Grammatical marking of givenness

The role of givenness, presupposition, and prosody in Czech word order: An experimental study

“…First, they show the relevance (and in a way primacy) of prosody for information structure, and givenness in particular, in a language that was considered a "discourse configurational language" long before this term was introduced (e.g., Mathesius 1939). Second, they show that there is a relation between definiteness and word order, which partly corroborates the proposal of Kučerová (2007Kučerová ( , 2012. At the same time, however, we will show that her proposal is problematic in a number of respects.…”

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AbstractWe present evidence from acceptability judgment experiments that there is systematic prosodic givenness marking in Czech in that discourse-salient elements avoid sentence stress, contra the claim in Kučerová 2007Kučerová , 2012 that givenness is marked only syntactically -by establishing a word order in which all given elements precede all new ones -and not prosodically in Czech. We argue that the syntactic movement of given elements results from the need to avoid the rightmost position where sentence stress falls, and not from a syntactic ordering requirement.

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“…According to a recent approach (Kučerová 2007(Kučerová , 2012, Czech has a special way of grammatically marking givenness. Whereas other intonation languages like English or German make use of deaccentuation, Czech uses syntactic movement to mark an element as given.…”

“…Whereas other intonation languages like English or German make use of deaccentuation, Czech uses syntactic movement to mark an element as given. According to Kučerová (2007Kučerová ( , 2012, a further difference between the two types of givenness marking is that in Czech, givenness is marked only if combined with definiteness or presupposition, whereas in English, discourse-salience alone licenses deaccenting.…”

“…In Section 2 we introduce the core notions discussed in this paper: definiteness, presupposition, and givenness. In Section 3 we discuss two existing approaches to givenness-related word order alternations: the grammatical approach of Kučerová (2007Kučerová ( , 2012, according to which givenness is marked by means of word order, and a prosodic approach, 3:3 according to which givenness is marked prosodically (via *Stress-Given) and only secondarily by word order (via NSR-I). We also briefly discuss the possibility of a multi-factorial approach, according to which a word order restriction and a prosodic restriction could both jointly contribute to word order alternations.…”