Information Packaging in Sinhala: a Preliminary Study of Adverbial Clauses in Focus Constructions

Each of these sentences can be compared with one or more of the others to demonstrate the presence of either the syntactic, semantic or pragmatic component. Sentences 1a and 1b both provide the same statement about the world and are thus semantically equivalent, but they differ in terms of their syntax (seen with the change in word order) and pragmatics (seen with the fronting, hence focus, of ‘bones’). On the other hand, sentences 1b and 1c are syntactically and pragmatically equivalent but differ with respect to their semantic meaning (‘hates’ versus ‘loves’). Finally, sentences 1a and 1d have the same semantic and syntactic components, but the stress-focus on ‘bones’ causes these sentences to differ pragmatically. For the purposes of this paper, the most important comparisons just discussed are those concerning 1a, 1b, and 1d. This is because it is when looking at these examples that we see evidence of what Vallduví and Engdahl (1996) refer to as ‘information packaging’. As can be seen in the three sentences expressed in 1a, 1b, and 1d, utterances may express the same propositional content despite changes in sentence structure or intonation or both, but they are not, as Vallduví and Engdahl (1996:459) point out, ‘interpretively equivalent in absolute terms’. In fact, these sentences differ because of the extrapropositional, or pragmatic, contribution to meaning, and therefore cannot be used interchangeably in the same context (Szendröi 2004; Vallduví and Engdahl 1996). In other words, it is not the message that is different, but the way in which the message is packaged that is different. In order to address this type of difference, Vallduví and Engdahl (1996:460) refer to this behavior as ‘information packaging’ which they define as ‘a structuring of sentences by syntactic, prosodic, or morphological means that arises from the need to meet the communicative demands of a particular context or discourse’. This is to say that speakers design their talk, both at the discourse and sentence levels, according to their beliefs about what hearers can be assumed to know or have in mind in a given context. As an example of this, it is possible to refer back to the sentences provided above. In these examples, both 1b and 1d are utterances constructed with the expectation that the hearer is aware that there is something that Boo-Boo loves, whereas the object of the love—bones—is presumed to be information that is either new to the hearer or contrasts with the hearer’s previously held beliefs. The same, however, cannot be said for 1a.