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

ABSTRACT

Studies of types of copular clauses assume that specificational and predicative clauses can be contrasted by their different information foci, as reflected in patterns of intonational prominence. This paper investigates that assumption by looking at the prosodic realisation of 600 specificational clauses with variable noun phrase (NP) subjects and 600 predicative clauses with predicative NP complements. A study of the utterances’ tonality, tonicity, relative pitch and intensity reveals that the two copular types cannot readily be contrasted by a mere background-focus dichotomy. While predicative clauses evince the expected prominence pattern with the focus on the description, specificational clauses give salience to their two arguments. Therefore, I propose that the real difference between specificational and predicative clauses most frequently concerns the foregrounding or backgrounding of the semantically more general NP, i.e., the variable and what I propose to call the ‘describee’, respectively. This I explain in terms of the different communicative dynamism of the variable vs. describee and of the specificational and predicative clause types in general.

KEYWORDS:

• English
• prosody
• information structure
• specification/predication
• communicative dynamism

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was made possible by the doctoral research grant awarded by the F.R.S.-FNRS. I thank everyone who offered comments and feedback to the presentation of this material at the Second Round Table on Communicative Dynamism (Université de Namur). I am particularly grateful to the two anonymous referees for their usual comments on earlier versions of this article. Many thanks also go out to Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte, Gerard O’Grady, Eirian Davies, and Ditte Kimps for discussion of issues central to this article. Needless to say, I am the only one responsible for remaining errors of thought.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Examples followed by (WB) were extracted from WordbanksOnline and are reproduced here with the permission of HarperCollins. Examples followed by (LLC) are from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English.

² Predicative clauses can also have adjectival, adverbial or prepositional complements to describe the subject, e.g., her music is brilliant, I’m here, she was in tears. This paper focuses on predicative clauses with a predicative nominative – i.e., an NP complement – only, e.g., he’s a natural..

³ Since the occurrence of copular be carrying the nuclear accent was not sufficiently frequent for reliable statistical analysis, its data were not included in the chi-square test.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS [25083327].

Notes on contributors

Wout Van Praet

Wout Van Praet obtained his MA in Linguistics from the University of Leuven in 2014. He also holds the degree of MSc in “Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition” from the University of Edinburgh (2015). He is currently working on his PhD at the University of Namur and the University of Leuven, focusing specifically on indefinite specificational clauses in English and the system of copular types surrounding them.