Intonation, Derivation, Information Information Packaging in a Proof-Theoretic Perspective

Cross-language comparison shows that in expressing information packaging—i.e., the structuring of propositional content in function of the speaker’s assumptions about the hearer’s knowledge and attentional state—, different languages exploit word order and prosody in different ways. In other words, one single informational construct is realized by drastically different structural means across languages. Thus for English and Dutch it can be argued that, roughly speaking, information packaging is structurally realized by means of alternative intonational contours of identical strings. But languages such as Catalan and Turkish, on the other hand, have a constant prosodic structure and realize information packaging by means of string order permutations. The present paper investigates how the various structural realizations of information packaging can be handled by a sign-based categorial grammar formalism which takes its inspiration from Oehrle’s (1988, 1993) work on generalized compositionality for multidimensional linguistic objects. The above generalizations suggest that information packaging involves syntax as well as prosody: hence any attempt to reduce informational aspects to either syntax (for Turkish, cf. Hofmann 1995) or prosody (for English, cf. Steedman 1991, 1992, 1993) is inadequate from a cross-linguistic perspective. The present paper proposes to treat the different forms of information packaging by means of a both intonationally/syntactically and semantically/informationally interpreted signbased version of the double non-associative Lambek (1961) calculus of Moortgat and Morrill (1991), enriched with the unary operators of Moortgat (1996). The signs, the grammatical resources of this formalism, are Saussurian form-meaning units which reflect the fact that the dimensions of form and meaning contribute to well-formedness in an essentially parallel way. 1 Information Packaging The notion of information packaging is introduced in Chafe (1976): [The phenomena at issue] have to do primarily with how the message is sent and only secondarily with the message itself, just as the packaging of toothpaste can affect sales in partial independence of the quality of the tooth paste inside. (Chafe 1976: 28) The basic idea is that speakers do not present information in an unstructured way, but that they provide a hearer with detailed instructions on how to manipulate and integrate this information according to their beliefs about the hearer’s knowledge and attentional state: To ensure reasonably efficient communication, [: : : t]he speaker tries, to the best of his ability, to make the structure of his utterances congruent with his knowledge of the listener’s mental world. (Clark and Haviland 1977: 5) On all levels the crucial factor appears to be the tailoring of an utterance by a sender to meet the particular assumed needs of the intended receiver. That is, information packaging in natural languge reflects the sender’s hypotheses about the receiver’s assumptions and beliefs and strategies. (Prince 1981: 224) For instance, sentences such as (1) and (2) are truth-conditionally equivalent in that they express the same proposition, but each of them ‘packages’ this proposition in a prosodically different way:1 The teacher loves ICE CREAM (1) The teacher LOVES ice cream (2) Typically, speakers will use (1) if the hearer at the time of utterance knows nothing about or is not attending to the teacher’s relation to ice cream, while they will use (2) if the hearer at the time of utterance knows that there exists a relation between the teacher and ice cream, is attending to this relation, but does not know what it is. Apparently, speakers are sensitive to such differences in the hearer’s knowledge and attentional state, and hearers rely on this: speakers not using this device systematically give their listeners a harder time. (Nooteboom and Terken 1982: 317) Truth-conditionally equivalent sentences that encode different information packaging instructions are not mutually interchangeable salva felicitate in a given context of utterance: e.g., of the above sentences, only the first one is a felicitous answer to the question What does the teacher love? It is this context-sensitivity that has traditionally placed information packaging within the realm of pragmatics, where two influential approaches can be distinguished, the ‘topic/comment’ approach and the ‘focus/ground’ approach. According to the focus/ground approach, sentences consist of a ‘focus’ and a ‘ground’.2 The focus is the informative part of the sentence, the part that (the speaker believes) makes some contribution to the hearer’s mental state. The ground is the noninformative part of the sentence, the part that anchors the sentence to what is already established or under discussion in (the speaker’s picture of) the hearer’s mental state. Although sentences may lack a ground altogether, sentences without focus do not exist. The topic/comment (theme/rheme) approach splits the set of subexpressions of a sentence into a ‘topic’, the—typically sentence-initial—part that expresses what the sentence is about, and a ‘comment’, the part that expresses what is said about the topic. Topics are points of departure for what the sentence conveys, they link it to previous discourse. Italics are used for unaccented expressions; small caps for expressions that bear a (focal) H* pitch accent; and boldface for expressions that bear a L+H* pitch accent. This is the terminology of Pierrehumbert (1980). H* accent and L+H* accent are called A accent and B accent, respectively, in Jackendoff (1972). The ground is also known as ‘background’, as ‘presupposition’ and as ‘open proposition’. In phonology, the term ‘focus’ is often used for intonational prominence. That is, any constituent which bears pitch accent is said to be a focus. Although in general, (part of) the informational focus is marked by prosodic prominence, not every accented constituent is a focus in the informational sense. In particular, accented constituents may also be topics/links. Sentences may be topicless: so-called ‘presentational’ or ‘news’ sentences consist entirely of a comment. In Reinhart (1982), it is argued that the dimension of ‘old’/‘new’ information is irrelevant for the analysis of sentence topics. Instead, the notion of ‘pragmatic aboutness’ is defined in terms of the organization of information. The set PPA(S) of Possible Pragmatic Assertions that can be made with a sentence S expressing proposition ' is defined as follows: PPA(S) = f'g [ fha; 'i j a is the interpretation of an NP in Sg (3) A pragmatic assertion ha; 'i is assumed to be about a. (The possibility for an NP interpretation a to serve as the topic of a pragmatic assertion ha; 'i is subject to further syntactic and semantic restrictions.) Notice, by way of example (adopted from Dahl 1974), that the sentence The teacher loves ICE CREAM gives rise to the parallel topic/comment and ground/focus partitions indicated in (4) if it answers the questions What about the teacher? What does he feel?, whereas it induces the partitions specified by (5) in the interrogative context What about the teacher?