not only syntactically distinct from preposing, but is functionally distinct as well. The preposed constituent of preposing consistently represents information standing in a contextually licensed set relationship with information evoked in or inferrable from the prior context.

Left-Dislocation No such requirement holds for LD. Thus, the formal distinction between the two types of construction corresponds to a functional distinction, while the formal similarity within the class of preposing constructions corresponds to a functional similarity.

Left-Dislocation Prince (1997) argues that there are in fact three types of LD, distinguishable on functional grounds. Of relevance here is the type of LD that Prince calls ‘simplifying LDs’: A ‘simplifying’ [LD] serves to simplify the discourse processing of discourse-new entities by removing them from a syntactic position disfavored for discourse-new entities and creating a separate processing unit for them. Once that unit is processed and they have become discourse-old, they may comfortably occur in their positions within the clause as pronouns (1997:124).

Left-Dislocation That is, LDs of this type are reserved for entities that are new to the discourse and that are being introduced in a dispreferred (i.e. subject) position. This stands in stark contrast to true preposing constructions, in which the preposed constituent must represent a discourse-old link to the prior discourse.

Summary Thus far, we have examined a range of sentence-types in which a subcategorized phrasal constituent appears in a marked preverbal position. Our corpus-based study has revealed that such preposing, like other marked syntactic constructions, serves an information- structuring function.

Summary First, preposing effects the instantiation of a salient or inferable open proposition; second, the preposed constituent represents a discourse-old link that serves to situate the information presented in the current utterance with respect to the prior context. Such links are related to previously evoked information via a salient set relationship.

Summary In addition, we have identified and analyzed two major types of preposing in English: Focus preposing Topicalization These are distinguishable on the basis of whether or not the focused constituent appears in preposed position. In the case of focus preposing, the preposed focus constitutes the link to the prior discourse, while in the case of topicalization the focus remains in canonical position, with the (non- focused) preposed constituent providing the link.

Summary On the other hand, these properties do not hold for left-dislocation, in which a pronoun that is coreferential with the marked constituent appears in that constituent’s canonical position. This formal difference was shown to correspond to a functional difference, while the formal similarity found within the class of preposing constructions was shown to correspond to a functional similarity.