Meaning and grammar seminar

Speaker: Hans Wilke (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Given-before-new, and then what? Information structure and sentence structure influence processing and expectations

Abstract: Comprehenders have expectations about how information will be presented in a sentence and make predictions about what will be mentioned next. In a series of experiments, we test how information-structural features and sentence structure influence both.

There is extensive evidence that comprehenders prefer given information to precede new information in a sentence. This principle has primarily been tested by considering information-structural features encoded in syntax, e.g., given information expressed in definite NPs. We carried out a self-paced reading experiment to revisit the given-before-new principle and disentangle new-/givenness from syntactic features. Additionally, we consider the effects of clause ordering and the mapping between a clause’s information status (given/new) and its type (matrix/subordinate). We find that given-before-new sentences are processed faster, and that this effect is even stronger when the given information is hosted by a subordinate clause.

Following this, I will present a selection of experiments that show how the information-structural principle of at-issueness influences expectations about what will be mentioned next. At-issueness concerns itself with what the main point of an utterance is and consequently, what is felicitously available to be picked up in subsequent discourse. For multi-clause sentences, clause type (matrix /subordinate) and clause position (sentence-early/sentence-final) have been posited to contribute to at-issue status. We measured reading times when a pronoun with two possible antecedents is disambiguated to a referent in either a matrix clause or a subordinate clause, in sentence-early or sentence-final position. We find that clause position impacts reading times, but that the effect of clause type depends on the type of subordinate clause comprehenders encounter.