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Contextual Motivation and Working Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Ronald H. Smyth
Ronald H. Smyth*
Affiliation:
Carleton University
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Extract

This study examines certain properties of human memory which impose limits on topic accessibility in discourse. While the discussion is centred on so-called “dative” and “cleft” sentences in English, the work is motivated by more general concerns which have been variously referred to as “topicworthiness” (Thompson 1988), “information flow” (Chafe 1987; Kuno, 1987), “topic continuity” (Givón 1983), “degree of presuppositionality” (Givón 1979), “pragmatic perspective” (Dik 1978), “packaging phenomena” (Chafe 1976), “staging” (Grimes 1975), “communicative dynamism” (Firbas 1967), “the theme system” (Halliday 1967), and “linear modification” (Bolinger 1952). The term adopted here is “information flow”.

One important aspect of the study of information flow is the attempt to determine the conditions under which speakers make selections from among alternative syntactic expressions of identical propositional meaning. While some of the motivation for such choices lies in sentence-internal factors such as the animacy or definiteness of NPs (e.g., Ransom 1979), I shall restrict the discussion here to the issue of contextual motivation as originally developed in Smyth (1977) and in Smyth et al (1979). A particular syntactic choice is said to be contextually motivated if the information flow features which govern it are external to the sentence, and the alternative structure is contextually inappropriate. Where contextual motivation is absent, I claim that either of the candidate syntactic forms is appropriate, although sentence-internal information flow factors may then exert a weaker influence on syntactic choice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , September 1988 , pp. 231 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1988

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