Cover not available
Part of
When Data Challenges Theory: Unexpected and paradoxical evidence in information structure
Edited by Davide Garassino and Daniel Jacob
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 273] 2022
► pp. 57–90

Remarks on information structure marking asymmetries

The epistemological view on the micropragmatic profile of utterances

| University of Roma Tre | University of Rome “La Sapienza”

Asymmetries in topic-focus marking have extensively been discussed in recent typological contention, with a view to finding an interlinguistically viable definition of information structure units (Lazard 1994, Zimmermann & Onea 2011, Matić & Wedgwood 2013). In this paper I will address Zimmermann & Onea’s (2011) universal outline of focus as information unit indicating the presence of alternatives which are relevant for the interpretation of a sentence. To this view I will oppose an epistemically grounded profile of topic and focus according to which these two information units encode evidential meanings in conversation. Notably, it is argued that while focus encodes a meaning of individual evidentiality, topic bears a meaning of mutual evidentiality (Hintz & Hintz 2017).

Keywords: focus alternatives, illocution, topic, individual evidentiality, mutual evidentiality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Incongruent topic-focus marking
    • 2.1Ambiguous prosodic signals
    • 2.2Syntactic asymmetries
    • 2.3Asymmetries in morphological marking
  • 3.Information structure, focus and alternatives projection
    • 3.1Zimmermann & Onea’s proposal: Focus, alternatives and possible worlds
    • 3.2Non-exclusive applicability of the alternatives-evoking function to focus
    • 3.3Contextual effects in the construal of alternatives
    • 3.4Uneconomic implications of alternatives’ representation as a precondition for focus interpretation
  • 4.Information structure, illocution and evidentiality
    • 4.1Information structure and illocutionary force
  • 5.The evidential perspective on information structure
    • 5.1Topic and focus as pragmatic markers of evidentiality
    • 5.2Utterances’ illocution and the evidentiality of information structure
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.273.02mas
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.
2004 Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2015 Evidentials: Their links with other grammatical categories. Linguistic Typology 19(2): 239–277. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, John L.
1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Bach, Kent
1994 Conversational impliciture. Mind & Language 9: 124–162. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boas, Franz
1900 Sketch of the Kwakiutl language. American Anthropologist 2: 708–721. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1910 Kwakiutl. An Illustrative Sketch. Washington: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Bocci, Giuliano
2013 The Syntax-Prosody Interface. A Cartographic Perspective with Evidence from Italian. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Büring, Daniel
2016 (Contrastive) Topic. In The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds), 64–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Lawrence K.
1982 Ecuadorian Quechua: Descriptive Sketch and Variation. PhD dissertation, University of Florida.
Casielles-Suárez, Eugenia
2003 Left-dislocated structures in Spanish. Hispania 86(2): 326–338. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace L.
1976 Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and topics and point of view. In Subject and Topic, Charles Li (ed), 25–55. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace L. & Nichols, Joanna
(eds) 1986 Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Choi, Hye-Won
1997 Information structure, phrase structure and their interface. In Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference, Miriam Butt & Tracy H. King (eds), 1–16. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cresti, Emanuela
1999 Force illocutoire, articulation topic-comment et contours prosodiques en Italien parlé. Faits de Langues 13: 168–181. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000 Corpus di italiano parlato. Introduzione e campioni (Vols. 1–2). Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.Google Scholar
2012 The definition of focus in Language into Act Theory (LAcT). In Pragmatics and Prosody: Illocution, Modality, Information Patterning and Speech Annotation, Heliana Mello, Alessandro Panunzi & Tommaso Raso (eds), 39–82. Firenze: Firenze University Press.Google Scholar
2018 The illocution-prosody relationship and the information pattern in spontaneous speech according to the Language into Act theory (L-AcT). Linguistik Online 88: 33–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria
This volume. To be or not to be focus adverbials? A corpus-driven study of It. anche in spontaneous spoken Italian. In When Data Challenges Theory. Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence in Information Structure, Davide Garassino & Daniel Jacob eds Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logo
De Haan, Ferdinand
1999 Evidentiality and epistemic modality: setting boundaries. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, [URL] (24 March 2021).
Diessel, Holger & Hetterle, Katja
2011 Causal clauses: A cross-linguistic investigation of their structure, meaning and use. In Linguistic Universals and Language Variation, Peter Siemund (ed), 21–52. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Donabédian, Anaïd
2001 Towards a semasiological account of evidentials: An enunciative approach of -er in Modern Western Armenian. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 421–442. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Face, Timothy L.
2001 Focus and early peak alignment in Spanish intonation. Probus, 13(2): 223–246. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Face, Timothy L. & D’Imperio, Mariapaola
2005 Reconsidering a focal typology: Evidence from Spanish and Italian. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 17(2): 271–289.Google Scholar
Faller, Martina T.
2002 Semantics and Pragmatics of Evidentials in Cuzco Quechua. PhD dissertation, University of Stanford.
Fanselow, Gisbert, Lenertová, Denisa & Weskott, Thomas
2008 Studies on the acceptability of object movement to Spec, CP. In The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures, Anita Steube (ed), 413–438. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Feldhausen, Ingo
2016 The relation between prosody and syntax: The case of different types of left-dislocations in Spanish. In Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance Intonation, Meghan Armstrong, Nicholas Henriksen & Maria del Mar Vanrell (eds), 153–180. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fortescue, Michael
2003 Evidentiality in West Greenlandic. A case of scattered coding. In Studies in Evidentiality, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & Richard M. W. Dixon (eds), 291–306. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fox, Barbara A.
2001 Evidentiality, authority, responsibility, and entitlement in English conversation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(2): 167–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara
2000 The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Focus and Topic Constructions in Italian. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara & Hinterhölzl, Roland
2007 Types of Topics in German and Italian. In On Information Structure, Meaning and Form, Susanne Winkler & Kerstin Schwabe (eds), 87–116. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frota, Sónia
2002 The prosody of focus: A case-study with cross-linguistic implications. Talk presented at the Speech Prosody Conference, Aix-en-Provence 2002.Google Scholar
Gagliardi, Gloria, Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo & Tamburini, Fabio
2012 La prominenza in italiano: demarcazione più che culminazione. In Atti del VIII° Convegno nazionale dell’Associazione Italiana Scienze della Voce (AISV), Mauro Falcone & Andrea Paoloni (eds), 255–270. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar
Garassino, Davide
2019 French cleft sentences across genres. What is (not) prototypical? Handout for the Workshop When Data Challenges Theory: Non-Prototypical, Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence in the Field of Information Structure, Freiburg im Breisgau 15–16 February 2019.Google Scholar
Garassino, Davide & Jacob, Daniel
This volume. When data challenges theory: The analysis of information structure and its paradoxes. In When Data Challenges Theory. Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence in Information Structure, Davide Garassino & Daniel Jacob eds Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logo
Givón, Talmy
2002 Bio-linguistics. The Santa Barbara Lectures. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grice, Paul H.
1975 Logic and conversation. In Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts, Peter Cole & Jerry Morgan (eds), 113–128. New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grzech, Karolina Z.
2011 Two aspects of common ground management: Information structure and epistemic meaning in Tena Kichwa. Talk presented at the V Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory, London.Google Scholar
2016 Discourse Enclitics in Tena Kichwa. A Corpus-based Account of Information Structure and Epistemic Meaning. PhD dissertation, University of London.
Halliday, Michael A. K.
1985 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Heim, Irene R.
1982 The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts.
Heritage, John
2012 Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45(1): 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hintz, Daniel J. & Hintz, Diane M.
2017 The evidential category of mutual knowledge in Quechua. Lingua 186–187: 88–109. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hjelmslev, Louis T.
1970 [1961] Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Wisconsin: University Press [Translated edition by Francis J. Whitfield].Google Scholar
Horvath, Julia
1986 Focus in the Theory of Grammar and the Syntax of Hungarian. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Jacob, Daniel
2015 Anaphorische Spaltsätze im Französischen: Grammatik-Text-Rhetorik. In Informationsstrukturen in Kontrast: Strukturen, Kompositionen und Strategien, Séverine Adam, Daniel Jacob & Michael Schecker (eds), 101–122. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Jasinskaja, Katja
2016 Information structure in Slavic. In The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds), 709–732. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [URL]Google Scholar
Ježek, Elisabetta
2005 Lessico. Classi di parole, strutture, combinazioni. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Kamio, Akio
1997 Territory of Information. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena & Lahousse, Karen
2018 The information structure of French il y a clefts and c’est clefts: A corpus-based analysis. Linguistics 56(3): 513–548. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kempchinsky, Paula
2008 How much structure does the left periphery need? Poster presented at Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages 38, April 2008.Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred
2007 Basic Notions of Information Structure. In Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 6, Caroline Féry, Gisbert Fanselow & Manfred Krifka (eds), 13–55. ISIS: Working Papers of the SFB 632.Google Scholar
2017 Assertions, judgements, epistemic and evidentials. Talk presented at the workshop Speech Acts: Meanings, Uses, Syntactic and Prosodic Realizations, Leibniz-ZAS Berlin, May 29–31 2017.Google Scholar
Lahousse, Karen
This volume. Is focus a root phenomenon? In When Data Challenges Theory. Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence in Information Structure, Davide Garassino & Daniel Jacob eds Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logo
Lahousse, Karen & Borremans, Marijke
2014 The distribution of functional-pragmatic types of clefts in adverbial clauses. Linguistics 52(3): 793–836. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George
1984 Performative subordinate clauses. Berkeley Linguistics Society 10: 472–480. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud
1994 Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representation of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lazard, Gilbert
1994 L’actance. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Lee, Chungmin
2006 Contrastive (Predicate) Topic, intonation, and scalar meanings. In Topic and Focus: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation, Chungmin Lee, Matt Gordon & Daniel Büring (eds), 151–175. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Lehiste, Ilse
1970 Suprasegmentals. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lenertová, Denisa & Junghanns, Uwe
2006 Fronted focus exponents with maximal focus interpretation in Czech. In On Information Structure, Meaning and Form, Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds), 347–363. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levy, Roger
2008 Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106(3): 1126–1177. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo
1996 A simple test for theme and rheme in the clause complex. Language Sciences 17(4): 357–378. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000 Grammatica funzionale delle avverbiali italiane. Roma: Carocci.Google Scholar
2009 La struttura informativa. Forma e funzione negli enunciati linguistici. Carocci: Roma.Google Scholar
2014 The topologic hypothesis of prominence as a cue to information structure in Italian. In Discourse Segmentation in Romance Languages [Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 250], Salvador Pons Bordería (ed), 219–241. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
This volume. Distinguishing psychological Given/New from linguistic Topic/Focus makes things clearer. In When Data Challenges Theory. Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence in Information Structure, Davide Garassino & Daniel Jacob eds Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logo
Masia, Viviana
2017a Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017b On the Evidential Status of Presupposition and Assertion. International Journal of Linguistics 9(4): 134–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matić, Dejan & Wedgwood, Daniel
2013 The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretation-based category in cross-linguistic analysis. Journal of Linguistics 49(1): 127–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Michelas, Amandine & German, James S.
2019 Focus marking and prosodic boundary strength in French. Phonetica 77: 244–267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mushin, Ilana
2001 Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance. Narrative Retelling. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murray, Sarah E.
2010 Evidentiality and the Structure of Speech Acts. PhD Dissertation, The State University of New Jersey.Google Scholar
2017 The Semantics of Evidentials [Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nakanishi, Kimiko
2008 Prosody and scope interpretations of the topic marker ‘wa’ in Japanese. In Topic and Focus. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy (Vol. 82), Chungmin Lee, Matt Gordon & Daniel Büring (eds), 177–193. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Nuyts, Jan
2001 Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expressions. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 383–400. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ohta, Amy S.
1991 Evidentiality and politeness in Japanese. Issues in Applied Linguistics 2(2): 211–238. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Olarrea, Antxon
2012 Word Order and Information Structure. In The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea & Erin O’Rourke (eds), 603–628. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Puglielli, Annarita & Frascarelli, Mara
2008 L’analisi linguistica: dai dati alla teoria. Cesena-Roma: Caissa Italia.Google Scholar
Riester, Arndt & Baumann, Stefan
2013 Focus triggers and focus types from a corpus perspectives. Dialogue and Discourse 4(2): 215–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rooth, Mats
1985 Association with Focus. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts.
1992 A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1: 75–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1996 Focus. In Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, Shalom Lappin & Chris Fox (eds), 1271–1298. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rosemeyer, Malte, Jacob, Daniel & Konieczny, Lars
This volume. How alternatives are created: Specialized background knowledge affects the interpretation of clefts in discourse. In When Data Challenges Theory. Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence in Information Structure, Davide Garassino & Daniel Jacob eds Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logo
Saeed, John
2004 The focus structure of Somali. In RRG2004: The International Role and Reference Grammar Conference, Brian Nolan (ed), 258–279. Dublin: Institute of Technology Blanchardstown.Google Scholar
Sánchez, Liliana
2010 The Morphology and Syntax of Topic and Focus: Minimalist Inquiries in the Quechua Periphery. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saussure de, Ferdinand
1916 Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.Google Scholar
Schumacher, Petra B.
2012 Context in neurolinguistics: Time-course data from electrophysiology. In What is a Context? Linguistic Approaches and Challenges, Rita Finkbeiner, Jörg Meibauer, & Petra B. Schumacher (eds), 33–53. Amsterdam: Jonh Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth O.
1985 Intonation, stress and meaning. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkley Linguistics Society, Mary Niepokuj (ed), 491–504. California: Berkeley Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Shireman, Joshua
2012 Focus in Ecuadorian Quechua. Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics 33: 16–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simons, Mandy, Beaver, David, Roberts, Craige & Tonhauser, Judith
2017 The Best Question: Explaining the projection behavior of factives. Discourse Processes 54(3): 187–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sweller, John
2003 Evolution of human cognitive architecture. In The Psychology of Learning and Motivations: Advances in Research and Theory 43, Brian H. Ross (ed), 215–266. Elsevier Science: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tamburini, Fabio
2007 Prominence (Versione 1.0), University of Bologna.Google Scholar
Titov, Elena
2019 Morphosyntactic encoding of information structure in Akan. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1): 27. DOI logo
Tosco, Mauro
2002 A whole lotta’ focusin’ goin’ on: Information packaging in Somali texts. Studies in African Linguistics 31(1–2): 27–53.Google Scholar
Truckenbrodt, Hubert
2016 Focus, intonation, and tonal height. In The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds), 463–482. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Vallduví, Enric
1995 Structural properties of information packaging in Catalan. In Discourse Configurational Languages, Katalin É. Kiss (ed), 122–152. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Willett, Thomas
1988 A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticization of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12: 51–97. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zimmermann, Malte & Onea, Edgar
2011 Focus marking and focus interpretation. Lingua 121: 1651–1670. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Biasio, Marco & Dario Del Fante
2024. Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian. Folia Linguistica 0:0 DOI logo
Garassino, Davide & Daniel Jacob
2022. Introduction. When data challenges theory. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo
Lahousse, Karen
2022. Is focus a root phenomenon?. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 148 ff. DOI logo
Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo
2022. Distinguishing psychological Given/New from linguistic Topic/Focus makes things clearer. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 40 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 march 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.