The discursive status of extraposed object clauses

Gentens, Caroline

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2016.03.001

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…In these constructions a complement clause is anticipated by the pronoun it. In a discussion of these constructions, Gentens (2016) characterizes the anticipatory it and the that-clause that follows it as being co-referential (as I've claimed for content nouns and their associated that-clauses in NCC and MoSCC constructions). Here I follow Gentens in focusing specifically only at the cases where the anticipatory it appears in object position and is optional, as in (35).…”

Section: Mos That-clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Manner-of-speaking that-complements as close apposition structures

Cuba

2018

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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An elusive property of that-clauses following manner-of-speaking verbs is that they do not behave like that-clauses following other non-factive verbs when it comes to the availability of wh-extraction, main clause phenomena and complementizer drop. Non-factive that-clauses allow wh-extraction, main clause phenomena and complementizer drop, but manner-of-speaking that-clauses resist them. In addition, the behavior of manner-of-speaking that-clauses patterns with noun complement clauses and that-clauses following the pronoun it. In this paper, I argue that the referential and adjunct status of manner-of-speaking that-clauses, noun complement clauses and that-clauses following the pronoun it is responsible for their shared restrictions on wh-extraction, main clause phenomena and complementizer drop. Specifically, I argue all three of these that-clauses are referential adjuncts in a close apposition relationship with a nominal object.

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Section: Mos That-clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I also leave aside discussion of the interpretive differences between sentences with or without anticipatory it. SeeGentens (2016) for one proposal on the interpretive difference.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Manner-of-speaking that-complements as close apposition structures

Cuba

2018

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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“…NPs are considered new-anchored when they present new instances but still retain a link with the previous discourse which prevents them from being interpretable "outside of context" (Gentens 2016). They are often NPs introducing new notions, like application and criticism in ( 8), but which are anchored to given referents, like the very techniques themselves, allowing the overall referential status to be marked as definite.…”

Section: New-anchoredmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…context(Gentens 2016). It also includes propositions consisting of given information, generally inferable, which contains one wholly new component.…”

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confidence: 99%

Towards a new typology of the referential information structure of specificational it-clefts

Bourgoin

2022

Text &Amp; Talk

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This paper investigates the referential information structure (IS) of full and reduced specificational it-clefts, which interacts as a distinct layer with their relational IS. Drawing on spontaneous spoken data from the London-Lund Corpus, this study examines how discourse-new and discourse-given information, i.e., referential IS, is distributed over the clefted noun phrase (NP) and cleft-relative clause. To assess the discourse-familiarity of nominal referents and open propositions, I develop an analytical model hinging on the predictability of information in accordance with the prospective dynamic of spoken language. The findings show that the distribution of given and new information is more diverse than described in existing typologies. In particular, it is revealed that the hitherto overlooked pattern in which both value and variable are discourse-given and in which the specification relation may be new or given is in fact the most common one. The findings also show that the choice between full and reduced it-clefts as two basic options is only partly motivated by the discourse-familiarity of the variable. The analysis of the prosodically coded relational IS reveals that multiple prosodic patterns can be mapped onto each category of clefts, thus demonstrating that the conflation of the referential and relational IS of it-clefts is untenable.

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“…Referents are classified as discourse-new when they are (iii) new-anchored, i.e. introduce a new referent into the discourse but one which can only be interpreted via some link to the preceding text (Gentens 2016: 20–1), or (iv) brand new, i.e. interpretable wholly out-of-context.…”

Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

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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The discursive status of extraposed object clauses

Cited by 7 publications

References 12 publications

Manner-of-speaking that-complements as close apposition structures

Manner-of-speaking that-complements as close apposition structures

Towards a new typology of the referential information structure of specificational it-clefts

Managing information flow through prosody init-clefts

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