A givenness illusion

Abstract

Constituents that encode information that is salient in the discourse or “given” are often prosodically reduced and remain unaccented. What is given and new is usually defined at the level of meaning: given expressions are those that refer to salient referents or predicates that have been made salient by the previous discourse. This paper presents evidence from two production studies that sometimes, a constituent that semantically should be contrastive, and hence accentable, is treated prosodically as if it was given, and placing an accent on it is consistently avoided—an illusory case of givenness. This effect can be explained by assuming that givenness is not only evaluated in terms of semantic content, but also at the phonological level. Prosodically marking a semantic contrast requires the presence of a phonological contrast. This effect thus provides evidence that the notion of “antecedent” relevant for prosodic givenness-marking needs to include reference to linguistic form, and not just to referential meaning.

Keywords:

• Information structure
• Focus
• Givenness
• Contrast
• Phonological identity
• Prosody

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by FQRSC Grant NP-132516: La prosodie: production, perception et différences interlinguistiques; and a SSHRC/CFI Canada Research Chair in Speech and Language Processing (Grant 212482). Thanks to Kate McCurdy for help in constructing the stimuli [some of the stimuli are based on the perception stimuli in Wagner and McCurdy (2010)]. Thanks to Aron Hirsch, Lauren Mak, Kate McCurdy, and Erin Olson for their work as RAs on this project. Thanks also to Anne Cutler, Gorka Elordieta, Roger Schwarzschild, Lisa Selkirk, and Edwin Williams for helpful comments. I am also indebted to many helpful suggestions by the reviewers and the editor.

Notes

¹In the following, I will mark the last accented word in a sentence with small-caps.

²At least these examples require accommodating additional context that would justify a contrast on John.

³There are several alternative characterizations of the obligatoriness of givenness marking. Williams (1997) proposed a principle “Do not overlook anaphoric possibilities,” which is similar to Maximize Presupposition captures the generalization that if one can use an anaphoric expression or anaphoric destressing, one has to do so, otherwise infelicity ensues. Schwarzschild (1999) proposed a principle “Avoid F,” which has a similar effect, but makes reference to syntactic F-markers that Schwarzschild stipulates following Selkirk's approach to Focus and Givenness. This obscures the close relation of givenness-marking to other anaphoric relations and the phenomenon of “maximize presupposition,” and runs into various empirical problems (Wagner, 2006).

⁴A reviewer notes that the sentence might also sound odd because kicked is not anaphorically deaccented. However, anaphorically deaccenting kicked as well as John is impossible, since there is no antecedent of the form x kicked John/him which would warrant a VP without any accent.

⁵We used the glmer function of the lme4 R package (Bates & Maechler, 2010).

⁶The p-values were estimated using the pvals-function of the R-package languageR introduced in Baayen, Davidson, and Bates (2008).

⁷Apparently the voicing distinction in the consonants [k] vs. [g] is not a big enough phonological difference for stalag/c x to be treated as distinct.

⁸It would be interesting to test for the precise effects of linear order and domain-finality experimentally, but the experiments reported here do not address these factors, so these remarks remain preliminary.