Topicalization (TOP) in English requires that the topicalized information stand in a partially-ordered set (poset) relationship with previously evoked information, whereas Left-Dislocation (LD) has been argued to have three discourse functions: to simplify the processing of discourse-new information, to trigger a poset inference, or to amnesty an island violation (Prince 1997). In this paper, we examine naturally-occurring instances in which both constructions occur (e.g., ‘Scorpions, those you have to look out for’) and compare them to the corresponding variants with TOP only (‘Scorpions you have to look out for’) and LD only (‘Scorpions, you have to look out for those’). All of the LD+TOP tokens in our corpus are of Prince’s second type, inducing a poset inference. At issue is what motivates a speaker to use both constructions simultaneously, given that the discourse constraints of one subsume those of the other. We argue that there are two motivations, corresponding to two types of LD+TOP: One is to facilitate processing; the other is to effect contrast. In Type I, the fronted constituent is syntactically complex, with LD+TOP simplifying what would have been difficult to process as either LD or TOP alone. In Type II, an alternate member of the poset has been explicitly evoked and an open proposition (OP) is salient; here, LD+TOP serves a contrastive function, with both the preposed constituent and the focus of the OP being contrasted within their respective posets. Finally, whereas previous work has found that discourse functions behave compositionally, this study suggests that where compositionality is precluded, an additional function may be discerned, justifying the simultaneous use of multiple constructions.

This chapter presents a preliminary taxonomy of the various ways in which demonstrative noun phrases are used, with particular focus on examples from English. The classification of demonstrative uses begins with a consideration of the semantic value of the demonstrative NP—whether the speaker is using the demonstrative to denote or refer to an entity, a kind, a predicate, or a variable in a quantificational domain—and then further categorizes the uses of demonstratives on the basis of various pragmatic considerations that influence their interpretation. The taxonomy includes many uses previously identified in the literature as well as other uses that have not heretofore been discussed.

The influence of information status on word order is widely recognized. Both canonical and noncanonical word orderings share a general preference for positioning old information before new information, although there is much disagreement regarding how to characterize “old” and “new” information. Among the key factors that determine the structuring of information in English are the information’s discourse-status and hearer-status (Prince 1992) and the salience of particular open propositions in the discourse. Because noncanonical constructions are used in consistent ways to structure information, formal features of a particular construction make it possible to infer the status of its constituents; thus, the choice of construction for information-packaging purposes simultaneously marks that information’s information status. The type of information status to which a particular English construction is sensitive is partly predictable from its form.

Previous work on English demonstratives (Gundel et al. 1993, Diessel 1999) has shown that distal demonstratives may be used to indicate information status. In this paper, we investigate a use of distal demonstratives that is licensed by (presumed) shared knowledge of culturally-familiar scenarios, rather than by private shared knowledge of particular entities, as exemplified in (1):(1) I’m not really fit to talk in the morning until I’ve had that first cup of coffee. [corpus]Here, the entity specified by the demonstrative NP stands proxy for the familiar routine of beginning’s one day and no specific cup of coffee is being referred to. We show that, by using the demonstrative in this way, the speaker presumes that the hearer is a member of community in which the relevant scenario is familiar.

Rohde et al . (2006) showed that, for transfer verbs, the salience of the recipient argument is a function of the particular coherence relation posited by participants. Using a priming paradigm with transfer verbs and occupation-denoting NPs in isolated sentences, we find that participants are sensitive to the lexical properties of the transfer verb itself as measured by the relative salience of the associated transfer verb arguments. Alternatively, using a sentence completion paradigm—a more strategic task in which participants are guided by discourse-level features—we find participants are sensitive instead to the coherence relations of the relevant event, replicating Rohde et al . (2006). Our findings support the notion that coherence relations drive the interpretation of multi-sentence discourses while sentences considered in isolation are guided by particular features of the linguistic context.

Information structure deals with the question of how—and specifically, in what order—we choose to present the informational content of a proposition. In English and many other languages, this content is structured in such a way that given, or familiar, information precedes new, or unfamiliar, information. Because givenness and newness are largely matters of what has come previously in the discourse, information structuring is inextricably tied to matters of context—in particular, the prior linguistic context—and this is what makes information structure quintessentially pragmatic in nature. While it has long been recognized that various non-canonical word orders function to preserve a given-before-new ordering in an utterance, a great deal of research has focused on how to determine the specific categories of givenness and newness that matter for information structuring. A growing body of psycholinguistic work explores the role that these categories play in language comprehension.

That there is a theoretical distinction between context-dependent and context-independent aspects of utterance interpretation has become a standard assumption in current theories of meaning; however, how and where to draw this distinction has been the subject of considerable debate. In the current study, we investigate whether speakers can systematically distinguish between WHAT IS SAID and WHAT IS IMPLICATED (Grice 1989 [1967]) using a novel truth-value judgment paradigm across a wide range of implicature types. We found that, by providing participants with a clear set of judgment criteria, including the adoption of an objective third-person perspective, we were able to enhance their ability to distinguish conversational implicature from truth-conditional meaning. In addition, we found that none of the implicature types we investigated was either consistently incorporated into or consistently excluded from what is said. Instead, our findings revealed considerable variation in frequency of incorporation across implicature types in ways that do not correspond straightforwardly to the various taxonomies of implicature types proposed in the literature.*

Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1985), pp. 447-458

Ellen F. Prince Gregory Ward, Betty J. Birner, Laurence R. Horn, Barbara Abbott, Pauline Jacobson, and Jerrold M. Sadock Ellen F. Prince, president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2008 and a major figure in the fields of discourse, pragmatics, and information structure, died peacefully in her home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 24, 2010, of lung cancer. She was sixty-six. At the time of her death, Ellen was Professor Emeritus (she would have eschewed the title ‘Emerita’) of Linguistics, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer and Information Science, at the University of Pennsylvania, where she had been a faculty member from 1974 until her retirement in 2005. Ellen was born Ellen Deanna Friedman on February 29, 1944, in the Flatbush1 neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Irving and Jeannette (née Rothkopf) Friedman. As a leap day baby, she enjoyed only sixteen birthdays in her sixty-six years, the last being on February 29, 2008, on which date friends gathered to celebrate her ‘Sweet Sixteen’. Growing up in Brooklyn, she attended Walt Whitman Junior High School for only two years, having skipped eighth grade, and Erasmus Hall High School for four years. In 1960, she enrolled in Brooklyn College, where she received a B.A. in French in 1964. Always interested in language, she completed an M.A. thesis in 1967 also at Brooklyn College, translating and commenting on an Anglo-Norman manuscript under the supervision of Wallace Lipton, while at the same time studying linguistics at New York University in 1966–67. In the fall of 1967 she enrolled in the Linguistics Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania, where her husband Gerald Prince (whom she met in a French poetry class at Brooklyn College and married on June 25, 1967) had been hired as an Instructor of French and where he is currently Professor of Romance Languages. At Penn, she studied under Zellig Harris, the founder of its linguistics department and inventor of transformational grammar. In 1974, she completed her dissertation, which provided a formal analysis of tense and aspect within a Harrisian framework, and was hired at Penn as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics. She soon found herself growing disenchanted with the limitations of sentence-level syntax; at the same time, she was becoming increasingly fascinated with larger units of analysis, specifically the use of language in context and the pragmatic principles that govern the distribution of sentences in discourse. Ellen was inspired by the work of Susumu Kuno, who impressed upon her ‘the fact that the form of an utterance may well have something to do with the communicative intentions of the speaker’ (Prince 1988a:164, acknowledgment note). An early work of Ellen’s—‘A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse’ (1978)—showed this influence to good effect. At the time, these two constructions were viewed as interchangeable. Ellen showed that in fact their discourse functions and constraints are quite different; while the presupposed portion of wh-clefts expresses propositions assumed by the speaker to be in the conscious mind of their addressee, the same is not true of it-clefts, one subvariety of which actually uses the presupposed part to introduce new information to the addressee, an instance of what David Lewis was later to dub ‘accommodation’. [End Page 866] This paper exemplifies an important feature of Ellen’s work, which is her reliance on naturally occurring data. This was before the ready availability of large computerized corpora; almost all of the examples in her paper had been painstakingly collected by hand, either from books and newspapers or, occasionally, from conversations. Well before Google, much less electronic databases, Ellen was ready to enrich her own work or that of colleagues with the inclusion of a deftly selected, fully contextualized example captured in the wild and preserved on a handy index card. Ellen stressed that we human linguists are not very good at constructing or evaluating examples that require specific discourse conditions. Another paper of Ellen’s—‘On the inferencing of indefinite-this NPs’ (1981c)—shows her resourcefulness in finding naturally occurring spoken data. The bulk of the examples in this paper...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Previous analyses of the use of English definite descriptions have generally taken one of two approaches, loosely characterizable as familiarity and uniqueness. That is, felicitous use of the definite article has been argued to require that the referent of the NP be either known to the hearer within the current context of utterance (e.g. Heim 1983, Prince 1992) or uniquely identifiable to the hearer (e.g. Gundel et al. 1993, Birner & Ward 1994, inter alia). What is common to all previous analyses is that the explanatory principle is presented as categorical; i.e. a referent is familiar or not, unique or not. There is generally no provision for gradience within the theory. In what follows we will investigate how familiarity- and uniqueness-based accounts of definiteness fare in accounting for the class of EMBEDDED DEFINITES known as ATTRIBUTIVE-POSSESSION constructions (McKercher 2001) and how the gradient notion of typicality impacts article choice in these constructions.

This article explores the interface between syntactic structure and information structure - in particular, the broad generalizations that can be made between certain noncanonical word orders and information-structural constraints on their use. Various ways of implementing the distinction between 'given' and 'new' information are described, and several classes of word orders (such as preposings, postposings, argument reversals, and clefts) are discussed in terms of the information-status constraints to which they are sensitive. It is argued that classes of related word orders share related constraints but that - both cross-linguistically and within a single language - there are also construction-specific constraints on the correlation between word order and information status.

Scalar implicaure is often offered as the exemplar of generalized conversational implicature. However, despite the wealth of literature devoted to both the phenomenon in general and to specific examples, little attention has been paid to the various factors that may influence the generation and interpretation of scalar implicatures. This study employs the "Literal Lucy" methodology developed in Larson et al. (in press) to further investigate these factors in a controlled experimental setting. Th e results of our empirical investigation suggest that the type of scale employed aff ects whether or not speakers judge a particular scalar implicature to be part of the truth-conditional meaning of an utterance. Moreover, we found that features of the conversational context in which the implicature is situated also play an important role. Specifically, we have found that the number of scalar values evoked in the discourse context plays a significant role in the interpretation of scalar implicatures generated from gradable adjective scales but not other scale types. With respect to the eff ects of scale type, we have found that gradable adjectives were less frequently incorporated into truth-conditional meaning than cardinals, quantificational items, and ranked orderings. Additionally, ranked orderings were incorporated less than cardinals. Th us, the results from the current study show that the interpretation of scalar implicature is sensitive to both the associated scale type and discourse context.

In an empirical study participants were asked to rate the perceived degree of certainty of utterances that contained either the modal would or main verb be (e.g. That would be me vs. That’s me), and which were also variously produced with one of three intonational contours (downstepped, declarative, and yes-noquestion). We found that both downstepped contour and epistemic would made a signicant and independent contribution to the assessment of speaker certainty. That is, participants rated utterances with the downstepped contour as most certain, followed by those with the declarative contour, while the yes-noquestion contour was perceived as highly uncertain. Similarly, participants rated speakers’ responses with epistemic would as signicantly more certain than those without it.