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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 23:1 (2013) ► pp.69–91

Extending further and refining Prince’s taxonomy of given/new information

A case study of non-restrictive, relevance-oriented structures

The aim of this article is to complement and refine Ellen Prince’s well-known taxonomy of given/new information (Prince 1981, 1992), which distinguishes between discourse-related and assumed familiarity-related newness/givenness. What we suggest is that a new category should be added to the existing hearer new, hearer old, and inferrable information categories, so as to include cases where the informational status of an entity or a propositional content cannot be determined with certainty. We call this new category ‘the (hearer) indeterminables’, and we justify its existence through a case study on nonrestrictive, relevance-oriented constructions (appositive relative clauses, non-restrictive pre-modifiers, apposition). We also argue that it is possible for speakers/writers to simulate informational statuses for politeness considerations, and that such simulation should be included in the definition of assumed familiarity.
Keywords: Prince’s taxonomy, Given/new information, Informational status, Relevance, Non-restrictive, Politeness, Foreground/background, Relative clauses, Apposition
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 March 2013
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.23.1.04loo
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