When Data Challenges Theory
Unexpected and paradoxical evidence in information structure
1st Edition
Published on 22. February 2022
313 pages
978-90-272-5815-1 (ISBN)
Description
This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The relevance of 'unexpected' data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning, discourse organization and speakers' rhetorical strategies, thus moving away from 'sentence-based' perspectives. At the same time, this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories, such as Focus and Topic, to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences, all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.
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Davide Garassino | Daniel Jacob
When Data Challenges Theory
Unexpected and paradoxical evidence in information structure
Book
02/2022
John Benjamins Publishing Co
€123.50
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Content
- Intro
- When Data Challenges Theory
- Editorial page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Table of contents
- Introduction. When data challenges theory: The analysis of information structure and its paradoxes
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Information structure and discourse organization
- 2.1 Common ground
- 2.2 Information structure and (implicit) questions
- 2.3 Alternatives and types of focus
- 3. The 'building blocks' of information structure
- 4. The realization of information structure and its 'natural paradoxes'
- 4.1 Information structure and prosody
- 4.2 The IS-prosody-syntax triangle
- 4.3 'Non-canonical' syntax: Left dislocation and cleft sentences in French and Italian
- 5. Conclusion and overview of the volume
- 5.1 As a way of conclusion
- 5.2 Contributions to this volume
- Acknowledgments
- References
- Part I. Theoretical studies
- Distinguishing psychological Given/New from linguistic Topic/Focus makes things clearer
- 1. Two concepts of topic, and some useful definitions
- 2. Non-prototypical clefts?
- 3. Is syntax the real thing?
- 4. Information structure is independent on semantic content
- Acknowledgments
- References
- Remarks on information structure marking asymmetries: The epistemological view on the micropragmatic profile of utterances
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Incongruent topic-focus marking
- 2.1 Ambiguous prosodic signals
- 2.2 Syntactic asymmetries
- 2.3 Asymmetries in morphological marking
- 3. Information structure, focus and alternatives projection
- 3.1 Zimmermann & Onea's proposal: Focus, alternatives and possible worlds
- 3.2 Non-exclusive applicability of the alternatives-evoking function to focus
- 3.3 Contextual effects in the construal of alternatives
- 3.4 Uneconomic implications of alternatives' representation as a precondition for focus interpretation
- 4. Information structure, illocution and evidentiality
- 4.1 Information structure and illocutionary force
- 5. The evidential perspective on information structure
- 5.1 Topic and focus as pragmatic markers of evidentiality
- 5.2 Utterances' illocution and the evidentiality of information structure
- 6. Conclusion
- References
- Alternatives to information structure
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Basic tenets of information structure
- 3. Brief critical assessment
- 4. Alternatives to information structure
- 5. Summary
- Abbreviations
- References
- Part II. Case studies: Experimental and corpus-based perspectives
- How alternatives are created: Specialized background knowledge affects the interpretation of clefts in discourse
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Focus and alternatives
- 2.1 What is focus?
- 2.2 The anaphoric character of alternative sets
- 2.3 How are alternatives generated in discourse?
- 2.4 Hypotheses
- 3. Methods
- 3.1 Participants
- 3.2 Design
- 4. Results
- 4.1 Data elimination procedures
- 4.2 Analysis
- 4.3 Description of results
- 5. Discussion
- 6. Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Appendix
- Is focus a root phenomenon?
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Background
- 2.1 Assertion and epistemic modality
- 2.2 The concept of a judge
- 2.3 Topics as root phenomena
- 2.4 Focus as a root phenomenon: Previous research and the goal of this paper
- 3. The distribution of three information-structural types of c'est-clefts in French
- 3.1 Three information-structural types of clefts
- 3.2 Distribution of c'est-clefts in adverbial clauses
- 3.3 Discussion: Contrastive focus and the concept of a judge
- 4. The distribution of il y a 'there is' clefts in embedded clauses
- 4.1 Introduction
- 4.2 Information-structural types of il y a-clefts
- 4.3 All-focus il y a-clefts inside embedded clauses: New data
- 4.4 Broad vs narrow new information focus and the concept of a judge
- 5. Verb-subject word order in French: An inverse root phenomenon
- 5.1 Introduction
- 5.2 The distribution of vs in embedded clauses
- 5.3 VS and the concept of a judge
- 6. Conclusion
- Acknowledgments
- References
- The curious case of the rare focus movement in French
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Focus movement configurations: Properties and currency
- 3. The interpretation of focus movement
- 4. Conclusive discussion
- Acknowledgement
- References
- To be or not to be focus adverbials?: A corpus-driven study of It. anche in spontaneous spoken Italian
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Focus adverbs and focus structure
- 2.1 Focus of FAs or 'domain of association'
- 2.2 Focus of the sentence and information structure
- 2.3 FAs as focus-binders
- 3. The information distribution of It. anche in utterances produced in spoken Italian: A corpus-driven analysis following the Language into Act Theory
- 3.1 General characterization of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT)
- 3.2 Overview of the information distribution of It. anche in the spoken utterances of DB-IPIC
- 3.3 The information distribution of anche in the textual IUs: A qualitative analysis
- 3.4 Conclusions on the information distribution of It. anche in spontaneous speech
- 4. Interaction between anche and focal information: A description based on the Language into Act theory
- 4.1 It. anche interacts with the c-focus
- 4.2 It. anche interacts with the T-focus
- 4.3 It. anche does not interact with a focus
- 4.4 Conclusions on the interaction between It. anche and focal information as defined in L-AcT
- 5. General concluding remarks
- Acknowledgments
- References
- Unmarked use of marked syntactic structures: Possessives and fronting of non-subject XPs in Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Linguistic features of Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish
- 2.1 Phonetics and phonology
- 2.2 Morphosyntax
- 3. Empirical study
- 3.1 Data and methodology
- 3.2 Results and discussion
- 3.3 Overall discussion
- 4. Concluding remarks and outlook
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Appendix 1. AJT
- Appendix 2. List of all possessive constructions of the BJS corpus by construction type
- Translation as a source of pragmatic interference?: An empirical investigation of French and Italian cleft sentences
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Cleft sentences in French and Italian
- 2.1 Frequency
- 2.2 Form and meaning
- 2.3 Information structure
- 2.4 French and Italian in translation
- 3. Corpus presentation and research questions
- 3.1 The corpus
- 3.2 Research questions and hypotheses
- 4. Quantitative analysis
- 4.1 Frequency
- 4.2 Form of clefts
- 4.3 Information structure
- 4.4 Interim discussion
- 5. Translation of French clefts into Italian
- 5.1 Translation of French clefts: A first glance
- 5.2 Understanding the translation of cleft sentences: Conditional inference trees and random forests
- 5.3 Discussion
- 6. Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Index
