Outline for July 6th

1. LSASummer Institute 2007Stanford UniversityInformation Structure and Word Order Variation LSA.323

2. Outline for July 6th • Introductions • Syllabus / course requirements • Overview of course • Information structure • Data and corpora • Word order variation • Theoretical preliminaries

3. Instructors Betty J. Birner Northern Illinois University bbirner@niu.edu http://www.engl.niu.edu/bbirner/ Gregory Ward Northwestern University gw@northwestern.edu http://www.ling.northwestern.edu/~ward

4. Office Hours • Stanford office location: 460-212 • Office hours: • After class (in 380-380Y) • By appointment

5. Readings and Bibliography • Text/Readings: • All readings are available on-line (on the course website on CourseWork). • Powerpoint slides will be made available (on CourseWork) a few hours after class. • Bibliography: • A partial bibliography of information structure and word order variation available at: http://www.ling.northwestern.edu/~ward/323bib.pdf

6. Requirements Your grade will be based on three equally-weighted components: • Prospectus. The prospectus describes your intended project (≤ 1 p.), including the intended topic, hypothesis, corpus, and some key references. • The prospectus is due (via email) by the Friday of the second week of class (7/13).

7. Requirements • Data sample. At least 50 tokens of the phenomenon to be studied, with the surrounding context (somewhere between several sentences and a paragraph or two for each token, depending on the hypothesis being investigated). • The data sample is due (via email) by the Friday of the third week of class (7/20).

8. Accessing On-Line Corpora To access Stanford’s on-line corpora: • Fill out, sign, and return the license form. • Go to www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/corpora/ for a list of corpora and instructions on how to access them. (You need to ssh.) • Corpora currently available for LSA.323: • TIPSTER • CALLHOME (American English) • American National Corpus • Treebank-3

9. Accessing On-Line Corpora • The corpus TA is Scott Grimm (sgrimm@stanford.edu); you do *not* need to contact him to access the corpora. • Corpus tutorial: Monday, 12:00 p.m. Education 334. Request a box lunch? • We are grateful to the folks at Stanford for arranging to have these corpora available to us. Thank them.

10. Requirements • Abstract. The abstract (≤ 1 p.) summarizes your research question, hypothesis, methodology, and findings. The abstract should be of a form and quality suitable for submission to an academic conference (e.g. LSA). • The abstract is due on the Friday of the fourth week of class (7/27). • Collaborative work encouraged!

11. Class I, July 6th: Theoretical preliminaries REQUIRED READING: • Prince, Ellen F. 1992. The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information-status. In S. Thompson and W. Mann, eds., Discourse Description: Diverse Analyses of a FundraisingText.  Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 295-325.

12. Class II, July 10th: Preposing and postposing REQUIRED READING: • Ward, Gregory and Betty J. Birner. 2001. Discourse and information structure.  In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, and H. Hamilton, eds., Handbook of Discourse Analysis.  Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 119-137.

13. Class III, July 13th: Argument reversal and inferential relations • PROSPECTUS DUE REQUIRED READING: • Birner, Betty J. 2006. Inferential relations and noncanonical word order. In B. Birner and G. Ward, eds., Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 31-51.

14. Class IV, July 17th:Clefts and equatives REQUIRED READINGS: • Prince, Ellen F. 1978. A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. Language 54:883-906. • Ward, Gregory. 2004. Equatives and deferred reference. Language 80:262-289.

15. Class V, July 20th: Functional compositionality • DATA SAMPLE DUE REQUIRED READING: • Birner, Betty J., Jeffrey P. Kaplan, and Gregory Ward. 2007. Functional compositionality and the interaction of discourse constraints. Language 83:323-349.

16. Class VI, July 24th: Cross-linguistic extensions REQUIRED READING: • Kaiser, Elsi and John C. Trueswell. 2004. The role of discourse context in the processing of a flexible word-order language. Cognition 94.2:113-147.

17. Class VII, July 27th: Roundtable discussion • FINAL ABSTRACTS DUE

18. Information Structure • “Given” vs. “new” information • Sentences with all new information are informative, but rare: • This guy sent a letter to a friend in a big city about a controversial topic. • Sentences with all given information are common, but uninformative: • She did. • Most sentences contain a mixture of given and new information: • My friend John sent one of his friends in New York a letter about the depression he’s been suffering from.

19. Information Structure • IS is but one factor that affects word order variation; others (taken from the course description for LSA.341 “Paraphrase and Usage”) include: • length / syntactic weight • animacy / agency • semantics of the relevant phrasal head • predictability…

20. Information Structure • In this course, we’ll be focussing on specific syntactic constructions (the micro level) with an eye to forming significant generalizations across constructions (the macro level). • While our emphasis will be on English (see, however, Class VI), there are many interesting questions that are raised cross-linguistically: • What happens in language contact situations? • What about bilinguals? • How and when do children acquire word order variation?

21. Data and Corpora • Native-speaker intuitions vs. naturally-occurring data (NOD): pros & cons • The Google Syndrome: NOD is an ‘unrefined’ resource; needs analysis. • Converging sources of data: • NOD • Psycholinguistic data (e.g., experiments, brain imaging) • Intuition data (both from analyst and informants) • Moral: each type of data has its advantages and limitations.

22. Data and Corpora Our analyses are based on a corpus of Standard American English, consisting of several thousand tokens of naturally-occurring data (all in accord with our intuitions). Written sources include newspapers, magazines, novels, nonfiction books, academic prose, and portions of the Brown Corpus.

23. Data and Corpora ‘Oral’ sources include personal conversations, TV shows, films, interviews from Working (Terkel 1974), and transcripts of the 1986 Challenger Commission meetings. (Are screenplays ‘oral’?) Style: formal vs. informal; planned vs. unplanned Data not collected randomly (problems with sampling) Statistics on frequency of one non-canonical construction: preposing (e.g., That one I like.)

24. The Preponderance of Preposing • Is preposing more common in writing or in speech? In formal or in informal contexts? • Issues to consider: • The relationship between writing and speech • Does a marked word order ‘compensate’ for the absence of prosody? • Does a marked word order amnesty phonological dispreferences? • As a complex syntactic construction, would a marked word order be more like to occur in written (i.e. planned) language?

25. The Preponderance of Preposing • My valiant attempt to compare the written and spoken language of a single speaker (Richard M. Nixon) was inconclusive. • In his book Six Crises, there were a total of 9719 sentences and 69 preposings, for a ratio of 140:1. How does this compare with other constructions? • Problems in counting (especially by machine): Nixon: That you don't want to answer, huh? Dean: The more we work on it, the more questions we see--- Nixon: ---That you don't want to answer, huh? [The Presidential Transcripts. 1974:95]

26. Word Order Variation Each language provides its speakers with a wide range of paraphrases: truth-conditionally-equivalentsyntactic variants. Truth-conditional equivalence: the gold standard of word order variation.

27. Word Order Variation Basic word order vs. marked word order Are all marked word orders optional? Do all speakers use word order variation?

28. Examples of Word Order Variation in English • Transitive sentences • Pat ate that banana.

29. A. Preposing constructions • Topicalization • That banana Pat ate. (This one she gave away.) • Focus preposing • A: Did Pat eat this banana? • B: No. That banana Pat ate.

30. A. Preposing constructions • Proposition assessment • Proposition affirmation • They said Pat would eat that banana, and eat that banana he did! • And what a banana it was, too! (#And it was what a banana, too!) • A: Pat’s amazing. B: That she is! • A: What’ll it be? B: Two hot dogs, please. A: Two hot dogs it is! (# It is two hot dogs!)

31. A. Preposing constructions • Proposition assessment (cont.) • Proposition suspension • I’m upset that Pat ate a banana, if eat a banana he did. • Proposition denial (“Epitomization”) • Chomsky, you’re not. • Stupid, she’s not.

32. Passive (get and be) • Passive with by-phrase • That banana was eaten by Pat. • That banana got eaten by Pat. • Passive without by-phrase • That banana was eaten. • That banana got eaten.

33. Cleft constructions • it-clefts (“clefts”) • It was that banana that Pat ate. • It was Pat who ate that banana. • wh-clefts (“pseudo-clefts”) • What Pat ate was that banana. • (The one) who ate that banana was Pat. • What Pat did was eat that banana. • reverse wh-clefts • That banana is what Pat ate. • Pat is (the one) who ate that banana. • th-clefts • That’s a banana that Pat ate. • That’s Pat who ate that banana.

34. Inversion • Eating that banana is Pat.

35. Gapping • Chris ate the orange, and Pat, that banana. • Pseudo-gapping • Chris won’t eat that banana, but Pat will, this one.

36. Right-node raising • Pat bought and Chris ate a banana.

37. Left-dislocation • That banana, Pat ate it. • Pat, she ate that banana.

38. Right-dislocation • He ate that banana, Pat. • Pat ate it, that banana. • Right-dislocation with concomitant copula deletion • Tasty piece of fruit, that banana.

39. Heavy NP shift • Pat gave to Chris that huge overripe banana from Brazil.

40. Dative alternation (“ditransitives”, “double object construction”) • Pat gave Chris that banana. • Pat gave that banana to Chris.

41. Particle movement • Pat ate that banana up. • Pat ate up that banana.

42. Extraposition • That Pat ate that banana is unfortunate. • It’s unfortunate that Pat ate that banana.

43. Combinations (partial) • Cleft + passive with by-phrase • It was that banana that was eaten by Pat. • What was eaten by Pat was that banana. • Inversion + passive with by-phrase • Being eaten by Pat is a banana. • Reverse wh-cleft + RD • That’s what I want, that banana.

44. Combinations (cont.) • Reverse wh-cleft + LD + passive • That banana, that’s what was eaten. • Cleft + gapping • It was Chris who ate the orange, and Pat, that banana • Gapping + inversion + passive with by-phrase + proposition suspension • Being eaten in a frenzy by Chris was that orange, and by Pat, that banana, if eaten they were.

45. Examples of Word Order Variation in English • Intransitive sentences • A lovely fountain is in the garden • A lovely fountain stands in the garden.

46. A. Inversion • Locative • In the garden is a lovely fountain. • In the garden stands a lovely fountain. • Non-locative • Also lovely is the fountain in the garden.

47. B. Existential there-sentences • There’s a lovely fountain in the garden. • There is in the garden a lovely fountain.

48. C. Presentational there-sentences • There stands a lovely fountain in the garden. • There stands in the garden a lovely fountain.

49. D. Combinations (partial) • Existential there + preposing • In the garden, there’s a lovely fountain. • Presentational there + preposing • In the garden there stands a lovely fountain. • Inversion + cleft • It was there that stood a beautiful fountain from the mid-1800s.