Chapter 2
Information structure and the
utterance
I have characterised information enriched constituents in terms of two kinds of content:
the compositional content and the contextual content, where the contextual content results
from the application of a contextually given embedding structure to the compositional content. An important observation here is that the embedding structure and the compositional
content of an information enriched constituent are related to the context in two different
ways: the embedding structure is already part of the context, or is presented as such,
whereas all or part of the compositional content is to update the context. These different
ways of relating to the context concern the information structure of the utterance, and
an analysis of information enriched constituents therefore requires a theory of information
structure.
In this chapter I discuss information structure as needed for a treatment of information
enriched constituents. I begin by surveying information structure generally in section 2.1,
focusing on those aspects that are of importance to information enrichment. In 2.2 I
then put forward a theory of information structure for information enriched constituents.
Finally, I present a corpus study in 2.3 making use of the theoretical notions developed in
the chapter.
2.1
Relevant notions of information structure
In the context of A’s question, consider two versions of an utterance said by B, one relying
on information enrichment and the other not:
(1)
A: What are you reading?
B: I am reading Animal Farm
B′ : Animal Farm
The question for the present chapter is the following: what is the information structure
of utterances like B and B ′ , in the sense of how they, or their subparts, are connected to
1
2
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
the context? In other words, how can the difference between B and B ′ be characterised in
terms of their relationship to what has already been said in the dialogue and possibly to
other knowledge that the dialogue participants may have? To answer this question I will
begin by surveying work on information structure.
Information structure deals with certain properties of sentences and utterances that
have to do with how the sentence or utterance is connected to the context, and what is
forwarded (highlighted) and what is backgrounded (toned down). This issue can be subdivided into questions such as the following: What is the sentence about, and what is said
concerning this? What is informative in the sentence, and what is an anchor to something already mentioned or otherwise known or inferable? What are the relations between
these pragmatically relevant notions and structural realisations – syntactic, morphological,
phonological – in the sentence?
The decisive question is whether information structure is seen as concerning either
pragmatics, or formal means, or both. In this thesis I analyse information enriched constituents mainly from a viewpoint of pragmatics, but I also include certain syntactic and
phonological considerations, and I acknowledge that formal means play a role for information enriched constituents to an extent that is beyond the scope of this thesis. In section
2.1.1 I consider relevant aspects of information structure within pragmatic approaches, and
in section 2.1.2 I consider formal means.
2.1.1
Pragmatics and information structure
I am now going to survey two pragmatic levels of information structure, that are of relevance to my further discussion of information enriched constituents. One level concerns
informativeness, and the other level concerns aboutness in the sense of the “object” being
talked about. In addition to these two levels, I am also going to consider an aspect of
information structure that cuts across the levels of informativeness and aboutness. This is
the aspect of contrast. The level of informativeness is discussed as focus-ground in 2.1.1.2,
the level of aboutness as topic-comment in 2.1.1.3, and contrast is discussed in 2.1.1.4. I
begin by an introduction.
2.1.1.1
Introduction
Information structure – as a pragmatic as well as a grammatical notion – is treated using a
variety of different terms and notions by different authors, resulting in a degree of confusion
in the field. This is not the place to give a comprehensive overview and clear up the
confusion, but I will survey some of the main themes and indicate some relations between
various approaches, focusing on aspects that are of importance to information enriched
constituents. There have been several attempts to bring together the various approaches.
See for instance Prince (1981), Gundel (1988), Vallduvı́ (1992), Vallduvı́ and Engdahl
(1996), Gundel (1999), Kruijff-Korbayová and Steedman (2003).
Three different perspectives are studied by theories of information structure: the perspectives of the sender, the recipient, and the subject matter. In dialogue, the sender is
2.1. RELEVANT NOTIONS OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE
3
the speaker and the recipient is the hearer. The generation of utterances that is my principal interest in this thesis naturally involves the perspective of the speaker, including the
speaker’s view of the hearer. One approach to the speaker/sender perspective of particular
relevance to my work is called information packaging, as exemplified by, among others,
Halliday (1967), Chafe (1976), Prince (1986), Vallduvı́ (1992), and Vallduvı́ and Engdahl
(1996). This concerns how the speaker packages a message to fit the hearer’s information
state. Information states will be discussed in detail in Chapter ??; for now, an information
state can be seen as a dialogue participant’s mental model of the dialogue and its context.
As an example of information packaging, Chafe (1976) discusses how communication functions effectively only if the speaker takes into account the hearer’s perspective, both in the
sense of the hearer’s general knowledge and what he is attending to at a given moment. In
this thesis I mainly make use of Vallduvı́’s work for the information packaging view.
An important distinction to be made in relation to information structure is that between
what has been called, among other things, relational and referential status, see for instance
Gundel (1988, 1999, 2003), Vallduvı́ and Engdahl (1996). The distinction was also discussed
earlier, by the Prague school, see Sgall et al. (1986). Referential status concerns the extent
to which entities are contextually accessible at a particular point in a dialogue or other kind
of discourse, that is, what their cognitive status is or how salient they are. This determines,
for instance, if a referent is encoded using a definite or an indefinite NP. Examples of studies
of referential status are Heim (1983), Givón (1983), Kamp and Reyle (1993), Centering
Theory (Brennan et al. (1987), Grosz et al. (1995)), Grosz and Sidner (1986), Gundel et al.
(1993), among others. Information structure concerns relational status: using terms that I
will introduce below, a focus is a focus in relation to the ground, and vice versa; a topic is
a topic in relation to a comment, and vice versa; and contrasting elements are contrastive
in relation to each other. I will say more about this below.
However, these two different perspectives – referential and relational status – are closely
linked, which can be seen in relation to, for instance, information enriched constituents.
Notably, in order to determine the focus and the ground of an information enriched constituent, that is, relational status, one needs to have a view of the referential status of
various entities in the context. The present chapter is concerned with relational status for
information enriched constituents, in the discussion of the information structure of the utterance. The next chapter is concerned with referential status, in the form of the structure
of the context.
2.1.1.2
Focus and ground
Consider the sentence I am reading Wittgenstein in the context of three different questions.
I use “(a)” and “(b)” to indicate that the sentence I am reading Wittgenstein and the
preceding question need not be produced by different dialogue participants, nor even be
part of a dialogue. They may be seen as part of a dialogue, but the indicative may also
be part of a written text, and the question implicitly addressed without being overtly
expressed, and so on. The three different examples are the following:
4
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
(2)
(a) What are you reading?
(b) I am reading Wittgenstein.
(3)
(a) Who’s reading Wittgenstein?
(b) I am reading Wittgenstein.
(4)
(a) What are you doing to Wittgenstein?
(b) I am reading Wittgenstein.
The informative part of the sentence differs for these three examples. In (2) it is “Wittgenstein” that is informative, in (3) it is “I”, and in (4) “(am) reading”. This means that the
parts that are uninformative – the remainder of the sentences – are also different for these
three examples.
The three examples illustrate the information structural dimension of informativeness,
for which I will use the terms focus and ground. The focus-ground division occurs under
different names and characterisations that are roughly equivalent. As with all approaches
to information structure, the terminology and definitions used depend on the type of phenomena the author is investigating, and from which angle. I have taken the terms focus
and ground from Vallduvı́ (1992), who defines the focus as that part of the sentence that
is informative. As such, it is the only part of the sentence that cannot be omitted, or, in
my terms, that has to be part of the compositional content. The focus always contains an
intonationally prominent element.
The ground in Vallduvı́’s framework is the anchor to the context. It is composed of
material that is already part of the hearer’s knowledge store or information state, and it is
included in the utterance to ensure that the focus is appropriately entered in the hearer’s
information state. The notion of ground that Vallduvı́ makes use of is further subdivided,
which I will discuss in 2.1.1.3. Focus and ground are complementary notions.
In this thesis I will use boldface to indicate a focus, and italics to indicate a ground.
For example (2) above, the focus-ground articulation of the sentence is then indicated as
follows:
(5)
(a) What are you reading?
(b) I am reading Wittgenstein.
As examples (2)-(4) show, the focus-ground articulation of sentences can be demonstrated using questions that represent the context of the utterance. This is frequent in
studies of information structure.
Vallduvı́ establishes that ground need not be present in an utterance, and this either
because it is an all-focus utterance where all parts are informative, or because it is a
“sentence fragment”, that is, relies on information enrichment. The following gives an
example of an all-focus reading:
(6)
(a) What’s going on?
(b) I am reading Wittgenstein.
2.1. RELEVANT NOTIONS OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE
5
Given that focus-ground concerns a distinction between what is already part of the
context and what is to update the context, focus-ground ought to concern all utterances
in dialogue. We have seen that an utterance can consist of just focus, or both focus and
ground. Is it possible for an utterance to consist of just ground? One type of utterance
that has been ignored in the information structure literature is the utterance that has
a grounding function and that is a repetition of some part of a preceding utterance, or
utterances that repeat a previous utterance verbatim. Consider the following exchange:
(7)
A: Eavan’s reading Animal Farm
B: Eavan’s reading Animal Farm
One information structural principle, which ties in with the maxims of Grice (1975), is
that all utterances are informative. Using the focus-ground distinction this means that all
utterances must have a focus. Then what is the information structure of B’s utterance in
(7) which contains exactly the same elements as the preceding utterance? I believe there
are two possibilities here. The first is that there is no focus in B’s utterance; there are no
elements and no relations between elements that are informative in the context, and it is
not possible to anchor B’s utterance using question-answer congruence since there is no
relevant question in the context as it has just been asserted by A’s utterance. The second
possibility is that the whole of B’s utterance is focus, and that what is informative comes
from factors other than the compositional content of the utterance, such as the intonation
or facial expressions. B’s utterance may for instance express surprise or disbelief.
Vallduvı́’s focus-ground builds on a tradition of similar information structural distinctions that attempt to capture the division into informative and context-reflecting utterance
parts. Vallduvı́’s ground-focus is, for instance, equivalent to the topic-focus of the Prague
school, Sgall et al. (1986). They characterise the difference between topic and focus in
terms of contextual boundedness: topic is contextually bound whereas focus is non-bound.
They take the example of “Beavers build DAMS”, uttered with “dams” being intonationally prominent, and note that this is ambiguous between three different readings (the
example is originally due to Chomsky). One reading occurs in a context where “beavers
build” is contextually bound, a second reading where just “beavers” is contextually bound,
and the third reading in a context where none of the elements in the utterance are bound.
In the first reading “dams” constitutes the focus, in the second reading “build dams”, and
the third reading is an all-focus utterance. The first reading, with just the intonationally
prominent “dams” as the focus, is a narrow focus reading of the example. The two other
readings are both broad focus readings (also called wide focus readings), one with the VP
as the focus, and the other with the whole sentence as the focus.
The theme-rheme of Steedman (1991, 2000a,b), is also an example of the focus-ground
dimension, with the theme as that part of the utterance that connects it to the rest of the
discourse, that is, the ground, and the rheme corresponding to the focus.
The distinction between the informative and the context-reflecting is also found in
syntactic and semantic approaches to information structure. One example is Chomsky
(1971), who makes a distinction between focus and presupposition. One of his examples is
6
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
(8), where “John” is the focus, and the presupposition expressed by part of the sentence
is that someone writes poetry:
(8)
Is it john who writes poetry?
In the generative framework of the 1960’s, Chomsky (1971) discusses whether focuspresupposition is determined from the deep structure or by the surface structure. In the
latter case, the focus is the “phrase containing the intonation center”,1 and the presupposition is given by replacing the focus with a variable. Jackendoff (1972) also makes use of
focus-presupposition, but characterises the difference between focus and ground in terms of
shared knowledge: the presupposition is the information in the sentence that the speaker
assumes to be shared by her and the hearer, whereas the focus is what the speaker assumes
not to be shared.
The term presupposition is avoided within theories that are more oriented towards
pragmatics, such as the theories of Vallduvı́ and Steedman, and Rochemont (1986) who
rejects the term because the information structure notion of presupposition as the ground
is distinct from the normal linguistic use of it (see e.g., Beaver (1997)). Rochemont instead seeks to define ground (partly) in terms of c(ontext)-construability, which involves
entailment in relation to preceding discourse.
2.1.1.3
Topic and comment
The topic-comment articulation concerns aboutness: the topic is what the sentence is
about, and the comment is what is said concerning this. As examples one may compare
Eavan read Animal Farm in the following two contexts:
(9)
(10)
(a) What about Eavan? What did she read?
(b) Eavan read Animal Farm.
(a) What about Animal Farm? What is so special about it?
(b) Eavan read Animal Farm.
In (9) one may identify “Eavan” as the topic, that is, the sentence is about Eavan. The
complement of the topic in (9) is “read Animal Farm”. This is the comment, and is what
is being said about the topic, “Eavan”. In example (10) the topic can instead be regarded
as “Animal Farm”, with “Eavan read” as the comment. In both examples, a “what about”
question is used to indicate the topic.
Topic is not an unproblematic notion, and it is defined quite differently by different
authors. There is one tradition of seeing topic in terms of what a sentence is about, as I
have shown so far. This view is for instance taken by Gundel (1988). Another view is to
see topic in terms of spatial and temporal frames, as propounded by Chafe (1976), among
others. Yet another view of topic is in terms of “old information” in the sense of being
known in the context. One example of this view is given by Vallduvı́ and Engdahl (1996)
1
Chomsky (1971) p. 200.
2.1. RELEVANT NOTIONS OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE
7
in their discussion of the notion of link. Generally there is disagreement in the literature
as to whether a topic must be contextually known or not.
There is also some disagreement as to the position of the topic in the sentence, and
whether it need be explicitly realised at all. For Halliday (1967) the topic, which he calls the
theme, is always sentence initial. He describes the theme as “what is being talked about,
the point of departure for the clause as a message”.2 The complement of the theme is the
rheme. Halliday gives the three examples in (11), and asserts that in the first expression,
the theme is “John”, in the second “yesterday”, and in the third “the play”:
(11)
John saw the play yesterday
Yesterday John saw the play
the play John saw yesterday
This means that for Halliday, the theme in both of (9) and (10) is “Eavan”. Sentenceinitial topics have the advantage of being easy to determine, but the disadvantage of not
always capturing what the sentence is about. Allowing the topic to occur anywhere in the
sentence, as many other authors do, comes closer to capturing aboutness, but makes the
identification of the topic more complex, as a possibly complex context needs to be taken
into account.
The two articulations focus-ground and topic-comment are partially overlapping. For
instance, the comment always includes informative material, but may also contain other
material. For instance, in example (9) above, the focus is “Animal Farm”, as given by the
second question, and this is part of the comment. The information structure of (9) can be
given as follows, using both the focus-ground dimension and the topic-comment dimension:
(12)
(a) What about Eavan? What did she read yesterday?
(b) Eavan read Animal Farm.
topic
comment
ground
focus
Thus in (12) the focus is part of the comment, and ground contains the topic and the
non-focus part of the comment.
For example (10) the information structure for both dimensions can be given as follows:
(13)
(a) What about Animal Farm? What is so special about it?
(b) Eavan read Animal Farm.
comment topic
focus
ground
In (13) the two dimensions overlap completely. Animal Farm is both topic and the full
ground. “Eavan read” is comment and focus, by being what is asserted about the topic,
and by being the informative part of the sentence.
2
Halliday (1967) p. 212.
8
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
Vallduvı́ (1992) notes the overlap between the focus-ground and topic-comment levels,
and combines the two articulations by subdividing the ground. The link is that part of
the ground that corresponds to a sentence-initial definition of the topic, and the tail is any
non-link material within the ground. The information structure notions used by Vallduvı́
are thus given in the form of a hierarchy: first of all an utterance is divided along the focusground dimension, and the ground is then further divided into link and tail. Vallduvı́’s link
and tail, as well as his notion of focus, are intimately connected with a modelling of context
using file cards. I will have more to say about this way of modelling dialogue context in
the next chapter where I discuss the context of information enriched constituents. For now
it suffices to note that in Vallduvı́’s framework, the link corresponds to a notion of topic,
and is always part of the ground, and the tail is any remaining ground material.
Not all sentences have all of link, tail, and focus; Vallduvı́ discusses four possible sentence types: link-focus, all-focus, link-focus-tail, and focus-tail sentences. Example (12)
above contains all three of link, tail, and focus, as can be seen in (14):
(14)
(a) What about Eavan? What did she read yesterday?
(b) Eavan read Animal Farm.
ground
focus
link
tail
As the link is sentence initial, example (13) is a focus-tail sentence:
(15)
(a) What about Animal Farm? What is so special about it?
(b) Eavan read Animal Farm.
focus
ground
tail
The two dimensions topic-comment and focus-ground are also discussed by Dahl (1974),
who notes that they divide the sentence in different but overlapping ways. Dahl, unlike
Vallduvı́, does not require the topic to be part of the ground; as the topic belongs to
another level than the ground-focus distinction, it can coincide with either the focus or the
ground. Note also that for an example like (15), Vallduvı́’s notion of topic in the form of
the link, which is always sentence-initial if it is present at all, does not capture the sense
in which “Eavan read Animal Farm” is about “Animal Farm” as in (13).
Erteschik-Shir (1998) uses a model of context that is similar to the one used by Vallduvı́,
and relates her information structural primitives to the context model in a similar way. I
will discuss this in more detail in the next chapter. For now, I note that Erteschik-Shir
makes use of the notion of topic from the topic-comment dimension, and focus from the
focus-ground dimension. For instance, Erteschik-Shir would give the following analysis of
(12), where “read” does not correspond to any information structure category:
(16)
(a) What about Eavan? What did she read yesterday?
(b) Eavan read Animal Farm.
focus
topic
2.1. RELEVANT NOTIONS OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE
2.1.1.4
9
Contrast
Having surveyed the two information structure levels of focus-ground and topic-comment, I
am now going to consider the notion of contrast. This is an aspect that cuts across both of
focus-ground and topic-comment, and concerns a specific relation between utterance parts
and differing but similar or comparable elements in the context. As an initial example,
consider B’s utterance in the context of A’s question:
(17)
A: Is it raining?
B: It’s snowing
The contrastive elements “snowing” and “raining” are different elements, but their ability
to be contrastive in relation to each other also depends on their comparability with respect
to some property. For instance, they may both be seen as referring to aspects of the
weather.
Contrast is often discussed in relation with focus, but several authors note contrast
also in relation with ground or, rather, topic. Vallduvı́ (1992) discusses focus-contrast and
link-contrast, where the link is a form of topic as I discussed above, and contrast arises
as a “side-effect”. Vallduvı́ and Vilkuna (1998) use the term kontrast to analyse contrast,
and consider kontrast as being coextensive with both of theme and rheme, where theme
seems to correspond to Vallduvı́’s ground and rheme to his focus. Based on cross-linguistic
differences in the syntactic and phonological realisation of contrast, Molnár (2002) argues
that contrast is a separate information structural category that is superimposed on both
focus and topic.
Steedman (2000b) defines a focus-background articulation within each of his theme and
rheme, where theme and rheme are characterised as in section 2.1.1.2. Steedman’s focus
is a contrastive or otherwise highlighted element within either of theme or rheme, and
background is any material that is not highlighted. In the following example, the theme is
“Mary admires”, and the rheme is “the woman who directed the musical”:
(18)
(a) I know that Mary envies the man who wrote the musical. But who does
she admire?
admires the woman who directed the musical
(b) Mary
theme
rheme
background focus
background
focus
background
In Steedman’s approach the focus within the theme is “admires”, as this contrasts with
“envies” in the first sentence in the context. The rheme-focus is “directed”, which contrasts with “wrote”. Elements that are not focus are background, with “Mary” as themebackground, and “the woman who” and “the musical” as rheme-background.
One important issue for the determination of contrast is degree of restrictiveness concerning contrast. Molnár (2002) enumerates five different criteria for the determination
of contrast as they are found in the literature. These are the following, with increasing
restrictiveness as one descends the list:
10
(19)
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
1. Highlighting. Some form of highlighting is enough to give contrast.
2. Dominant contrast. This divides the sentence into two parts, the focus on the
one hand and the complementary background/presupposition on the other.
3. Membership in a set where some set of elements can be generated, where the
defining properties of the set need not be exhaustively known.
4. Membership in a set with a “limited number of elements”, that is, presumably
where the defining properties of the set are exhaustively known.
5. Explicit mentioning of alternatives. The contrastive elements are all explicitly
mentioned.
This list concerns syntactic reflections of contrast, and languages can be classified according
to where they are placed in this list. For instance, for a language like English only the first
two – the least restrictive – categories are needed. That is, the syntactic means that are
used to convey contrast in English involve highlighting and the division of a sentence into
a focused part and a backgrounded part.
The next two categories, concerning membership in a set, are motivated by Hungarian,
where different syntactic constructions are used for foci. When a focus occurs in a certain
position in a Hungarian sentence, it gives rise to an exclusive reading, whereby what
is predicted of the focus is only true for the focus and for no other element, in some
relevant contextual set. If the focus occurs in another position it does not give rise to
this exhaustive reading, and the predication may be true for other elements as well. Thus
categories (3) and (4) for Hungarian concern both syntax and semantics, in that syntactic
constructions are involved as well as the semantic creation of sets. The most restrictive
category, involving explicit mentioning of alternatives, is motivated by Finnish, where an
element can be realised in a certain syntactic position only if a contrasting alternative has
been mentioned explicitly in the preceding discourse. Category (5) therefore concerns both
syntax and pragmatics in Finnish.
It should again be emphasised that the categories and languages discussed so far in
relation to (19) concern syntactic reflections. It is quite possible for a language like English
to display contrast in relation to a set where the members are exhaustively known, and so
on, through pragmatic means.
A theory of contrast developed for English is the Alternative Semantics approach.
Within this approach all foci are seen as contrastive. In this way, Rooth (1992, 1996)
argues that any focus generates a set of alternatives. Consider example (3) again, repeated
here as (20):
(20)
(a) Who’s reading Wittgenstein?
(b) I am reading Wittgenstein.
According to Alternative Semantics, the focus-ground articulation of (20) determines a set
of propositions of the form x is reading Wittgenstein, where substitutions are made in the
position corresponding to the focused constituent. The values for x are the elements in a
set of individuals against which the sentence is evaluated.
2.1. RELEVANT NOTIONS OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE
11
Alternative Semantics is also the approach taken by Steedman (2000b). He states that
a rheme alternative set can be defined for (18) as a set of propositions of the form Mary
admires x, and a theme alternative set can be defined as a set of propositions of the form
Mary P x, with different values for P . The values for x in the rheme alternative set may
be different people and the values for P in the theme alternative set are attitudes that
are possible to have towards another person. Steedman notes that in practical situations
alternative sets are often not exhaustively known to the hearer.
Thus, on the Alternative Semantics approach every focus evokes a set of alternatives,
irrespective of whether some alternative is explicitly realised in the context. The Alternative Semantics approach involves membership in some set, where it is possible to construct
some set of alternatives to the focused constituent, but, as Steedman notes, the alternatives
need not be exhaustively known.
2.1.2
Formal means and information structure
Information structure is realised differently in different languages: by phonological, syntactic, or morphological means, or a combination of these. I am going to begin this section by
considering the interplay between syntax and phonology for the realisation of information
structure in English, Swedish, and French. I then consider phonology more closely, by
making a few remarks concerning the relation between phonological categories and information structural notions. I end the section by giving an example of morphology used for
the realisation of information structure.
English and Swedish make use of intonation and syntax to realise information structure. These two languages have a very flexible intonation: just about any word, or even
syllable, can be accented. This means that in English and Swedish, the use of intonation is convenient for conveying what part of an utterance is highlighted and what part
is not. Both languages also have access to syntactic constructions to indicate information
structure. As an illustration, say that person A wants to convey that Eavan is the one
who is reading a particular book, perhaps in contrast with a suggestion by another person
B that someone else was reading the book in question. In English and Swedish this can
be conveyed with “Eavan” being phonologically prominent as in (21), where phonological
prominence is indicated using small capitals:
(21)
A: eavan is reading Animal Farm
A: eavan läser Animal Farm
It can also be conveyed using a cleft construction as in (22):
(22)
A′ : It is Eavan who is reading Animal Farm
A′ : Det är Eavan som läser Animal Farm
Thus, for English and Swedish, both phonology and syntax are relevant to a theory
of information structure. Non-colloquial French does not have the flexible intonation of
English and Swedish, but a more fixed intonational pattern with prosodic prominence
12
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
typically occurring at the right-most periphery of phrases. Realisation of information
structure in French is therefore a question of using syntactic means in such a way that
material that is to display phonological prominence ends up on the right-hand side of
phrases.
For instance, French has a strong tendency not to allow a syntactic subject as the
informative part of a sentence realised through intonational prominence. Therefore, clefting
is very common in French in such cases. As an example, Lambrecht (1994) discusses French
equivalents of an English sentence such as the following where the subject is intonationally
prominent through “car” being emphasised:
(23)
My car broke down.
This can be uttered with the intention of the whole sentence being informative, say in the
context of someone asking what happened. In this case the French equivalent would be
(the translation is as given by Lambrecht):
(24)
Ma voiture est en panne.
Eng. My car is in breakdown.
Sentence (23) can also be uttered with the intention that it was precisely the car, as opposed
to something else, that was broken. In this case, Lambrecht argues, the French equivalent
would not be (25i) but rather (25ii):
(25)
(i) Ma voiture est en panne.
Eng. My car is in breakdown.
(ii) J’ai ma voiture qui est en panne.
Eng. I have my car that is in breakdown.
That is, in example (25) French would not use phonological prominence as in (i), which
would correspond to the indication of information structure as in English. Rather, the
creation of a new syntactic – and phonological – phrase as in (ii) is used to get the intonation
right.
However, in spontaneous spoken French the trend is towards a more flexible intonation,
as that used in English and Swedish. To give some actually occurring examples, I have
taken the following two from Féry (2001):3
(26)
3
A: Qui peint le garage en noir?
Eng. Who is painting the garage black?
B: Le garçon peint le garage en noir
Eng. The boy is painting the garage black
As above, small capitals indicate phonological prominence. However, Féry argues that French has no
stress or pitch accents, and marks “Le garçon” in (26) only as a phonological phrase, not involving any
accent, and the same for “Isabelle” in (27). I briefly return to this issue below in footnote 4 on page 15.
2.1. RELEVANT NOTIONS OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE
(27)
13
A: Qui mange du poulet avec des baguettes?
Eng. Who is eating chicken with baguettes?
B: isabelle mange du poulet avec des baguettes
Eng. isabelle is eating chicken with baguettes
In these two examples, the subject in the answer is intonationally prominent, and the
remainder of the sentences are produced with a flat intonation.
The two examples above are taken from an experiment where subjects were asked to give
what was written on cards, as answers to different questions. They could alter the text on
the cards as they liked and as they saw appropriate in different situations. There were both
examples of clefts being constructed, and intonation used as in (26) and (27). The purpose
of Féry’s experiment was not to investigate an increasing absence of cleft constructions
in spoken French, but rather phonological properties in relation to information structure
more generally.
Having considered English, Swedish, and French, it is quite clear that for all three
languages, phonology and syntax play a role in the realisation of information structure,
although in slightly different ways. In this thesis I will not be concerned with syntactic constructions such as clefts for the realisation of information structure, but I will be concerned
with the assignment of phonological prominence. Therefore it is interesting to note that
spoken French, which is what the dialogue examples in my thesis concern, is approaching
English and Swedish in terms of the realisation of information structure.
How is the “intonational prominence”, that is marked using small capitals in the examples above, characterised from a phonological perspective? Of a large body of work on
information structure and phonology I am here going to point at a few issues of relevance to
the considerations in this thesis. The first issue concerns the relationship between different
information structure notions and various phonological categories.
In general, there seems to be agreement on a correlation between focus and some
phonological accent in a language like English, and often focus is determined as that part
of the sentence that realises the primary sentence stress. See for instance Erteschik-Shir
(1986), Vallduvı́ and Zacharski (1994).
Jackendoff (1972) makes use of two types of phonological accents, which he calls A and
B, for “answer accent” and “background accent”. Both accents involve a high pitch, but
the A accent concludes with a fall in pitch and the B accent with a rise in pitch. One of
the examples that Jackendoff considers is the following:
(28)
A: Well, what about Fred? What did he eat?
B: Fred ate the beans
According to Jackendoff, the intonation pattern for B’s utterance in this context is that
“Fred”, the topic, is associated with a B accent, and “(the) beans”, the focus, is associated
with an A accent. Thus Jackendoff sees the A accent as a focus accent and a B accent as
a topic accent.
14
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
Steedman (2000b) sees the theme-rheme distinction, which constitutes the informativeness dimension, as determining the overall shape of the intonational tune. The focusbackground dimension determines the precise position of the pitch accents, with the contrastive element, the focus, being realised with a pitch accent. Steedman makes use of
the intonational theory of Pierrehumbert (1980), Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990),
and others. Pierrehumbert assumes two relative pitch levels, H and L, for high and low
pitch. Steedman makes use of two of Pierrehumbert’s pitch accent tones, H* and L+H*.
H* marks a tone with a high pitch, whereas L+H* marks a rising pitch. The “*” indicates
that the tone is aligned with a stressed syllable, so that for a L+H* tone, it is the H
tone that is aligned with a stressed syllable. Steedman connects the H* accent with the
rheme-focus, and the L+H* accent with the theme-focus.
The overall intonational tune that is seen as determined by the theme-rheme dimension,
according to Steedman, also includes intonational phrase boundaries. These are L or H
phrasal tones together with a boundary tone L% or H%. The details of the intonational
phrase boundaries need not concern us here, but as an illustration, Steedman’s example
(18) above is given here with his intonational schema:
(29)
(a) I know that Mary envies the man who wrote the musical. But who does
she admire?
Mary
admires
the woman who directed the musical
(b)
theme
rheme
backgr focus
backgr
focus
backgr
L+H*LH%
H*
LL%
For this example, the theme is associated with a L+H*LH% tune, and the rheme with
H*LL%, with the theme seen as an intonational phrase ended by LH%, and the rheme as
an intonation phrase ended by LL%. The theme-focus is realised with the L+H* accent
and the rheme-focus with a H*.
A straightforward correlation between information structure categories and types of
phonological accent – such as that an accent of type X necessarily implies an information
structure category Y or that an information structure category Y is necessarily realised by
an accent of type X – has been questioned. For instance, Hedberg and Sosa (2001) analyse
prosody for spontaneous spoken dialogue and five different information structure categories:
contrastive focus, plain focus, contrastive topic, unratified topic, and ratified topic. They
find, for instance, that the H* accent was used with all categories, with the exception
of ratified topics. As another example, Prevost (1995) addresses the issue of whether
a difference in intensity – how “loud” something is – can be correlated with a difference
between contrastive and non-contrastive foci. He contends that although it is quite possible
to produce accents with a higher intensity especially when there are alternatives explicitly
mentioned in the discourse – which is what he makes use of in his implementation – it is
highly unlikely that an absolute level of intensity can model contrast, that is, that hearers
should be able to detect contrast just on the basis of the intonation of one element.
There is an issue of general importance here. It is quite possible that speakers can be
made to utter a sentence with a particular intonation pattern, such as the statement in
2.1. RELEVANT NOTIONS OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE
15
(28) with a B and an A accent, or a Steedmanesque sentence as in (29). However, this
need not be what speakers actually do in spontaneous speech. Studies of real data, such as
the study carried out by Hedberg and Sosa (2001), are therefore needed to establish such
correlates. On the other hand, with real data in the form of spontaneous dialogue or speech
generally, comes the added difficulty of determining information structure in the first place,
and studies need to deal both with the determination of accents and the determination of
information structure categories; in order to draw any conclusions concerning correlates
between information structure categories and phonological patterns, the definition and
identification of information structure categories need to be very precise.
I am not going to settle the issue of the relationship between information structure
categories and phonological accents here. In the remainder of this thesis I assume that the
generation of a focus is accompanied by some accent, which is also the primary stress
in the utterance. As a default, this accent may be seen as Jackendoff’s A accent or
Pierrehumbert’s H*. However, it may also be in the form of some other type of accent.
I will typically refer to this accent – however it is realised – as the nuclear accent or the
primary stress, and I mark it on words using capitals or small capitals.
The second issue that I am going to discuss here concerning information structure and
phonology, is the issue of whether there are differences in the phonological realisation in
English, Swedish, and French in relation to information structure. The approaches that
I have considered so far – Jackendoff, Steedman, and so on – have all concerned English.
For the focus type accent and the topic type accent there seem to be similar proposals for
French as for English. For instance, Mertens (2002) describes a text-to-speech system for
French which associates a HL intonation contour – a high tone followed by a lowering –
with focus, which is reminiscent of Jackendoff’s A accent for the focus. The notion of focus
used by Mertens corresponds to material that is highlighted or emphasised, as opposed
to backgrounded material, but is, however, not calculated on the basis of the context,
but only on sentence-internal information such as syntax and punctuation. Mertens also
assigns either a high tone or a high tone with a rise in pitch to the topic, which is always in
a sentence-initial position in the system. These two accents are reminiscent of Jackendoff’s
B accent.4
The topic accent is not obligatory in English. For instance, the utterance “Fred ate the
beans” in (28) need not have a topic accent for “Fred”. It may be produced with a much
more flat intonation. Swedish seems to have a phonological realisation of information
structure that corresponds quite closely to the realisation in English. At least certain
dialects of Swedish have an A/H* accent associated with focus material, and has a topic
accent that is not obligatory. The topic accent in Swedish seems to be predominantly used
for contrastive topics, and to convey particular emotions such as indignancy.
Leaving issues concerned with phonology, I mentioned above that the realisation of
information structure using formal means can be done using syntactic, phonological, or
4
In contrast with Mertens and others, Féry (2001) argues that French, unlike Germanic languages and
other Romance languages like Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan, does not have any kind of lexical stress,
and that information structure in terms of the focus-ground articulation is realised phonologically not in
the form of pitch accents but through prosodic phrasing. I am not in a position to settle the matter here.
16
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
morphological means. To give an example of a morphological strategy, Japanese makes
use of a morpheme wa to indicate “aboutness”; what a sentence or clause is about as
opposed to what is said concerning this. The morpheme wa can be called a topic marker,
and Gundel (1988) gives the following example from a recording in Japanese:
(30)
monogatari
story
kara
from
da
be
wa
top
hajimatte
begin
kedomo
but
saisho
at first
otokonoko
boy
sono
that
otokonoko
boy
wa
top
ko
child
ga
subj
uchi
home
wa
top
gakko
school
ni
to
kagikko
latchkey child
gaeri
way back
kaeru
go back
datte
be
“The story TOP starts with a boy on his way back from school. The boy TOP
comes home, and that child TOP is a latchkey child.”
The speaker of the example in (30) uses wa to indicate that the first sentence is about a
particular story. In the second sentence the topic has shifted and is a referent that was
introduced in the first sentence as part of what is said about the story, a referent that is
encoded as the boy and then as the child.
2.2
The information structure of information enriched
constituents
Having reviewed some relevant concepts involved in theories of information structure, I
will now discuss the information structure of information enriched constituents. As will
become apparent in the next few chapters, the generation, and also the interpretation,
of information enriched constituents concern the relation between the utterance and the
context, and the information structural distinctions that I make are based on differences
in how different parts of the enriched constituents constrain and are constrained by the
context.
I will discuss the two dimensions focus-ground and topic-comment, as well as the aspect
of contrast, in relation to information enriched constituents. However, for reasons I will
explain below, my main concern throughout the remainder of this thesis is with focusground and contrast. I begin by a consideration of previous approaches to phenomena
like information enriched constituents in section 2.2.1. Next, I discuss focus and ground
in 2.2.2, topic in 2.2.3, and contrast in the form of contrastive and non-contrastive foci in
2.2.4. Based on my discussion of information enriched constituents and the information
structural focus-ground, topic, and contrast, I then put the pieces together for information
enriched constituents in section 2.2.5, by reformulating compositional content, embedding
structure, and contextual content, in information structural terms.
2.2. THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF ENRICHED CONSTITUENTS
2.2.1
17
Some previous approaches
I will consider two approaches to phenomena related to what I cover using information
enrichment. Both of these approaches view the phenomena from a pragmatic point of view,
and are to different degrees concerned with dialogue. The first approach is important to the
work presented in this thesis because in addition to incorporating a theory of information
structure, it provides an implementation of the generation of these phenomena. That
is, it provides an explicit connection between information structure and generation in a
dialogue system. I return to this approach in Chapter ?? where I specify possibilities for
the implementation of information enriched constituents. The second approach introduces
a term base, that I will use for information enriched constituents in a slightly modified way.
It also includes an interesting proposal concerning pronominalised ground material.
The first approach is that of Jokinen (1994), who is concerned with the generation of
utterances in a specific domain, and provides an implementation of a system that is capable
of generating both elliptical and non-elliptical utterances, as she calls them. Jokinen uses
information structure to help determine how much material is to be realised as part of the
utterance, and makes use of two notions: Central Concept and NewInfo.
The Central Concept is a “distinguished discourse referent which is talked about in the
contribution”.5 It is intended to capture topichood. As Jokinen provides an implementation, the notion of Central Concept is operationalised in relation to a world model of the
domain in question, which is Yellow Pages information. The world model is a hierarchy
of concepts that can all be Central Concepts. Examples include need and want as event
states, buy and hire as event actions, car, van, and bike as vehicles that are hire-objects.
All and only the concepts in the hierarchy can be Central Concepts, and the expression
realising the concept can have any position in the utterance.
The NewInfo is a “concept or property which is new with respect to some Central
Concept”.6 In my terms, the NewInfo corresponds roughly to the focus from the focusground dimension, and the Central Concept to a topic from the topic-comment dimension,
although the two dimensions are conflated in that NewInfo is defined in relation to the
Central Concept. NewInfo must be explicitly realised in an utterance whereas the Central
Concept does not. The Central Concept is not realised in elliptical utterances. Jokinen
defines elliptical utterances in syntactic terms: either a syntactically obligatory argument
of the main verb, or the main verb itself, is not realised in the utterance. However, the
dialogue theory that she formalises and the formalisation she provides are concerned with a
pragmatic view of ellipsis: an elliptical utterance realises only NewInfo and not the Central
Concept.
One example that she gives is the following:
(31)
U(ser): I want a car
S(ystem): Buy or rent?
5
6
Jokinen (1994) p. 152.
Jokinen (1994) p. 153.
18
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
When the system is to generate a response to the human user’s utterance, the Central
Concept is a concept car, and NewInfo is a disjunction of a buy event and a rent event.
The want event is also part of the context and reasoning about this is also necessary to
determine that an elliptical utterance can be used, but want is not assigned an information
structure category. The non-elliptical system utterance would be “Do you want to buy
or rent one?” That is, whereas elliptical utterances contain only NewInfo, non-elliptical
utterances contain NewInfo and the Central Concept, and may also contain other material.
A number of other papers by Jokinen and colleagues treat the same issue. In work by
Jokinen and Wilcock (2001) the term Topic has replaced Central Concept, and the notions
of Topic and NewInfo now seem to be complementary: any concept in the equivalent of the
contextual content of an utterance is either a Topic or a NewInfo. For the system utterance
in the example above, both of want and car would now be Topics, and the disjunction of
buy and rent NewInfo as before. Paradoxically, topic here seems to have lost the aboutness
of the Central Concept; it is no longer only one concept but several, and seems more to
correspond to ground than to topic.
The second approach that I consider is the one by Vallduvı́ (2001). Along the informativeness dimension Vallduvı́ makes a distinction between ground and rheme to discuss
rheme-only fragments or informational fragments, such as B ′ :
(32)
A: What does John like ?
B: John likes BEER
B′ : BEER
He calls the material that I have underlined in A’s utterance the base, and asserts that it
is because of the accessibility of this base that B’s utterance does not need to include a
ground, as in B ′ as opposed to B. I will make use of Vallduvı́’s notion of base below, in a
slightly modified way.
Besides examples like (32) Vallduvı́ considers examples involving pronouns, as in these
two B utterances:
(33)
A: What does John like?
B: He likes BEER
(34)
A: How does he feel about Bill?
B: He LOVES him
Vallduvı́ also labels B’s utterances in both (33) and (34) informational fragments. This
is in part based on these utterances being more natural in dialogue than the B utterance
in (32), in the context of the preceding question in each example. It is also motivated by
the claim that “he likes” in B’s utterance in (33), and “he” and “him” in (34), do not
perform the anchoring function that is normally carried out by the ground. They do not
perform this anchoring function because the base is accessible in the context through the
preceding question. Thus Vallduvı́ sees neither of B’s utterance in (33) and in (34) as
having a ground.
2.2. THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF ENRICHED CONSTITUENTS
19
Several approaches to ellipsis and fragments in dialogue consider utterances realising
only the focus. I will discuss some of these at appropriate places later in this thesis. Work
by Steedman and work based on his approach that I have mentioned here (Steedman (1991,
2000a,b), Prevost (1995)), contain no analysis of examples of information enrichment, and
I am not aware of any such work in this framework. However, I do believe the approach is
quite suited to a study of information enrichment in dialogue, since the framework accommodates the focus-ground dimension (roughly Steedman’s theme-rheme) and contrast for
both topics and foci (roughly Steedman’s theme-focus and rheme-focus).
2.2.2
Focus and ground
Turning now to my treatment of information enriched constituents, the information structural articulation displayed by all information enriched constituents is that between informativeness and uninformativeness. A constituent relying on information enrichment
consists of at least an informative part, and is enriched by an already known (uninformative) part. This articulation is the focus-ground distinction that I introduced above. The
terminology and notions that I have chosen to adopt, and slightly adapt, for this dimension
are those of Vallduvı́ (1992).
Like other approaches, I view the focus as the informative part of the utterance. The
focus encodes that piece of information with which the hearer is to update her information
state, or more precisely, the information that the speaker presents to the hearer as to
update the latter’s information state. It is intonationally prominent in all of the three
languages that I am considering: Swedish, English, and French. The focus has to be part
of the compositional content of the utterance.
With Vallduvı́ I designate the ground as that part of the utterance that reflects the
context, in the sense that it indicates to what contextual material the focus should be
attached in the hearer’s information state. In contrast with the focus, ground need not be
part of the compositional content of the utterance (nor of the contextual content in the
case of all-focus utterances). The ground is uninformative. For Vallduvı́ this means that
the ground does not make any contribution to the hearer’s information state; the speaker
assumes that the hearer already has the knowledge that the ground encodes. However,
something more about the notion of uninformativeness needs to be said.
Firstly, as I will discuss using corpus examples in section ??, it is quite clear that
the inclusion of ground material in the compositional content of an utterance often is
not without import, that is, it is not “uninformative” in a wide sense. A ground that
is included in the compositional content of an utterance is there for a purpose. For this
reason, one may constrain the term information to mean only that part of the logicosemantic or propositional content of an utterance that the speaker presents as unknown
to the hearer or that is in fact unknown to the hearer. Any semantic content that is
part of an utterance and that is already part of the context is then uninformative. Any
extra meaning that may be conveyed by an utterance above semantic content, through
implicatures, presuppositions, and so on, is not seen as information in this restricted use
of the term. A restricted use of the term information is presumably what is assumed by
20
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
focus-ground distinctions concerning informativeness, and the particular view that I have
outlined is the one taken by Vallduvı́ to distinguish focus from ground.
Thus in the restricted sense of the term information, the ground is uninformative.
Another way to account for the fact that a ground that is included in a dialogue utterance
is not uninformative in a wide sense, would be to redefine information, and consider the
different kinds of information that ground and focus supply.
In this thesis I use the term information in both the restricted sense, to identify a
particular way in which grounds and foci differ, and in a more general sense. The more
general sense specifically goes together with my modelling of the context in the form of an
information state using the information state approach to dialogue modelling, as discussed
in Chapter ??. In Vallduvı́’s sense, the information state does not consist of information
but of knowledge, and his representation of the context is in the form of a knowledge store.
The more general sense in which I use information is also seen in information enriched
constituents. In the strict sense of the term information, these constituents are enriched
by uninformative material, but information enrichment instead refers to enrichment by
material that can be found in an information state, or some other model of the context.
The second issue that I want to discuss in relation to the “uninformativeness” of the
ground is given by my characterisation of the ground as that part of an utterance that the
speaker presents to the hearer as either already part of the hearer’s information state or
that can be uncontentiously accommodated. The emphasis on the speaker’s presentation
means that whether the ground is actually part of the hearer’s information state is a matter
that my focus-ground distinction is not concerned with; the speaker may for instance be
mistaken about what she believes has been established by her and her interlocutor. Accommodation is adapted from Lewis (1979), and in my work means that a hearer constructs
a ground for a focus given by the other dialogue participant. I will discuss accommodation in detail in the next chapter, when dealing with the context of information enriched
constituents. A constructed and accommodated ground enables the hearer to update her
information state with the focus information.
Accommodation in this sense seems to involve a dialogue participant updating her
information state with the ground, that is, ground seems to be informative in the same
update sense as the focus. However, the content making up an accommodated ground
must be constructed out of or derived from something that is already known by the hearer.
Indeed, a speaker would presumably not rely on information enrichment if she did not trust
her interlocutor to be capable of constructing an appropriate ground, that is, the content
making up that ground is shared knowledge (as assumed by the speaker). It is in this sense
that a distinction between foci and grounds can be maintained concerning informativeness,
even when a ground is accommodated.
This view of accommodation also agrees with the kind of accommodation discussed by
Lewis (1979). Consider a person A that says “My brother will be in town tomorrow” to
a person B. If B does not know that A has a brother, she is still able to construct a
new entity that has the property of being A’s brother, add this entity to her information
state, and then update her information state with the information that the person who is
A’s brother is coming to town the following day. B is able to construct the proper entity
2.2. THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF ENRICHED CONSTITUENTS
21
through her knowledge of the interpretation of the expression “my brother” as said by
A, and this is knowledge that can also be exploited by the speaker A, trusting that his
interlocutor is able to accommodate an appropriate entity.
In addition to the accommodated ground being constructed out of aspects that are in
some sense part of shared knowledge, the differences between a focus and an accommodated
ground regarding updating the information state notably concern presentation and what
is under discussion. In terms of presentation, a ground is presented as known or inferable
to the hearer by not being included in the compositional content of the utterance. This is
not so for the focus. In terms of what is under discussion, focus is precisely what is under
discussion at a given point in the dialogue, whereas an accommodated ground is not. This
latter difference can be seen in terms of ensuing dialogue: if an accommodated ground
is to be discussed, it must explicitly be brought into the discussion. Thus both of focus
and accommodated ground in some sense update the information state, but they do so in
distinct ways and under distinct circumstances.
I see both focus and ground as pragmatic notions, and, further, as consisting of semantic
material and having various syntactic and phonological correlates. For convenience, I will
often refer to foci and grounds as strings of words, when discussing parts of utterances
or giving paraphrases of contents, rather than in the form of semantic formulae or more
complex representations. I will merely use this as a convenient way of referring to the
semantic interpretation when the details of the semantics are not under consideration.
That focus is informative in relation to the ground can be expressed in terms of focus
supplying a value or an argument to the ground. This is similar to the function of answers
in relation to questions, and, indeed, ground and focus are often discussed in terms of
questions and answers, as could be seen in the discussion of theories of information structure
above, including my introductory example (1) in the present chapter, partly repeated here:
(35)
A: What are you reading ?
B: I am reading Animal Farm
In B’s utterance in (35), “Animal Farm” is the focus in relation to the ground, “I am
reading”, given in the same sentence. As previously, I use boldface to indicate the focus,
and ground material is in italics. The ground in B’s utterance performs a contextual
anchoring function by being equatable with A’s preceding question which is already part
of the context. That is, the determination of the focus-ground articulation of B’s utterance
is done through determining the informative part in relation to the preceding question, and
determining the uninformative part through equivalence with (part of) the question. Since
B’s utterance contains a full ground, it does not rely on information enrichment.
This is in contrast with B ′ in (36), which is an information enriched constituent:
(36)
A: What are you reading ?
B′ : Animal Farm
Here, only the focus, “Animal Farm”, is supplied as part of the compositional content.
The ground is the same as in the other version of B’s utterance, but is now only part of
22
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
the contextual content. It is constructed out of the underlined material in the preceding
question. Following Vallduvı́ (2001) I will call this underlined material in the question the
base.
With the base I intend that part of the dialogue history, from which the ground is
taken or constructed when the compositional content contains no ground (or only a partial
ground), exemplified by the underlined material in A’s utterance in (36). I also use it for
the contextual material that the ground of an utterance reflects, when the compositional
content of that utterance contains ground. An example of this is the underlined material
in A’s utterance in (35). The difference between Vallduvı́’s proposal and mine, is that he
sees B ′ in (36) as ground-less, and I make a distinction between the compositional content
of B’s utterance, which contains only the focus and no ground, and the contextual content,
which contains the focus together with the ground, the latter given by the base. For both
usages of the term, ground is seen as part of the utterance, whereas base is outside of the
utterance and part of the context.
As in (35) the “focushood” of “Animal Farm” in (36) is determined through informativeness, but now the ground is no longer determined through equivalence, but is constructed
from the context. I will discuss the construction of ground for information enriched constituents at length in Chapter ??.
The information enriched B ′ in (36) is an answer to a preceding question. Information
enriched constituents can be used to perform a number of different functions, as could be
seen already in Chapter ??. They can, for instance, also function as questions, as in the
following example:
(37)
A: What are you reading?
B: Animal Farm ?
The contextual content of B’s utterance in (37) can be paraphrased as Am I reading Animal
Farm? Here, the focus and the ground are the same as for B ′ in (36), the only difference
being the function performed. I am going to look at a number of different information
enriched constituents functioning as questions and as answers.
The naturalness of the informativeness of an answer in relation to a question is presumably part of the reason why the focus-ground articulation is so often discussed in terms
of questions and answers. However, as B’s utterance in (37) shows, a question can also
be informative. If focus-ground is thought of in terms of function-argument structure, a
question supplying a ground can be seen as a function that is applied to an argument that
consists of the focus given by the answer. A question that is a focus can similarly be seen
as the argument of a contextually given function corresponding to the ground. The result
is then another function.
As I have already mentioned, focus and ground are relational and not referential notions, see section 2.1.1.1. That is, focus is informative with respect to the ground (with
the exception of all-focus utterances which are informative without being related to a
ground), and ground performs its anchoring function in relation to the focus. For example,
the relational and non-referential status of the focus can be illustrated using disjunctive
questions:
2.2. THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF ENRICHED CONSTITUENTS
(38)
23
A: Is Virginia or Germaine reading Animal Farm ?
B: Virginia
“Virginia” in B’s utterance is the focus in relation to a ground that can be paraphrased as
is reading Animal Farm. The presence of “Virginia” already in A’s utterance may lead one
to think that “Virginia” in B’s utterance is non-informative. This misconception may in
particular arise if ground and focus is thought of in terms of “old” and “new” information.
That is, how can “Virginia” in B’s utterance be new information when Virginia has already
been mentioned in the dialogue?
Here it is important to note that the “newness” of the focus is not in terms of the
discourse; whether the referent has been introduced in the dialogue or not makes no difference. “Virginia” in B’s utterance is “new” in relation to the ground, which is the question
of precisely who has read Animal Farm. This questioned is not answered in A’s utterance,
but in B’s subsequent response.
In my discussion of the informational fragments of Vallduvı́ (2001) in section 2.2.1, I
noted that Vallduvı́ considers examples such as B’s utterances in (39) as not having a
ground:
(39)
A: What does John like?
B: He likes BEER
This is not the approach that I take. I see “he likes” in (39) as a ground, just as if it were
expressed in the form of “John likes”:
(40)
A: What does John like ?
B: He likes BEER
B′ : John likes BEER
I analyse B ′ in (40) as a ground that involves pronominalisation, and the other utterance
by B in the same example as an identical ground (see 2.3.3.2 and 2.3.3.1). However, in
terms of their distribution in dialogue, there is an interesting parallel between information
enriched constituents and utterances that contain a pronominalised ground, as I discuss in
relation to corpus examples in section ??.
2.2.3
Topic
I have discussed information enriched constituents in terms of focus-ground. How does the
topic-comment articulation relate to information enrichment? In particular, the interesting
question is the following: given that an utterance that relies on information enrichment
must minimally contain the focus as part of its compositional content, can the topiccomment dimension shed any light on the amount of material that can additionally be
included, still leaving the utterance as an information enriched constituent? Specifically,
can a topic that corresponds to material that is less than the full ground be realised as
part of the compositional content, without all of the comment?
24
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
Consider example (12) again – repeated below as (41) – which is one of the examples
that I discussed in relation to the topic-comment approach:
(41)
(a) What about Eavan? What did she read yesterday?
(b) Eavan read Animal Farm.
topic
comment
ground
focus
An information enriched constituent in the form of just the focus is perfectly acceptable
here, as B’s first utterance in (42) shows:
(42)
A: What did Eavan read yesterday?
B: Animal Farm
B′ : Eavan Animal Farm
But what about (42B ′ ), which consists of the focus together with the topic?
Interestingly, in the corpus dialogues that I have considered, such constructions seem
to only ever turn up being enriched by material in the same sentence, where coordination
is involved. That is, “Eavan Animal Farm” would occur in a context such as this:
(43)
A: What did Judith and Eavan read yesterday?
B′′ : Judith read Down and Out in Paris and London, (and) Eavan Animal
Farm
That is, the second conjunct in B ′′ might be seen as consisting of a focus (“Animal Farm”)
and a topic (“Eavan”), and as being enriched by the first conjunct for the remaining
material, “read”. Syntactically, B ′′ in (43) is an instance of gapping. It should also be
noted that B ′′ involves listing: each person is listed together with the book they read.
Within the focus-ground dimension, “Eavan” in the second conjunct in (43B ′′ ) is a
partial ground, the full ground consisting of “Eavan read”. I will discuss corpus examples
of this kind in relation to partial ground below in 2.3.3.4, but I am not going to give these
examples any other treatment in this thesis. This is because of the practical limitation that
I made in the preceding chapter concerning the types of information enriched constituents
that I consider in this thesis: I am not treating constituents that are enriched by material
in the same utterance.
I believe it is possible to construct variants of B ′ in (42) that are acceptable. This may,
for instance, be achieved by turning “Eavan” into a question as in (44), or as something a
speaker produces while planning the focus information as in (45):
(44)
A: What did Eavan read yesterday?
B: Eavan? Animal Farm
(45)
A: What did Eavan read yesterday?
B: Eavan... (hm..) Animal Farm
2.2. THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF ENRICHED CONSTITUENTS
25
Utterance (42B ′ ) may also be possible if “Eavan” is phonologically marked in some way,
which may be used to imply contrast between Eavan and some other person. However,
it may be difficult to find examples like (42B ′ ) where the topic is included in a “neutral”
or “unmarked” way, but I leave it as an open question whether an utterance like this
is acceptable in dialogue. Thus motivated by the corpus examples that I study in this
thesis, I do not include the topic-comment distinction as a level of analysis for information
enrichment in this thesis. This will further be discussed for a particular kind of example
in section 2.2.4 below.
I also leave as an open question the issue of whether different parts of the comment
may play a role for information enrichment, and the same for topics that are not part of
the ground.
2.2.4
Contrastive and non-contrastive focus
The final aspect of importance to information enrichment is that of contrast. I make
a distinction between two kinds of focus: contrastive and non-contrastive focus. As I
showed above when discussing contrast in general terms for information structure, several
approaches include contrast for both foci and topics. As I do not include a treatment
of topic in relation to information enriched constituents, I include no consideration of
contrastive topics here (an example might be the listing utterance in (43) above).
A contrastive focus is informative material that is contrasted with an alternative in the
context, an alternative being a differing but similar entity in the same set. Based on the
corpus data that I discuss, a contrastive focus can pragmatically be connected to the most
restrictive criteria on contrast: explicit mentioning of alternatives. That is, a contrastive
focus always contrasts with an alternative that has been mentioned earlier in the dialogue.
I do not consider cases where contrast is merely implied, and I also do not consider contrast
between one alternative mentioned in the dialogue and another alternative that is salient
through non-speech means. It should be noted that these constraints on contrast result
from the dialogue examples that I consider; the notion of contrast could well be extended
to cover other types of contrast, that is, a less restrictive notion of contrast could be used
if other data is considered.
A focus that does not involve explicit contrast is a non-contrastive focus. In general,
when I use the term focus on its own, I refer to both contrastive and non-contrastive focus
unless it is clear that I mean the one or the other. The common denominator for contrastive
and non-contrastive foci is informativeness. For the examples that I consider, a focus is
always either contrastive or non-contrastive, and never both.
My reason for the distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive foci concerns a
difference in the way they relate to the context, in the sense of how the embedding structure
is created. I will discuss this in more detail in the next chapter.
My use of alternative in relation to information enriched constituents is not identical to
its use within Alternative Semantics. As I discussed above, on the Alternative Semantics
approach every focus is seen as evoking a set of alternatives. This is not so for information
enriched constituents, where only contrastive foci are seen in relation to an alternative,
26
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
and this an explicitly realised one. My discussion of alternatives in relation to information
enriched constituents will be more nuanced in Chapter ??.
Example (36) that I discussed in section 2.2.2 in relation to focus and ground is an
example of a non-contrastive focus. I include this example again here, as (46):
(46)
A: What are you reading ?
B: Animal Farm
Given that A’s question in (46) is the full dialogue context for B’s utterance, “Animal
Farm” is a non-contrastive focus as there is no explicit alternative in the context. On the
assumption that B is only reading one book, the answer in (46B) excludes a number of
other possibilities, which may be a set of other books that is exhaustively known or not to
A and B, but this has no bearing on the determination of the status of the focus in this
example regarding contrast.
Example (47) gives an example of a contrastive focus:
(47)
A1: What is Virginia reading ?
B1: Animal Farm
A2: And Germaine ?
A2 is a question that relies on information enrichment. The ground in the contextual
content of A2 can be seen as given by the underlined base in A1, with a paraphrase for the
contextual content of A2 as What is Germaine reading? The focus in A2 is “Germaine”
which contrasts with the explicitly mentioned “Virginia” in A1. As with non-contrastive
foci, the contrastive “Germaine” is informative in relation to the ground.
Example (47) can also serve as an elucidation of the information structure of questions
and answers, and of the concepts ground, contrastive focus, and non-contrastive focus.
For the different utterances in that example, taken one by one, I assume the following
information structure articulations (no base is indicated):
(48)
A1: What is Virginia reading ?
B1: Animal Farm
B1′ : Virginia is reading Animal Farm
A2: And Germaine ?
A2′ : And What is Germaine reading ?
B2: 1984
B2′ : Germaine is reading 1984
At the start of the dialogue, utterance A1 is an all-focus utterance. It updates the information state with the question of what Virginia is reading. Whether the referent of
Virginia is contextually salient or known to both dialogue participants, concerns referential status, and does not influence the relational status of “Virginia” as part of the focus in
A1. Utterance B1 is an information enriched constituent that consists of only the focus,
2.2. THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF ENRICHED CONSTITUENTS
27
which is informative in relation to the preceding question. It is a non-contrastive focus. A1
functions as the base for B1, and gives the ground for the contextual content of B1. B1′
does not rely on information enrichment, and consists of both the ground and the focus.
Utterance A2, as I explained above, is then a question that relies on information enrichment, and consists of a contrastive focus “Germaine”. This focus is informative in relation
to a structure What is
reading, which may be paraphrased as What is who reading?
or About who do you want to ask what he/she is reading? This question is either already
part of a dialogue participant’s information state when A2 is about to be asked, or it is
accommodated together with the integration of “Germaine” as a result of A2. Utterance
A2′ is the corresponding question that does not rely on information enrichment, and this
consists of a full ground and focus.
Utterance B2 is an information enriched constituent consisting of only a focus. It is
informative in relation to the question given by A2 (or A2′ ), and it may also be construed
as contrasting with “Animal Farm” in B1. B2′ gives the corresponding non-informationenriched utterance, which consists of a full ground and focus.
Concerning utterance A2 in (47) and (48) one may also note that it seems as though
“Germaine” may either be pronounced with an A accent (or something similar) or with a
B accent (or something similar), which may be taken as indicating that “Germaine” acts
as a topic in this utterance. Under the assumption of a notion of topic that is independent
of the focus-ground dimension, that is, where a topic can either be part of the ground or
of the focus, as Dahl (1974) and others assume, there is no contradiction in “Germaine”
constituting both focus and topic. For a theory of phonology it means that some information enriched constituents consisting of only a focus may be realised with a B accent
and not an A accent. As this thesis is not primarily concerned with phonology, and as I
have carried out no phonological analysis of corpus material, and as, additionally, it seems
that “Germaine” can also be realised with the “default” A accent, I include no special
treatment of utterances like A2 in (48) in this thesis. However, I also leave the door open
to an incorporation of a notion of topic in an extended treatment of information enriched
constituents, which can influence the phonological analysis. This notion of topic would
presumably be independent of the focus-ground dimension.
Note that for an approach that equates the notion of topic with the B accent, and
connects the topic only to the ground – as is the case for the link as used by Vallduvı́
(1992) and Vallduvı́ and Engdahl (1996) – the utterance A2 in (48), if pronounced with a
B accent, ends up as an utterance consisting of only ground material. From a pragmatic
point of view, it seems odd to say that the question of what Germaine is reading is part of
the shared context even before it has been asked, which would mean that A2 and A2′ are
uninformative and do not update the context in any way. Allowing a notion of topic that
is not tied only to the ground, would avoid this, and would allow A2 as an informative
utterance in the form of a focus that is to update the shared context.
Leaving the discussion of example (48), the determination of the contextual content of
an example with a contrastive focus can be construed as involving the determination of
parallelism between two structures, where the focus is an alternative to the corresponding
element in the parallel structure. For example (47) the contextual content of A2 can
28
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
be determined as (49a) by seeing this as parallel to (47A1), repeated as (49b), where
“Germaine” and “Virginia” are alternatives:
(49)
(a) What is Germaine reading?
(b) What is Virginia reading?
Parallelism is used by Dalrymple et al. (1991) for ellipsis, and by Pulman (1997) for
the interpretation of focus. I will make the notion more formally precise in Chapter ??,
but for now I rely on an intuitive understanding of the concept. As a further illustration,
contrast (47) with (50):
(50)
A1: What is Virginia reading?
B1: Animal Farm
A2: And Homage to Catalonia
In (50) the contextual content of A2 is instead parallel with the contextual content of B1.
These contents are given as (a) and (b), respectively:
(51)
(a) Virginia is reading Homage to Catalonia
(b) Virginia is reading Animal Farm
In (49) “Germaine” and “Virginia” are alternatives in the two parallel structures, that
is, “Germaine” in (47A2) is a contrastive focus by being contrasted to “Virginia” in (47A1).
In (51), on the other hand, parallelism is established not with A1 but with B1, and two
Orwellian books are instead alternatives.
Both contrastive and non-contrastive foci are intonationally prominent. However, in
terms of the placement of intonational prominence within the focus, contrastive and noncontrastive foci can differ for the information enriched constituents that I study. For a
contrastive focus, it is the contrasting element that is intonationally prominent, whereas a
non-contrastive focus has a “default” intonation pattern. As an example, take the expression “two inches”. Consider first this expression as a non-contrastive focus, produced in a
context such as this:
(52)
A: What’s the distance ?
B: Two inches
The primary stress will normally fall on “inches” in this example (primary stress is marked
using small capitals):
(53)
A: What’s the distance?
B: Two inches
The placement of the primary stress for a contrastive focus depends on which element
is the contrasting one. In example (54) “two” contrasts with “five”:
2.2. THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF ENRICHED CONSTITUENTS
(54)
29
A: This distance is five inches. What’s that distance?
B: two inches
In example (55) “inches” contrasts with “centimetres”:
(55)
A: Okay, so this here is two centimetres. Now what is that?
B: Two inches
Languages like French and other Romance languages which have a less flexible intonation are not always able to mark contrastive accents in this way. See, for instance, the
discussion by Vallduvı́ and Zacharski (1994) of Catalan and Italian examples. A syntactic restructuring of the utterance may be needed to get the contrastive element into an
intonationally prominent position.
One may also imagine the special case of “two inches” contrasting with, say, “three
centimetres”. For such an example, there are two pairs of contrasting elements – “two”
contrasting with “five”, and “inches” with “centimetres” – and there may be two accents,
one for “two” and one for “inches”. This would be an example of multiple contrastive foci.
Phonological differences between contrastive and non-contrastive foci need not only
concern accent placement, but also such factors as higher and lower pitch, and differences
in speech rate. I do not consider such factors here.
The examples concerning accent placement can also be discussed using the notions of
broad and narrow focus that I introduced above. The two examples (53) and (55) both
involve the same intonation pattern, with the primary stress on “inches”:
(56)
B: Two inches
Such an example, out of context, is ambiguous between a reading with narrow focus on
“inches” and a reading with wide focus on “two inches”. A wide focus reading will typically
correlate with a non-contrastive focus, as in (52). A narrow focus reading can be either
contrastive or non-contrastive.
I am now going to turn to the issue of the determination of the focus, in the sense of
how much material belongs to the focus, or, in other words, just what is informative in an
utterance. This is an issue that comes to the fore especially in relation to contrastive foci,
but also concerns non-contrastive foci. Consider the following example:
(57)
A: This distance is three inches, and what is that distance?
B: That distance is two inches
Utterance B is pronounced with the main stress on “two”, which marks a contrast with
“three” in the context. Now, for the purpose of the investigation of information enriched
constituents, I view “two” as the focus of B’s utterance in the context of A’s utterance.
That is, given A’s utterance, the only informative part of B’s utterance is “two”.
This view of the focus is a pragmatically-based view. The remainder of the utterance,
the pieces of semantic content corresponding to “That distance is” and “inches”, is available
in the context in the form of the preceding utterance, that is, it is ground material. An
30
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
alternative approach, that I do not take here, is more syntax oriented, and involves seeing
the whole of “two inches” as the focus in B’s utterance in (57). This unit – “two inches”
– constitutes a syntactic phrase. More specifically, in example (57) it constitutes what I
will call a focus phrase, following Drubig (1994).
Drubig makes a distinction between the focus and the focus phrase to argue that association with focus, in the sense of Rooth (1985), concerns the focus phrase and not the
focus. Drubig describes the focus phrase as a “constituent that must contain – but not
necessarily properly contain – a focus whose prominence is marked in the usual way”.7
One of his examples – originally due to Chomsky – is the following, where intonational
prominence is marked using small capitals and the focus phrase is marked using square
brackets:
(58) He only invited [ex-convicts with red shirts]
The notion of focus phrase is used by several other authors. For instance, Umbach (2002)
uses the distinction between focus and focus phrase to discuss alternatives evoked by utterances, and Krifka (2006), like Drubig, discusses association with focus in relation to focus
phrases.
Just how is the focus phrase determined? Drubig’s characterisation that I quoted
above is quite vague. For instance, in his example (58) the NP “red shirts”, the PP “with
red shirts”, and so on, are all constituents that contain the focus. I will not attempt a
syntax-based definition of the focus phrase as I use it in this thesis, but rather give an
informal characterisation in terms of questions. As a working hypothesis, I characterise a
focus phrase as the minimal syntactic phrase that can answer a “bare wh-question”, where
such a question is a wh-question where the wh-phrase consists of only a wh-word. This
characterisation can be used for focus phrases that are NPs and AdvPs, using question
words what, who, where, how, and so on. Examples where the focus is a verb may need
special treatment.
As an illustration of bare wh-questions, for B’s utterance in (57), the questions “That
distance is how many inches?” and “How many inches is that distance?” are not bare
wh-questions, but “What is the distance?” is. This makes “two inches” the focus phrase
for this utterance. For Drubig’s example, a question “He only invited ex-convicts with
what shirts?” is, for instance, not a bare wh-question, whereas “Who did he only invite?”
is.
My reason for using a pragmatically based notion of focus, as opposed to requiring
the focus to be a syntactic constituent, is that this enables the investigation of how much
material the compositional content of an information enriched constituent must contain. As
I do not want to abandon the principle that an utterance must minimally realise the focus,
and – as I will show using corpus examples – as an utterance can realise less material than
the focus phrase, the focus must be able to be less than the focus phrase. This means that
from a pragmatic point of view, a (syntactic) focus phrase can contain (pragmatic) ground
material in addition to the (pragmatic) focus. As this approach enables the investigation
7
Drubig (1994) p. 6.
2.2. THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF ENRICHED CONSTITUENTS
31
of examples where the focus is strictly less than the focus phrase, it also enables the
investigation of information enriched constituents of this kind and where some examples
include the full focus phrase as part of the compositional content, and others only the
focus. That is, it enables the investigation of when it is possible to rely on enrichment for
a focus-phrase ground and when it is not.
For an illustration of the approach whereby the focus is always equal to the full focus
phrase, consider the following example from Vallduvı́ and Zacharski (1994):
(59)
A1: What did you get Ben for Christmas?
B1: I got him a blue shirt
A2: What did you get Diane?
B2: I got her a red shirt
Vallduvı́ and Zacharski view “a blue shirt” as the focus in B1, and “a red shirt” as the
focus in B2. Both of these are syntactic phrases and equal to the focus phrase.
As ground and focus are complementary notions, the view that one takes of the focus
influences the view that one takes of the ground, and vice versa. For Vallduvı́ and Zacharski,
the ground of B2 is only given by A2, making “I got her/Diane” the ground. On my
approach, the ground of a particular focus can be a complex entity made up of a number
of different parts of the context. For example (59), B2 is not produced only in the context
of A2, but in the context of all three preceding utterances – this is indeed what enables
“red” to be a contrastive element. Thus I view the focus of B2 as “red”, and the ground
material in the form of “I got her/Diane a” and “shirt” is given by the two preceding
utterances. I investigate the construction of ground in this way in Chapter ??.
The view that one takes of the focus and the ground depends on to what use the theory
is to be put. I investigate whether “red” in (59) and “two” in (57) can be realised as
information enriched constituents, and why this is so, or why this is not so. Such questions
are not the concern of Vallduvı́ and Zacharski, and they choose a different view of the
focus and the ground. However, interestingly, their view of “a red shirt” as the focus in
(59B2) has them make the following remark: “in the context of [(59)], the interesting or
informative bit within the focus of the answer in [B2] is the fact that the shirt Clara got
Diana is red” [my emphasis].8 This seems to suggest that, strictly, their focus contains
more than informative material, which agrees with a pragmatic view of seeing only “red”
as the (pragmatic) focus.
2.2.5
Information enriched constituents
Given the informational primitives introduced above – focus and ground – the compositional and contextual contents of information enriched constituents can now be characterised in information structure terms in the following way:
8
Vallduvı́ and Zacharski (1994) p. 13.
32
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
(60) The contextual content of an information enriched constituent consists of the focus
and a full ground
(61) The compositional content of an information enriched constituent consists of either
of the following:
(a) A focus (for a simple information enriched constituent)
(b) A focus together with a partial ground (for a complex information enriched
constituent)
A simple information enriched constituent is enriched by the full ground. A complex
information enriched constituent is enriched by only part of the ground, namely that part
of the ground that is not included in the compositional content. A partial ground consists
of strictly less material than a full ground. In this thesis I will mainly consider partial
grounds in the form of focus-phrase material that is part of the compositional content,
when the focus is strictly less than the focus phrase.
An example of a simple information enriched constituent is (36), repeated here as (62):
(62)
A: What are you reading ?
B: Animal Farm
The information enriched constituent in B’s utterance in (62) consists of just the focus.
B’s utterance in (63) is a complex information enriched constituent, consisting of both the
focus and a partial ground:
(63)
A: How many inches is that ?
B: Two inches
Utterances that do not rely on information enrichment for their interpretation have a
contextual content that is equal to their compositional content, and this content consists
either of a full ground and focus, or just a focus in the case of all-focus utterances.
In Chapter ?? I discussed information enriched constituents not only in terms of a compositional and a contextual content, but also in terms of a contextually given embedding
structure that when applied to the compositional content gives the contextual content.
Now, what is the embedding structure for information enriched constituents in terms of
information structure? It can be characterised as follows:
(64) The embedding structure of an information enriched constituent corresponds to the
ground
For a simple information enriched constituent, the embedding structure in the form of the
ground is applied to the constituent, and the result is the contextual content consisting of
the focus and the full ground. For a complex information enriched constituent, the partial
ground in the compositional content is identified with part of the embedding structure, and
the embedding structure is then applied to the remainder of the compositional content,
which is the focus. An alternative view may possibly be to characterise the embedding
structure as that part of the ground that does not belong to the compositional content.
2.3. CORPUS STUDY
2.3
33
Corpus study
Having given the theoretical background of information enriched constituents in terms
of information structure, I am now in a position to present the corpus study of the two
informational primitives focus and ground in relation to information enrichment, and the
two kinds of focus: contrastive and non-contrastive. The corpus study presented here is
not an overview of all the different kinds of information enriched constituents I have found
in the dialogues I have studied, however one may want to subclassify them, but rather
an illustration of the informational primitives using fairly straightforward examples. The
complexity involved in the usage of information enriched constituents will unfold in the
next two chapters, which deal with the context of information enriched constituents, and
the constraints governing information enriched constituents, respectively.
In addition to information enriched constituents, I discuss utterances containing a full
ground. This is not only to examine ground as an informational primitive, but has further
importance. First of all, it is instructive to contrast the use of information enriched constituents with the use of ground-focus utterances, and insights from this comparison are
needed both for the study of context in Chapter ?? and for the discussion of the constraints
in Chapter ??. For instance, variations in the use of a full ground as part of the contextual content, as presented in 2.3.3.1-2.3.3.3, have interesting parallels with the embedding
ground material of information enriched constituents and is useful for the discussion of the
indeterminacy of the ground of enriched constituents.
Secondly, the formalisation developed in Chapters ??-?? and the dialogue system component specified in Chapter ??, incorporate both utterances that do and utterances that
do not make use of information enrichment. Making a principled choice of which kind
of utterance is appropriate in a given situation – one that relies on information enrichment or one that does not – depends not only on knowing the mechanisms of information
enrichment, but also on knowing when not to rely on information enrichment.
As above, in the examples I use boldface to mark a focus (contrastive or non-contrastive),
italics for the ground, and underlining for the base, the latter being the reflection of the
ground in the context. I investigate the informational primitives one by one. I begin with
the focus, in the form of information enriched constituents whose compositional content
consist of only the focus, with non-contrastive focus in section 2.3.1 and contrastive focus
in 2.3.2. In 2.3.3 I then consider utterances whose compositional content contains ground
material, either a full ground or a partial ground. Finally, in 2.3.4, I consider some examples that may seem uncertain as to whether the material in question is ground or focus.
Some of the corpus examples discussed in this and the following two chapters are also
discussed by Ericsson (2005, 2006).
2.3.1
Non-contrastive focus
As I have already mentioned, the paradigm example of focus-ground structure, often discussed in the literature and used as a test for information structure, is a question-answer
pair, with the question being a wh-question that gives the focus-ground partitioning of
34
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
the answer. The counterpart for information enriched constituents is a wh-question that
gives the ground, and an answer that consists of only the focus. In the corpora that I
have looked at, examples of this kind are indeed very frequent among information enriched
constructions, with the answer constituting a non-contrastive focus, that is, the content of
the information enriched constituent is informative with respect to the ground, but does
not contrast with some other element that is explicitly introduced in the dialogue.
An example of a non-contrastive focus as an answer that appeared already in Chapter
?? is the following, where C marks the customer and T A the travel agent:
(65)
[ Amex tape 6 call 1 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
C: At what time does it get to Toronto ?
TA: Three thirty five p.m.
In Chapter ?? I discussed this example in terms of the travel agent’s utterance having
a compositional content paraphrasable as 3.35pm. I gave It gets to Toronto at
as the embedding structure, and It gets to Toronto at 3.35pm as the contextual content
of the travel agent’s information enriched constituent. Using the information structure
primitives that I have now introduced, “Three thirty five p.m.” in the given context is an
utterance that relies on information enrichment, and its compositional content consists of
just the focus. The customer’s preceding utterance supplies the ground for this utterance,
and the ground corresponds to the embedding structure. The travel agent’s utterance is
informative in relation to the preceding question. Examples like this one show the close
connection between ground and questions: it is quite natural to discuss ground in terms of
questions. Given the context in the form of C’s question, there is no explicitly mentioned
alternative to the time given by the travel agent, and thus it is a non-contrastive focus.
Dialogues in the Travel Agency domain, such as (65), consist to a large degree of
the exchange of information between the travel agent and the customer: the travel agent
needs to know when, where and how the customer wishes to travel as well as personal
details concerning the customer, and the customer may ask about prices and other details
concerning various travel alternatives. Information exchange provides many opportunities
for reliance on information enrichment, and in the Travel Agency domain a great number
of question-answer pairs – with the question a wh-question and the answer relying on
information enrichment – can be found; (66)-(68) are a few more examples.
(66)
[ Amex tape 13 call 1 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: What’s your last name ?
C: Ensler 9
C’s utterance in (66) is informative with respect to T A’s question which provides the
ground, and the full focus-ground – the contextual content – of C’s utterance can be
rendered as My/C’s last name is Ensler.
9
The Amex Travel Agent Data contains single or repeated letters as anonymisations of people’s names.
I have chosen to add in names again – although names that bear no relation to the original names – to
make the examples more readable.
2.3. CORPUS STUDY
35
In (67), the focus making up the customer’s utterance is informative with respect to a
ground paraphrasable as I want to have my ticket issued and given by the travel agent’s
preceding question:
(67)
[ Amex tape 16 call 5 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: When do you want to have your ticket issued ?
C: Sometime this week
In (68), C’s “flight number” seems to be a correction or specification of the earlier
“name”, and the ground for T A’s focus can probably be expressed as something like The
flight number is or The flight number of that is:
(68)
[ Amex tape 1 call 1 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
C: What’s the name of that the flight number ?
TA: Four two zero eight
Again in (68), the answer, this time given by the travel agent, is a non-contrastive focus.
Swedish Travel Agency dialogues in the GSLC give comparable examples. The Tourist
Office domain in the French OTG similarly revolves around the exchange of information,
and it too gives many examples of wh-questions followed by focus-only answers. OTG
dialogues involve a customer, C, and an official at the tourist office, marked by H, for
hôtesse. In example (69) H’s Nothing at all is informative in relation to the question of
the price of some particular item, that is, the ground that is introduced by C’s question:
(69)
[ OTG 1AP0248 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
C: Ça fait combien?
Eng. How much does that cost ?
H: Rien du tout
Eng. Nothing at all
The contextual content – the ground-focus – of H’s utterance in (70) below can be
paraphrased as We are a quarter of an hour from the train station by foot here, with the
compositional content – the focus – provided by H giving the amount of time:
(70)
[ OTG 2AG0363 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
C: On est à combien de temps de la gare à pied d’ici ?
Eng. How much time are we from the train station by foot here ?
H: Un quart d’heure
Eng. A quarter of an hour
In HCRC Map Task dialogues, the (G)iver is the person with the path on her map, and
the (F)ollower is the person who is to draw the path. The Map Task dialogues involve,
among other things, the follower’s needing to know just how to move in relation to various
landmarks on the map:
36
(71)
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
[ HCRC q7nc3 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
F: How far above the granite quarry should I go ?
G: About half a centimetre
About half a centimetre is a non-contrastive focus that serves to inform F of how far she
should go above the granite quarry.
A final example of this kind of question-answer pair is in Swedish and is a doctor posing
a question to a patient:
(72)
[ GSLC A5006011 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
D: Vem är det som har varit sjuk då?
Eng. So who is it that’s been sick ?
P: En nära släkting till min man
Eng. A close relative of my husband’s
The patient’s answer is informative in relation to the doctor’s question.
2.3.2
Contrastive focus
The contrastive focus, in addition to being informative in relation to the ground, involves
contrast with some previously mentioned item in the dialogue. The following is an example
of a contrastive focus that functions as a question:
(73)
[ Route 2.9 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
F1: Est-ce que tu vois le bar du Matin?
Eng. Do you see the Matin bar?
R1: Non pas du tout
Eng. No not at all
F2: La rue Saint-Rome ?
Eng. The Saint-Rome street ?
In this example, “la rue Saint-Rome” is an alternative to “le bar du Matin”, both being,
say, landmarks in Toulouse. The parallelism between F 2 and a contextual utterance, F 1,
involves the ground of F 2 being identical to “Do you see” in F 1, together with the direct
objects in the two utterances being alternatives to each other, and the structure of the two
utterances being the same.
In contrast with paradigm examples of focus-ground articulation, the focus in (73) does
not have the function of an answer, and the material that gives the ground is not presented
in the form a wh-question in the dialogue. Rather, the focus itself functions as a question,
and the ground comes from part of another question. The informativeness of the focus in
F 2 in relation to the ground can be thought of in terms of the ground as a contextually
construable question, Do you see
?. It is in relation to this question that the focus
adds information, the result being another question, Do you see the Saint-Rome street?.
2.3. CORPUS STUDY
37
Another example of contrastive focus that I consider here is a Swedish example that is
from a dialogue recorded at a Travel Agency, albeit not a typical exchange in that domain:
(74)
[ GSLC A8207051 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA1: Hur mår din lilla Josefin?
Eng. How is your little Josefin?
C1: Hon mår hyfsat
Eng. She’s okay
TA2: Och Gabriella ?
Eng. And Gabriella ?
This example is similar to the one in French above, (73), in that the information enriched constituent has the function of a question, and is parallel with a preceding question.
“Gabriella” is parallel with “(your little) Josefin” in T A1.
2.3.3
Ground
Ground is that part of the utterance that reflects the context. It reflects that part of
the context to which the focus is to be added. Ground material may or may not be
part of the compositional content of an utterance. If it is not, the compositional content
consists of either a contrastive or a non-contrastive focus, as seen in sections 2.3.1 and
2.3.2. If the compositional content contains a full ground, the utterance does not rely
on information enrichment. In the corpora, I have found three types of ground which I
discuss below: identical (2.3.3.1), anaphoric (2.3.3.2), and reformulated ground (2.3.3.3).
A compositional content may also contain a partial ground, which makes the utterance
an information enriched constituent: it relies on enrichment for the remaining ground
material. I discuss examples involving a partial ground in 2.3.3.4.
2.3.3.1
Identical base and ground
Utterances that do not rely on information enrichment and that are focus-ground utterances can have a ground that is identical, verbatim, to the ground occurring in the context.
In the following French example the same words that make up the ground in H’s answer
appear in C’s question, and in exactly the same order:
(75)
[ OTG 1PF0052 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
C: Il est sorti quand?
Eng. It came out when? – When did it come out ?
H: Il est sorti hier
Eng. It came out yesterday
38
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
Due to the question being in the declarative form – a common way of forming questions in
spoken French (using an interrogative intonation) – the focus in the answer even appears
in the same place as the wh-word.
Identical grounds occur also in examples in Swedish and English, as well as in different
domains. Examples (76) and (77) are from the Travel Agency domain, the first one in
Swedish and the second one in English:
(76)
[ GSLC A8203021 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
C: Hyrbilarna, när hämtar man dom ?
Eng. The rental cars, when do you pick them up ?
TA: Man hämtar dom när man landar
Eng. You pick them up when you land
(77)
[ Amex tape 13 call 1 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: Which carrier is that ?
C: That is US Air
Example (78) is from an informal conversation in Swedish:
(78)
[ GSLC A3212011 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
B: Vad är det för svamp?
Eng. What kind of a mushroom is that ?
A: Det är en karljohanssvamp
Eng. That’s a cep
The example in (79) is an identical ground from the Map Task domain:
(79)
[ HCRC q7nc3 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
F: What should I have done?
G: You should have gone to the left
The identity in (79) is not verbatim but at the semantic-pragmatic level: “You” in the
giver’s utterance resolves to the follower, as does the “I” in the follower’s utterance. This
means that identical grounds can be expressed slightly differently at word level, which raises
the general question of how to determine when two grounds are identical. There may be
no clear dividing line between identical grounds and those I call reformulated grounds, and
I will discuss this issue more below, in 2.3.3.3. However, it seems clear that what G does
in (79) is not a ground reformulation, but just an indexical adjustment.
2.3.3.2
Anaphoric ground
A ground, or a part of a ground, can be provided in the form of a pronoun through
pronominalisation of contextual material. For instance, part of the ground in C’s utterance
in (80) is expressed using the pronoun “it”, which is coreferent with “the passenger’s last
name” in the preceding question:
2.3. CORPUS STUDY
(80)
39
[ Amex tape 3 call 2 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: Now what’s the passenger’s last name ?
C: It’s Boland
Note that several examples discussed as involving an identical ground also included
pronouns. However, the difference between those examples and the ones discussed here is
that the former examples involve the repetition of a pronoun, that is, the pronominalisation
has occurred earlier in the dialogue.
Another example of a pronominalised ground is (81) where “it” corefers with “the
confirmation number” in T A’s utterance:
(81)
[ Amex tape 16 call 9 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: What’s the confirmation number ?
C: It’s five three two nine 10
In (82) “they” refers to the lost steps mentioned in G’s question:
(82)
2.3.3.3
[ HCRC q2nc3 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
G: Where are the lost steps in relation to the waterfall ?
F: They are about seven inches away
Reformulated ground
In Chapter ?? I discussed the indeterminacy of the embedding structure of information
enriched constituents. This is now the same as the indeterminacy of the ground in the
contextual content, or, equivalently, the indeterminacy of the base, where the base is that
part of the context which the ground in the contextual content reflects. Often there are
several possible ways of paraphrasing the ground of an information enriched constituent,
which is highly evident in corpus dialogues. An interesting parallel to this indeterminacy
is the case of what I call ground reformulation. These examples involve a ground as part of
the compositional content, and the material that it is a reflection of, the base, is explicitly
introduced in the dialogue, but one may suspect semantic or pragmatic differences between
the ground and the base. Ground reformulation in some sense occupies a “middle ground”
between ground and focus, as I will discuss below, or one may suspect a form of continuum
between focus and ground material. I believe examples like the ones presented here provide
interesting material for theories of information structure, spoken dialogue, and pragmatics.
Ground reformulation involves an introduction of a variation, a slight difference in
meaning. This can be for purely stylistic reasons, and can reflect the true indeterminacy
of ground: speakers need not have exactly the same view of the ground, or even a very
determined view of it. It may have to do with the different roles of different dialogue
10
Just as for names, different kinds of personal details such as numbers of various types have been
anonymised in the Amex Travel Data. I have included new sequences of numbers to make the examples
more comprehensible.
40
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
participants, or it may be a means of introducing a difference with more of a semantic
import. This latter point goes together with a view of utterance meaning as something
that is not necessarily fixed once a dialogue participant has spoken. Rather, speakers and
hearers interactively contribute to the meaning.
Consider the following example:
(83)
[ Amex tape 13 call 1 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: You want to travel again on what day now?
C: I could leave late Friday after work on the eighth of September and
if that doesn’t work out I could go the morning of the ninth of September
The travel agent asks when the customer wants to travel, and the customer replies with
when she could leave. The verbs “travel” and “leave” seem to be semantically interchangeable in this context, but the modal auxiliary in the customer’s utterance indicates a certain
elasticity concerning the answer: the date and time that follows is one possibility, but there
may be other possibilities as well. The customer even continues to give such an alternative possibility, this time with the ground “I could go”. The modal verb is still there,
but “leave” and “go” seem to involve at most a stylistic variation. Looking at the whole
example, it seems to involve ground reformulation for both stylistic reasons and with a bit
more semantic import.
Why then consider “could” as ground and not as focus when it does seem to add
something to the dialogue? Something to note, first of all, is that the focus of a reformulated
ground is informative in relation to the base. In the case of questions, the answer does
answer the question posed by the other dialogue participant. In (83) the focus in the first
conjunct is “late Friday after work on the eighth of September” and in the second conjunct
“the morning of the ninth of September”. These are informative in relation to the travel
agent’s question. That is, they can be used to give an answer to the travel agent’s question.
Information structurally, of course, one would not quite formulate the question indicating
the focus-ground articulation of either of the conjuncts in C’s utterance in (83) as T A’s
question. This means that strictly they are informative in relation to a slightly different
question. However, real dialogue is quite different from constructed dialogue.
A second thing to note about the examples that I discuss here is related to the embedding structure of information enriched constituents. Just as this embedding structure may
be indeterminate, it seems that different grounds that are explicitly realised in a dialogue
may be more or less equivalent for the purpose of the dialogue. An utterance involving
a reformulated ground can be seen as the speaker conveying to her interlocutor that “the
information you are looking for is this (i.e., the focus)”, together with “it is also possible to
conceive of the ground as this” or “I also suggest that we adjust the ground slightly from
your suggestion to mine”, or something similar. That is, an argument for the judgements
of these parts of utterances as ground material and not focus comes from the indeterminacy
of embedding structures, and the similarity between the ground and the base.
However, as a third remark, the presentation of material such as “I could leave” and “I
could go” in (83) is highly important. If they are pronounced with a flat non-prominent
2.3. CORPUS STUDY
41
intonation, they indicate ground status, and are seen as stylistic variations of each other
and of the travel agent’s question. But, if each “could” is phonologically prominent by
being associated with an A accent or something similar, the “could” is to be seen as
informative, hence as focus material. Unfortunately I have not had access to any audio
data for the Amex corpus.
Consider also (84):
(84)
[ Amex tape 16 call 1 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: What was it you needed to have changed ?
C: He wants to change United to US Air
C is calling the travel agent to change a flight reservation for someone else. The information
that the travel agent is looking for in the extracted exchange is just what it is that needs
to be changed, and this is given by C. In addition C’s answer indicates that it is not C but
another person that wants the change made, that is, there is a clear semantic difference
between T A’s and C’s utterances.
Assuming that C’s “he wants to change” is intonationally non-prominent, there are
three remarks I would like to make. Firstly, at the point in the dialogue where this
exchange takes place, who wants to do the changing probably is not important. Secondly,
the person that C is talking about has probably been mentioned at the beginning of the
dialogue, as the use of the pronoun indicates, and thirdly, if the customer is calling on
somebody else’s behalf their goals coincide, which means that it does not matter whose
goals you talk about. Speaker C therefore has no need to draw particular attention to
the slight correction, and expects the travel agent to accept this adjustment of the ground
without difficulty.
If dialogue participant C does want to draw attention to who it is that wants to change
something and introduce the material in question as informative, that is, no longer as
ground but as focus information, she can do so through intonational prominence, as in C ′
below, or using a more elaborate expression, as in C ′′ :
(85)
C′ : HE wants to change United to US Air
C′′ : Well, it’s not me who wants to change something but Mr. Medina, and
what he wants to change is United to US Air
The Amex travel dialogues provide many examples of ground reformulation. In the
following example the customer gives the travel agent the requested date, and at the same
time introduces the slight nuance of needing to go as opposed to would like to:
(86)
[ Amex tape 3 call 2 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: What day would he like to travel ?
C: He needs to go on Tuesday May 9th
It may be that C is introducing a semantic difference here – the date in question is the
only one possible – or it may have less of an import. Again, intonation plays an important
42
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
role here. In either case, the ninth of May is going to be the date that the travel agent
gives to her database search.
The following example seems to involve perfectly equivalent ground and base in the
particular context:
(87)
[ Amex tape 16 call 7 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: Who’s the traveller ?
C: The traveller will be Edith Boland
The same can probably be said about the following example, although “ska åka” (am going
to) is more definite than “vill åka” (want to go):
(88)
[ GSLC A8203051 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
K: Vart vill du åka nånstans?
Eng. Where do you want to go ?
N: Jag ska åka till Sundsvall
Eng. I’m going to Sundsvall
The point here is that the travel agent is going to find the customer a way to go to
Sundsvall, and whether the customer would like to go, wants to go, or needs to go, is quite
irrelevant to determining the task of the travel agent.
The final example that I discuss here is in French and quite an interesting one. This is
(89) which gives the opening utterances of a dialogue between a customer and the person
working at the tourist information:
(89)
[ OTG 1AP0323 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
C1: On pourrait en avoir nous aussi des plans de la ville?
Eng. Could we also have some maps of the city?
H1: Il vous en faut combien?
Eng. How many do you need ?
C2: Ils sont quinze
Eng. They are fifteen
H asks for a number of maps, and C replies by giving the number of people in the group.
However, an answer to H’s question is inferable from C’s utterance. It may be that the
number of people is meant to imply an equal number of maps, in which case the ground
and the base are equivalent in the context in question at least from the point of view of
C, and the ground in C2 is quite an elaborate reformulation. However, it may also be
that C uses her answer as a way of avoiding a direct answer to H’s question; by giving the
number of people in the group, she lets H determine just how many maps are needed or
obtainable. In this case, the whole of C2 is informative and it is no longer appropriate to
talk about “ils sont” as a reformulated ground.
2.3. CORPUS STUDY
43
To sum up the discussion of ground reformulation, these are parts of utterances that
seem to have varying degrees of both focus and ground characteristics. If they are thought
of in terms of a continuum, at one end of this there are pieces of material that are more
or less semantically equivalent and that show no actual difference in terms of their effect
on the dialogue and the participants’ actions. At the other end there are semantic or
pragmatic differences that may have an actual effect.
2.3.3.4
Partial ground
A partial ground means that some but not all ground material is realised as part of the
compositional content of an utterance, and the utterance is enriched by material making
up the rest of the ground. Consider the following example:
(90)
[ Amex tape 3 call 2 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA1: What’s the passenger’s last name ?
C1: It’s Ensler
TA2: And first name ?
T A2 contains a contrastive focus, “first”, and also ground material in the form of “name”.
Both of these belong to the focus phrase, and “name” is a partial ground. For the generation
of the travel agent’s utterance in T A2, one would need to consider whether the full focus
phrase is to be produced, or just the focus “first”, among other possibilities such as a full
ground and focus.
Another example of a partial ground is (91):
(91)
[ GSLC A3212011 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
A: Man kan ta, när man bakar mjuk pepparkaka man tar i bikarbonat
Eng. You can take, when you bake soft gingerbread 11 you put in bicarbonate
B: Vanliga pepparkakor då?
Eng. Ordinary gingerbread 12 then? – What about ordinary gingerbread ?
The contextual content of B’s utterance in (91) can be paraphrased as Vad tar man i
när man bakar vanliga pepparkakor (då)? ((What about ordinary gingerbread,) What do
you put in ordinary gingerbread? ). As in the example above, the partial ground – here
“pepparkakor” (“gingerbread”) – belongs to the focus phrase, and the generation of B’s
reply in (91) would need to consider whether only the focus, or the full focus phrase, or
something more, would need to be realised.
In (92) one dialogue participant has just asked for the telephone numbers for the companies Folksam and Trygghansa:
11
12
“Mjuk pepparkaka” is gingerbread cake. “Soft gingerbread” is a literal translation.
“Pepparkakor” is gingerbread as gingerbread biscuits. “Ordinary gingerbread” is a literal translation.
44
(92)
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
[ GSLC A8102181 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
G: Folksam har telefonnummer trettio noll tre noll noll och Trygghansa nittiotvå åttio noll noll
Eng. Folksam has the telephone number thirty zero three zero zero and
Trygghansa ninety-two eighty zero zero
I have chosen not to include the preceding question in example (92) as this question has a
special form, and requires a discussion of the context of information enriched constituents. I
return to this example and its context in section 2.3.4. The information structure markings
that I have included in (92) concern the second conjunct in G’s utterance. The first
conjunct has an information structure that is determined by a preceding question. It has
a full ground consisting of “Folksam has the telephone number”, and the focus is “thirty
zero three zero zero”. The second conjunct is enriched by this first conjunct and also
by the question. The focus that is marked in (92) is the focus of the second conjunct,
and the partial ground of this conjunct consists of Trygghansa. The remainder of the
ground comes, through enrichment, from the first conjunct and from the question: “has
the telephone number”.
Example (93), where one dialogue participant has just asked about the telephone numbers for Holmia and Royal, is analogous to (92) (the utterance preceding G’s utterance is
omitted for the same reason as for example (92) above):
(93)
[ GSLC A8102181 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
G: Till Holmia är numret arton sextioett femtio och till Royal nittio åttiotvå
åttiotvå
Eng. To Holmia the number is eighteen sixty-one fifty and to Royal ninety
eighty-two eighty-two
The second conjunct is the information enriched constituent. It contains a partial ground
in the form of “to Royal”, and is enriched by the first conjunct and the question (not shown
in (93)) for the remaining material.
In contrast with (90) and (91), in (92) and (93) the partial ground is not part of the
focus phrase. The partial ground in (92) and (93) can be analysed as corresponding to a
topic in a topic-comment framework, as I discussed in section 2.2.3.
Having given these examples of partial ground, I am now going to turn to the issue of
just what is not to be seen as a partial ground. Regarding this issue, there is a distinction
between material that is needed for the unique identification of a particular referent at a
particular point in a dialogue, and material that is not needed for such identification but
that is part of the context. This is related to the discussion of the determination of the
embedding structure in section ??.
Consider example (94):
2.3. CORPUS STUDY
(94)
45
[ Amex tape 16 call 5 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA: What did you want to change on your reservation ?
C: I wanted to change the departure date from the tenth to the sixteenth
Is C’s utterance enriched by “on your reservation”, that is, is C’s utterance to be seen as
an information enriched constituent? Semantically and pragmatically it is quite clear that
the change that C is talking about is to the reservation that T A has just talked about and
nothing else.
A similar example is (95):
(95)
[ HCRC q2nc5 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
G: Where are you in relation to the left-hand side of the page just now ?
F: I’m about an inch and a half to two inches away from the left-hand
side
F ’s utterance clearly concerns “just now” although this is not mentioned in F ’s utterance
but only in G’s question, and the left-hand side in F ’s utterance is clearly the left-hand
side of the page.
I believe that what is going on in examples like (94) and (95) is more akin to anaphoricity
than to information enrichment. Compare (94) with the following short discourse in (96),
or the related dialogue in (97):
(96)
A woman in a red hat and a man are sitting outside a café. The woman is
reading a newspaper.
(97)
A: What is the woman in a red hat doing?
B: The woman is reading a newspaper
The woman in the second sentence in (96) is the same woman that is referred to in
the first sentence in the same example. That is, “the woman” in the second sentence
anaphorically refers back to the individual introduced in the first sentence. That this
woman is wearing a red hat does not seem to be part of the meaning of the second sentence,
but rather belongs to the larger context in which the second sentence occurs. The same
seems to be true for the dialogue in (97).
I have chosen not to treat examples such as (94) in my thesis, but the question of
whether they involve information enrichment or not is perhaps moot. I return to this issue
in relation to practical implementations in the form of dialogue systems below. There is
also a further discussion involving syntax here that would be interesting to pursue. This
would be an investigation of the correlation between syntactic categories and enrichment.
In this thesis I have chosen to treat cases involving adjuncts such as “just now” in (95)
and other non-restrictive descriptions as not involving information enrichment, but I leave
a more thorough investigation of this area as an open question.
46
2.3.4
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
Focus and “non-ground”
I will finish my corpus discussion of the informational primitives of relevance to my treatment of information enrichment, with a look at some more examples involving material
whose status as either focus or ground may seem uncertain. Specifically, these examples
provide an interesting look at the relation between question-answer pairs and ground-focus.
First of all, we have seen several examples of foci and answers containing the same
amount of material, for instance “Ensler” as the answer to “What’s your last name?” in
example (66) on page 34. Compare such examples to (98):
(98)
[ Amex tape 13 call 3 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
TA1: What day’s he returning?
C1: The sixteenth
TA2: Ok and about what time on the sixteenth?
C2: And he said around six p.m.
The contextual content of C2 can be paraphrased as (And) He said he’s returning around
six p.m.13 The answer to the T A2 question is “around six p.m.”, which makes (at least)
that part of C2 focal. Now, what about “he said”, is this really ground? No, “he said”
also seems to be informative in relation to T A2, that is, focal. This means that the focus
in C2, “he said around six p.m.”, is larger than the answer to the question in T A2. Such
examples are discussed by Morgan (1973) as elliptical constructions that are sentences:
(99)
A: How does Nixon eat his tapioca?
B: I think with a fork.
They are also discussed by Fernández et al. (2004) as embedded fragments:
(100)
A: Who saw Mary?
B: John thinks Bill.
There are also examples of the opposite, the focus being smaller than the answer to a
question occurring in the dialogue. Consider the following:
(101)
[ HCRC q2nc3 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
...
G3: Where are you from the left-hand side?
F3: About two
13
T A2 is enriched by T A1 (or C1) and can be paraphrased as About what time is he returning on the
sixteenth? Taking into account the indeterminacy of the ground one may also paraphrase C2 as (And) He
said he’s returning around six p.m. on the sixteenth.
2.4. SUMMARY
47
In F 3 in (101) the focus is “about two”, whereas the answer to question G3, given by a
larger context not shown in (101), is “about two inches”. I return to this example and the
full relevant context in section ??.
These “discrepancies” mean that there is only a partial correspondence between questions and answers as they appear in dialogues, on the one hand, and grounds and foci, on
the other. Part of the explanation for this lies in dialogue participants’ frequent reliance
on accommodation, as I will show in the next chapter.
Another kind of example involving “non-ground” material is one that is very common
in dialogue. The question preceding the answer given in (92) on page 44 was in fact the
following utterance by A (I also repeat the answer):
(102)
[ GSLC A8102181 ] [ Appendix ??, example (??) ]
A: Folksam och Trygghansa kan jag få numret till dom?
Eng. Folksam and Trygghansa can I get their numbers?
G: Folksam har telefonnummer trettio noll tre noll noll och Trygghansa nittiotvå åttio noll noll
Eng. Folksam has the telephone number thirty zero three zero zero and
Trygghansa ninety-two eighty zero zero
Taking the two numbers in G’s utterance as foci, there seems to be only a partial overlap
between the remaining material in G’s utterance, and the material that is introduced in
C’s utterance which can serve as the ground for G’s utterance. Does this mean that “has
the telephone number” is non-focus material, that is, ground? I say no, and my analysis
of examples such as this is as follows. In relation to G’s utterance, A’s question is a
conventionalised indirect speech act, requesting G to give A certain telephone numbers. If
G’s utterance is instead seen as answering a direct question, this question can be formulated
as something like the following:
(103)
A′ : Vilket telefonnummer har Folksam och Trygghansa?
Eng. What telephone numbers do Folksam and Trygghansa have?
G relies on the contextual availability of this question, and therefore “Folksam har telefonnummer” in the first conjunct and “Trygghansa” in the second can be seen as non-focal
material, that is, ground.
I will discuss examples like this one in relation to accommodation for information
enriched constituents in the next chapter. There is also a connection between example
(102) and examples of reformulated ground.
2.4
Summary
In this chapter, information enriched constituents and corresponding utterances not relying
on information enrichment have been characterised using theories of information structure.
This permits an analysis of utterances in terms of how different subparts are related to
48
CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE UTTERANCE
the context, which is a key element for information enrichment. I have characterised the
compositional content of information enriched constituents as consisting of a focus or a
focus together with a partial ground. The focus is the informative part of an utterance,
which is to update the context, and I have described the ground as that part of an utterance
that the speaker presents to the hearer as either already part of the hearer’s information
state or that can be uncontentiously accommodated. The embedding structure has been
equated with the ground, and the contextual context of an information enriched constituent
is equal to the full ground and focus. Foci have been characterised as either contrastive
or non-contrastive, where the former type of focus contrasts with an alternative element
that is explicitly mentioned in the context. These theoretical notions have been applied
to corpus examples, showing non-contrastive and contrastive foci, as well as utterances
containing different kinds of ground. Grounds have been specified as identical, anaphoric,
reformulated, or partial.
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