The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

(23) What can be understood as new?
a. (i) What did Marie give to Pavel?
(ii) Marie dala Pavlovi [facku] New ←− slap
b. (i) What did Marie give to whom?
(ii) Marie dala [Pavlovi facku] New ←− Pavel a slap
c. (i) What did Marie do?
(ii) Marie [dala Pavlovi facku] New ←− gave Pavel a slap
d. (i) What happened?
(ii) [Marie dala Pavlovi facku] New ←− Marie gave Pavel a slap
In contrast, if an utterance contains any deviance from the basic order, then such an utterance
is infelicitous in an all-new context. It means that if any reordering takes place,
at least one constituent must be α G , i.e., introduced in the previous discourse. In other
words, any reordering limits the number of structural positions in which we can identify
the partition between given and new. For example, in a derived word order, as in (24), there
is only one felicitous interpretation of the information structure. More precisely, only the
rightmost constituent can be interpreted as new (non-G). In this particular case, it is the
indirect object Pavel. Thus, in (24) there is only one possible partition between given and
new, in contrast to (22) that is compatible with several partitions, as schematized in (25).
(24) Focus Projection within a derived word order:
a. Marie dala facku [Pavlovi] New ←− S V DO || IO t DO
b. #Marie dala [facku Pavlovi] New
c. #Marie [dala facku Pavlovi] New
d. #[Marie dala facku Pavlovi] New
(25) a. Marie dala facku || Pavlovi.
b. (||) Marie (||) dala (||) Pavlovi (||) facku.
What we can learn from the observed pattern is that in basic word order there is a relative
freedom in what parts of the utterance can be interpreted as new and what parts can be interpreted
as given. As I have already anticipated in the previous discussion of G-movement,
this pattern can be described in the following manner: whatever is interpreted as given cannot
be linearly preceded by anything interpreted as new.
Let’s now turn to the question of how exactly the multiple partition effect follows from
our system. To see that, we will look at a very simple case: a transitive clause that has no
modifiers, only a subject, a verb, and an object. Consider first the case where the subject is
the only given element. As we already know, the resulting word order is SVO, as seen in
(26) and (27). 16
(26) a. Subject-G verb Object ←−
b. #Object verb Subject-G
16 I use here examples with potom ‘then, afterward’ instead of a wh-question. The reason is that potom
creates a natural context where only the subject is presupposed/given. For reasons that are not clear to me, it
is difficult to obtain the same pragmatic effect with a wh-question.
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