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

Abstract

We 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. This is supported by the empirical finding that given objects need not scramble if they are not in sentence-final position, even if they are preceded by new elements (experiment 2). We also argue against Kučerová's claim that given elements are marked only if definite/presupposed in Czech by showing that irrespective of this property, all given objects tend to avoid the sentence-final position (experiment 1). Finally, our results reveal an interaction between presupposition and word order, in the sense of an acceptability penalty for utterances in which non- * We are grateful to the following people for their valuable comments: Philippa Cook, Gisbert Fanselow, Jana Häussler, Beste Kamali, Ayesha Kidwai, Ivona Kučerová, Frank Kügler, Agata Renans, Michael Rochemont, Filip Smolík, Kriszta Szendrői, Barbara Tomaszewicz, Luis Vicente, Malte Zimmermann. Parts of this paper were presented in preliminary versions on two occasions: in a seminar on the relation between information structure and syntax in Potsdam (January 2012) and at the Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 22 at McMaster University (May 2013). We thank the audiences for their comments. The paper has undergone significant revision during the review process. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Semantics & Pragmatics, esp. Paul Elbourne, for their incredibly valuable comments and questions. Finally, we'd like to express our gratitude to the following people for their help with the data and experiments:

Approaches to Hungarian

“…The key idea on which this type of approach is based is that, in inverse analogy to focus, given elements prefer to avoid surfacing in a syntactic position which is assigned prosodic prominence by default. Šimík and Wierzba (2015) argue in favour of such an account of the word order effects of givenness in Czech, one example of which was cited above. They show that, in the absence of stress shift, Czech disfavours a new » given ordering of arguments if and only if the given element is in a sentence-final position, where it receives the default nuclear stress (see also Šimík et al 2014;Šimík & Wierzba 2017).…”

“…As noted in the preceding subsection, different types and/or degrees of givenness may elicit varying forms of associated linguistic marking Kučerová (2007Kučerová ( , 2012. claims that an object in Czech is marked by reordering as in (2b) only if it is "presupposed" in addition to being given in the common ground, where presuppositionality is roughly equivalent toEnc's (1991) notion of specificity Šimík and Wierzba (2015). argue that this extra requirement is both too strong and too weak for an adequate description of Czech.3.…”

Acoustic Correlates of Focus Marking in Czech and Polish

“…We are not aware of any systematic acoustic study of this information-structural notion in Polish. Based on grammaticality judgments, Šimík and Wierzba (2015) recently argued that in the case of Czech, manipulations of word order are prosodically motivated by the need for given items to avoid being located in the position where sentence main stress is allocated (in clause-final position). The results of Šimík and Wierzba (2017) further support this approach for Czech as well as for Polish and Slovak.…”

Using audio stimuli in acceptability judgment experiments

“…Certain research questions require the use of non‐written stimuli: For example, Ritchart, Goodall, and Garellek (2016) directly manipulated prosody in their experiment investigating the sources of the English that‐trace effect. Šimík and Wierzba (2015) used audio stimuli to study the influence of stress on word order in Czech. Research on the effect of disfluencies or filled pauses on parsing (e.g., Lau & Ferreira, 2005) also necessitates the use of audio stimuli.…”