THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF PREPOSING.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

WARD, GREGORY LOUIS.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Subjects (All):

Linguistics.

0290.

Local Subjects:

0290.

Physical Description:

313 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 46-08A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

The extrasentential competence which underlies a speaker's knowledge about the appropriateness of some syntactically well-formed sentence in a particular context has come to be called pragmatic competence. This research examines that aspect of pragmatic competence involved in English preposing constructions (e.g., That part we haven't finished yet). An analysis of 915 tokens of naturally occurring data reveals that preposing performs two simultaneous functions in discourse. First, the referent of the preposed constituent marks the BACKWARD LOOKING CENTER of an utterance (cf. Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein 1983). A BACKWARD LOOKING CENTER (BLC) is a discourse entity which is related to the set of previously evoked discourse entities, i.e. the set of FORWARD LOOKING CENTERS (FLC), via a salient SCALAR relationship (cf. Hirschberg 1985). Second, preposing constructions are 'presuppositional' (cf. Jackendoff 1972) in that they mark an OPEN PROPOSITION (OP) as salient in the discourse (cf. Prince 1981). A preposed sentence consists of two parts: the OP and the FOCUS. The OP contains one or more unbound variables which are instantiated with the 'new information' or FOCUS (cf. Wilson and Sperber 1979) of the utterance. The FOCUS (or FOCI) of an OP is representable as a value on some SCALE, and is realized prosodically with an accented syllable. Based on whether or not the FOCUS is preposed, two types of preposing are distinguished: FOCUS PREPOSING and TOPICALIZATION. The BLC of FOCUS PREPOSING contains the FOCUS of the utterance, in which case it bears the single accented syllable of the utterance. TOPICALIZATION, on the other hand, involves a non-FOCUS BLC, and bears multiple accented syllables: one on or within the preposed constituent and one on the constituent containing the (non-preposed) FOCUS. A taxonomy of preposing is presented, based on the type of scalar relation that holds between the BLC and the FLC, the discourse status of the OP, and the semantic type of information which instantiates the variable of the OP. It is shown how preposing, together with intonation, specifically affects utterance interpretation.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-08, Section: A, page: 2284.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1985.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.