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Related Experiment Videos

A crosslinguistic study of postposing in discourse

B J Birner1, G Ward

  • 1University of Pennsylvania. betty@linc.cis.upenn.edu

Language and Speech
|April 1, 1996
PubMed
Summary

Postposing subjects in various languages like English, Farsi, and Italian places unfamiliar information at the end of sentences. This contrasts with English right-dislocation, which uses familiar information.

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Syntax
  • Discourse Analysis

Background:

  • Linguistic analysis of sentence structures reveals variations in subject placement.
  • Understanding the discourse function of syntactic constructions is crucial for linguistic theory.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the discourse constraints governing post-verbal logical subjects in seven sentence-types across English, Farsi, Italian, and Yiddish.
  • To differentiate the function of subject postposing from English right-dislocation.

Main Methods:

  • Comparative analysis of sentence-types allowing non-canonical subject positions.
  • Examination of discourse constraints related to information novelty (familiar vs. unfamiliar).
  • Contrastive analysis with English right-dislocation structures.

Main Results:

  • Seven sentence-types (English inversion, presentational/existential there-sentences; Farsi inversion; Italian ci-sentences, subject inversion; Yiddish es+subject postposing) share a constraint.
  • This constraint requires the postposed subject (NP) to represent unfamiliar information.
  • English right-dislocation, conversely, marks familiar information and involves a coreferential pronoun.

Conclusions:

  • Subject postposing functions to place unfamiliar information in sentence-final position.
  • The presence of a coreferential pronoun in right-dislocation inherently marks the NP as discourse-old, precluding its use for introducing unfamiliar information.

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