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Article published In:
English Text Construction
Vol. 14:1 (2021) ► pp.1–24

‘Actually given’ versus ‘presented as given’ and ‘actually new’ versus ‘presented as new’

What happens when the ‘presented as’ gets out of step with the ‘actually’?

| University of Nottingham

This paper considers the relevance of various approaches to the study of ‘Given’ and ‘New’ to a number of practical problems: complaints from listeners to UK radio programmes that presenters place emphasis on the wrong words; inaudibility of openings of utterances in radio news bulletins; and ambiguity of pronouns. Approaches to ‘Given’ and ‘New’ to be discussed include those whose concerns are with intonation (e.g., Halliday & Matthiessen 2014), those who pay attention to definiteness/indefiniteness in the nominal group (e.g., Martin 1992), and those who are more concerned with what is in the minds of hearers and readers (e.g., Prince 1981; Lambrecht 1994). The underlying questions that are being investigated are: How free are speakers and writers to assign ‘Given’ or ‘New’ status to entities? Are there constraints on what they can do intonationally, or with definiteness, or with pronouns?

Keywords: given, new, intonation, definiteness, pronouns, assumed familiarity, identifiability, activation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The problems
    • 2.1Problem 1: The “wrong” use of intonation by radio presenters and newsreaders
    • 2.2Problem 2: Missing first elements of clauses
    • 2.3Problem 3: Ambiguous third person pronouns
  • 3.Problem 1: The “wrong” use of intonation by radio presenters and news readers
    • 3.1Intonation and Given and New
    • 3.2Lexicogrammar and Given and New
    • 3.3Propositional content and Given and New
  • 4.Problem 2: Missing first elements of clauses
  • 5.Problem 3: Ambiguous third person pronouns
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00041.ber
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