Part of
Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance LanguagesEdited by Kristin Bech and Kristine Gunn Eide
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 213] 2014
► pp. 53–78
Edited by Kristin Bech and Kristine Gunn Eide
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 213] 2014
► pp. 53–78
Testing the theory
Information structure in Old English
Various information structure (IS) distinctions have been proposed in the literature to account for differences in word order in languages both modern and historic. We use the schemes adopted by several ongoing IS annotation projects and examine their effect on object position (pre-/post-verbal) in Old English. While most of the schemes make the same major distinctions, some apparently small differences (e.g. elaborating vs. bridging inferables) have relatively large effects. Although these distinctions are frequently difficult to make, the effort to operationalise them is useful, since failing to include them in the annotation can produce misleading results. Other distinctions (e.g. different types of ‘old’ information) show virtually no effect, supporting the wide-spread view that they constitute a single category.
References (25)
Arnold, Jennifer E., Losongco, Anthony, Wasow, Thomas & Ginstrom, Ryan. 2000. Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering.
Language
76(1): 28–55.
Biberauer, Theresa & Roberts, Ian. 2008. Cascading parameter changes. Internally-driven change in Middle and Early Modern English. In
Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory. The Rosendal Papers
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 113], Þórhallur Eyþórsson (ed.), 79–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bies, Ann Elizabeth. 1996. Syntax and Discourse Factors in Early New High German: Evidence for Verb-Final Word Order. MA dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Birner, Betty J. 2006. Inferential relations and noncanonical word order. In
Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning. Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn
[Studies in Language Companion Series 80], Betty J. Birner & Gregory Ward (eds), 31–51. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Calhoun, Sasha, Nissim, Malvina, Steedman, Mark & Brenier, Jason. 2005. A framework for annotating information structure in discourse. In
Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky
, 45–52. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Du Bois, John W. 1980. Beyond definiteness: the trace of identity in discourse. In
The Pear Stories. Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production
, Wallace L. Chafe (ed.), 203–274. Norwood NJ: Ablex.
Gundel, Jeanette K., Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse.
Language
69(2): 274–307.
Haug, Dag T.T. 2011. Guidelines for annotation of givenness: The PROIEL project. [URL]
Haviland, Susan E. & Clark, Herbert H. 1974. What’s new? Acquiring new information as a process in comprehension.
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
13: 512–521. [URL]
[URL]Karttunen, Lauri. 1976. Discourse referents. In
Syntax and Semantics 7. Notes from the Linguistic Underground
, James D. McCawley (ed.), 363–385. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1996.
Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents
. Cambridge: CUP.
Los, Bettelou & Komen, Erwin R. 2012. The Pentaset: Annotating information state primitives. Ms, Radboud University Nijmegen.
Nissim, Malvina, Dingare, Shipra, Carletta, Jean & Steedman, Mark. 2004. An annotation scheme for information status in dialogue. In
Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)
, 1023–1026, Lisbon, Portugal.
Pintzuk, Susan. 1996. Cliticization in Old English. In
Approaching Second. Second Position Clitics and Related Phenomena
, Aaron L. Halpern & Arnold M. Zwicky (eds), 366–400. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
. 1999.
Phrase Structures in Competition. Variation and Change in Old English Word Order
. New York, NY: Garland.
Pintzuk, Susan & Taylor, Ann. 2006. The loss of OV order in the history of English. In
The Handbook of the History of English,
Ans van Kemenade & Bettelou Los (eds), 249–278. Oxford: Blackwell.
Prince, Ellen F. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In
Radical Pragmatics
, Peter Cole (ed.), 223–255. New York, NY: Academic Press.
. 1992. The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information-status. In
Discourse Description. Diverse Analyses of a Fund-Raising Text
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 16], Sandra A. Thompson & WilliamC. Mann (eds), 195–325. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Riester, Arndt, Lorenz, David & Seemann, Nina. 2010. A recursive annotation scheme for referential information status. In
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)
, 717–722, Valetta, Malta.
Taylor, Ann & Pintzuk, Susan. 2011. The interaction of syntactic change and information status effects in the change from OV to VO in English.
Catalan Journal of Linguistics
10: 71–94.
. 2012a. The effect of information structure on object position in Old English: A pilot study. In
Information Structure and Syntactic Change,
María José López Couso, Bettelou Los & Anneli Meurman-Solin (eds), 71–94. Oxford: OUP.
. 2012b. Rethinking the OV/VO alternation in Old English: The effect of complexity, grammatical weight and information structure. In
The Oxford Handbook of the History of English,
Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), 835–845. Oxford: OUP.
Taylor, Ann & van der Wurff, Wim (eds). 2005. Special issue on aspects of OV and VO order in the history of English.
English Language and Linguistics
9(1): 1–4.
Wallenberg, Joel C. 2009. Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: Scrambling and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Wasow, Thomas. 1997. Remarks on grammatical weight.
Language Variation and Change
9: 81–105.
Cited by (9)
Cited by nine other publications
LOS, BETTELOU, GEA DRESCHLER, ANS VAN KEMENADE, ERWIN KOMEN & STEFANO CORETTA
2023. The decline of local anchoring: a quantitative investigation. English Language and Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 345 ff. 
STRUIK, TARA & GERT-JAN SCHOENMAKERS
2023. When information structure exploits syntax: The relation between the loss of VO and scrambling in Dutch. Journal of Linguistics 59:3 ► pp. 655 ff.
Struik, Tara & Ans van Kemenade
2022. Information structure and OV word order in Old and Middle English: a phase-based approach. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 25:1 ► pp. 79 ff.
Tiemann, Juliane
2022. The object position in Old Norwegian. In Language Change at the Interfaces [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 275], ► pp. 61 ff.
Chrambach, Susanne
2019. From time-before-place to place-before-time in the history of English. In Developments in English Historical Morpho-Syntax [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 346], ► pp. 223 ff.
Taylor, Ann & Susan Pintzuk
Taylor, Ann & Susan Pintzuk
2020. Split coordination in English. In Diachronic Treebanks for Historical Linguistics [Benjamins Current Topics, 113], ► pp. 16 ff.
Dreschler, Gea
2017. Chapter 6. The information status of late subjects in passive main clauses in Old English. In Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 243], ► pp. 103 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.