Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background, Given/New.

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Jonathan Knibb <j_knibb@H...> wrote:
>
> Tom wrote:
> >Given vs. New --
> >The "Given" is the part of the utterance that the speaker expects
the
> >addressee already knows or at least should already know; the "New"
is the
> >part of the utterance that is new, or at least new relative to
this
> >discourse and new relative to the "Given".
> >
> >Topic vs. Comment --
> >The topic is what the utterance is about; the comment is what is
uttered
> >about the topic.
>
> I've never really understood the difference between 'topic' and
> 'given (information)'. What does 'about' mean in this context?
>
> It's a fundamental feature of my 'lang T4 that given information is
> expressed in the first half of the sentence (subject, roughly
speaking)
> and new information in the second half (~predicate). All sentences
have
> both. Tom, you say that a sentence may or may not have both given
and
> new information; I'd be interested to see examples which have only
one
> of these, to see how I'd render them in T4.
>
> Jonathan.
> ==
>
I meant the terms "given" and "new" in a purely non-technical
way: "given" information is anything the speaker expects the
addressee either already knows, or should already know; "new"
information is either "new" in the barest since, or "new" relative to
the discourse, or "new" relative to the "given" information.

If I tell you "Your name is Jonathan", you will probably notice
immediately that that sentence contains no new information.  When
your parents first named you -- at your christening or baptism or
whenever it was -- "Johnathan" was new information to you, but you've
had a long time to get used to it by now -- much longer than
I've had.

"Topic", also, I meant in the strictly non-technical sense, of "what
the text is about".  The sentence "Your name is Jonathan" is about
your name.  That also happens to be the grammatical subject of the
sentence.

I can no longer remember where I read it, but, I remember reading
some Russian linguist saying that it is a feature of Russian that
most sentences are organized with the givenmost information earliest
and the newest information latest.  Probably in a few days I will
find it again.

In "Evidentiality: the Linguistic Coding of Epistemology", Wallace
Chafe & Johanna Nichols, editors, Volume XX in Advances in Discourse
Processes:
in Chapter One, "The Heterogeneity of Evidentials in Makah", William
H. Jacobsen, Jr. mentions evidentials Kwakiutl studied by Boas and in
Washo studied by Jacobsen himself.
The (I'm spelling it wrong perforce) -emskw evidential in Kwakiutl
means, according to Boas, "as I told you before";
the "-le" evidential in Washo, which Jacobsen summarizes
as "redundant", means, Jacobsen says, "the speaker believes that the
addressee either already knows it, or should already know it."

These two evidentials, then, would clearly mark Given information.
"Given" information need not always be marked as "given"; and, I
don't suppose every sentence -- not even every declarative,
indicative, sentence -- has to have a "given" part.  But if a
language has a "as I told you" evidential or an "as you (should)
already know" evidential, and a sentence has a part marked with such,
that part must be a "given" part of that sentence.

Also, some languages have a "mirative".  A "mirative" basically
encodes something along the lines of either "I don't quite believe it
myself yet, but..." or "I don't quite know how to take it yet, but..."
Clearly, anything marked with the "mirative" would have to be "new".

Some Arabicists have said that some Arabic sentences have what they
called a Major Subject, or a Broad Subject, possibly in addition to
what is usually called a "subject".  That is what grammarians of
Japanese, Chinese, and other so-called "topic-prominent" languages
call the Topic.  Some "topic-prominent" languages are also "subject-
prominent", and some of their sentences have what some grammarians
have called a "double-subject" construction; that is, the topic is
expressed as a noun phrase, then the comment is expressed as a
complete clause, having its own subject.
Example:
"That tree, the leaves don't go all the way to the top."

Tom H.C. in MI