The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová
The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová
The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová
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(19) a. What happened?<br />
b. Přijel vlak.<br />
arrived train<br />
‘A train arrived.’<br />
(20) a. What happened to the train?<br />
b. Vlak || přijel.<br />
train arrived<br />
‘<strong>The</strong> train arrived.’<br />
This is basically the story. 14 <strong>The</strong>re are still many questions that need to be addressed –<br />
and I will address them in the coming sections and chapters – but the core <strong>of</strong> the argument<br />
is as simple as this: If a given element α G is asymmetrically c-commanded by a non-G<br />
element, α G needs to move. If there is no <strong>of</strong>fending c-command relation, G-movement<br />
does not take place.<br />
Before I approach developing the syntactic system in more detail, I want to shortly address<br />
what I mean by given.<br />
In the literature on information structure it is agreed, at least since Halliday (1967), that<br />
an utterance may be divided into two parts, one <strong>of</strong> which is more established in the discourse<br />
(common ground, context. . . ) than the other. While the terminology and the actual<br />
approaches vary widely (see for example Kruijff-Korbayová and Steedman (2003) for a<br />
recent overview), there is a strong intuition that the two parts are complementary to each<br />
other. Thus, it is a reasonable assumption that a grammar might refer only to one <strong>of</strong> the<br />
parts. <strong>The</strong> question then is which part is relevant.<br />
<strong>The</strong> approach I take here is based on the idea that the part encoded in the grammar is<br />
the given part (on given/new or given/focus scale). For arguments for this type <strong>of</strong> approach<br />
see, for instance, Williams (1997); Schwarzschild (1999); Krifka (2001); Sauerland (2005);<br />
Reinhart (2006).<br />
As to the question <strong>of</strong> how exactly given is defined for now I will adopt Schwarzschild’s<br />
definition <strong>of</strong> givenness, stated in (21). <strong>The</strong> definition is based on the observation that<br />
for element α to be given, which in English roughly corresponds to being deaccented, α<br />
must be entailed by the previous discourse and α must have a salient antecedent. Since<br />
entailment refers to proposition, the definition ensures that entailment can be stated for any<br />
α (not only propositional but also referential and predicational), (21-b).<br />
(21) Definition <strong>of</strong> Given (modified from Schwarzschild 1999, p. 151, (25))<br />
α is interpreted as Given in an utterance U iff there is a salient antecedent A such<br />
that<br />
a. α and A corefer; or<br />
14 <strong>The</strong>re is one crucial piece missing: dependence <strong>of</strong> G-movement on head movement. I will discuss this<br />
property in section 1.3 and 2.3.<br />
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