Interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors on basic word order in the languages of Europe

Syntactic complexity, discourse status and animacy as determinants of grammatical variation in Modern English

“…In general, however, topics are characterised as having a semantic, pragmatic and syntactic dimension. From a purely semantic perspective, topic tends to be defined as the constituent which expresses what the clause is about, thus assuming the position of the referent about which something is predicated (Levelt 1989: 151; Lambrecht 1994; Kiss 1998; Sornicola 2006: 375–7). At the pragmatic level, topic has generally been viewed as having an anchoring function, that is, it provides information which is given or old in the listener's presumed state of knowledge, hence available for quick retrieval (Dahl 1974; Chafe 1976; Prince 1981; Maslova & Bernini 2006: 70).…”

“…In terms of syntax, topic is identified with clause-initial position (Chafe 1976; Li & Thompson 1976; Halliday 1985; Sornicola 2006: 378). Placing topical material in initial position constitutes an addressee-oriented strategy since initial topics provide the addressee with an easily accessible and familiar referent that can serve both as a link with previous discourse and as the perspective from which the new information in the sentence can be interpreted (Prince 1981: 224; Sornicola 1994: 4639).…”

“…Secondly, subjects most often play the semantic role of agent, which is pragmatically prominent because actions and events in the real world start with the agent, and, as the Iconicity Principle predicts, a coded experience will be easier to store, retrieve and communicate if it is coded in such a way that its structure corresponds to the order of things in the real world and mirrors universally accepted perceptions of salience and dominance (see Levelt 1989: 138; Siewierska 1994; Horie 2000; Maslova & Bernini 2006: 85–8). These two features of subjects, animacy and agentivity, correlate with easy accessibility of the language material, which in turn involves easy and smooth, almost automatic, processing on the part of the hearer (Halliday 2000; Sornicola 2006: 477). The correlation between topic and human/agent subjects is one of the reasons behind the predominance of actives over passives in English and is supposed to be a crucial factor controlling the active–passive choice (Givón 1979; Bock 1982; Foley 1994).…”

“…The eligibility of the subject/topic depends on an array of crosslinguistic factors which are represented in several prominence hierarchies. These are not categorical but describe tendencies, and apply specially to SVO languages (Sornicola 2006). As figure 1 illustrates, they can be classified into three broad groups (see Siewierska 1988: 29ff.…”

“…When trying to express an action or process involving an agent and a patient, speakers of English are faced with a choice between two basic options, the active and the passive voice, as in (1) and (2) respectively: My boss has hired John as her new assistant.John has been hired by my boss as her new assistant. While the active sentence in (1) displays an agent + patient word order, the long passive (or passive with an overt agent, see Biber et al 1999: 154) illustrated in (2) serves as a reversing-order strategy, yielding the opposite arrangement of constituents, patient + agent 2 . Other strategies, such as topicalisations and left-dislocations, are available in English to alter the basic configuration of linear order, but they differ from passives in being clearly more marked from both a pragmatic and a stylistic point of view, mostly because they result in deviation from the basic SV(O) order (see Siewierska 1984: 234−6; Maslova & Bernini 2006: 113, Sornicola 2006: 392). As for short passives, they are in fact a more frequent alternative to the active than long passives, accounting for more than 80 per cent of all passive constructions in Svartvik (1966: 141), 86 per cent in Biber et al (1999: 938), and more than 88 per cent in my own corpus here (see table 2).…”