The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

To sum up, we now have in place a formal system which can account both for syntax
and semantics of givenness in Czech. In the following sections, I will address two remaining
questions: First, what is the relation between givenness and deaccenting in English?
Second, what is the role of phonology in the overall system?
4.6 Givenness versus deaccentuation
In the literature on givenness there is disagreement on how to define the exact semantic
properties of givenness. 19 I have not addressed so far the question of how G-movement
stands with respect to the conditions on givenness assumed for other languages. Since the
literature on givenness is vast I will concentrate here on literature which explicitly argues
for a direct relation between deaccentuation in English and givenness. This is a reasonable
move because the literature arguing for givenness as the default information structure value
(Schwarzschild, 1999; Krifka, 2001; Sauerland, 2005, among others) is based on the claim
that an empirically more accurate theory of English prosody can be built if focus accenting
is eliminated in favor of deaccenting given constituents. 20
I will show in this section that the conditions on deaccenting are weaker than the conditions
on G-movement. In other words, not everything that gets deaccented in English,
G-moves in Czech. I will argue that for a Czech constituent α to be given and be able to
G-move two conditions must be satisfied: (i) α must have a salient (contextually entailed)
antecedent, and (ii) there must be an existential presupposition which α satisfies. On the
other hand, in English, for an element to be deaccented it is enough that the element has
a salient antecedent. The main argument will be based on the behavior of indefinites in
Czech.
Let’s start with Schwarzschild’s informal definition of givenness, in (114).
(114) Definition of GIVEN (Schwarzschild 1999, p. 151, (25))
An utterance U counts as GIVEN iff it has a salient antecedent A and
a. if U is type e, then A and U corefer;
b. otherwise: modulo ∃–type shifting, A entails the Existential F-closure of U.
The question that arises is what it exactly means to have a salient antecedent. Consider the
following English examples and the parallel Czech examples.
(115) (Schwarzschild, 1999, p. 154, ex. (30))
If a MAN owns a DONKEY, his WIFE owns a donkey.
(116) a. Když muž vlastní OSLA, jeho žena vlastní OSLA.
when man owns donkey his wife owns donkey
‘If a man owns a donkey, his wife owns a donkey.’
19 I thank Irene Heim for discussing the facts in this section with me and for helping me sort them out.
20 But see Krifka (2006a) and Krifka (2006b) for arguments that not everything can be captured with a
givenness-only theory.
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