Focus assignment in English specificational and predicative clauses: intonation as a cue to information structure?

Praet, Wout Van

doi:10.1080/03740463.2019.1641318

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 20 publications

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“…This allowed us to distinguish three levels, high, mid and low, for each type of tone movement. Tone movements were then ranked in the following order: high fall > mid fall > low fall > high rise > mid rise > low rise (Esser 1988; Van Praet 2019). Rise–fall and fall–rise are included under the fall and rise categories respectively.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing information flow through prosody init-clefts

Bourgoin¹,

O'Grady²,

Davidse³

2021

English Language and Linguistics

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This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificational it-clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices in real time. We examine this in a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of both full and reduced it-clefts extracted from the first London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory and instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted in the following findings about cleft usage in speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what information to make prominent irrespective of the actual discourse-givenness of the constituents. Clefts allow speakers to highlight elements by means of two strategies, syntactic and prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types of prominence in sequence. It-clefts always have a high first pitch accent, which signals some form of reset of the expectations generated by preceding utterances. The choice of whether or not to produce a cleft relative clause is not purely informationally motivated. Rather, reduced clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All of this makes clefts a particularly useful device for speakers responding moment by moment to informational needs and shifting communicative goals.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing information flow through prosody init-clefts

Bourgoin¹,

O'Grady²,

Davidse³

2021

English Language and Linguistics

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show abstract

Re-evaluating the importance of discourse-embedding for specificational and predicative clauses

Praet

2021

PRAG

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This paper studies the discourse-embedding of specificational clauses, in contrast with predicative ones. Specificational clauses – which express a variable – value relation – are assumed to have a ‘fixed’ information structure. This follows from the widespread definition of information structure in terms of a presupposition – focus contrast, which is often conflated with the variable – value contrast, on the one hand, and with a given – new contrast, on the other. Against these conflations, this study demonstrates that the specification is a separate layer of meaning, which not only shows variation in terms of focus-marking (Van Praet and O’Grady 2018), but also in terms of its embedding in specific contexts of use. These findings urge us to revisit not only the basis for distinguishing specificational clauses from predicative ones, but also to separate out the different layers of coded and pragmatic meaning that have been conflated under the header of ‘information structure’.

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Focus assignment in English specificational and predicative clauses: intonation as a cue to information structure?

Cited by 2 publications

References 20 publications

Managing information flow through prosody init-clefts

Managing information flow through prosody init-clefts

Re-evaluating the importance of discourse-embedding for specificational and predicative clauses

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