the effect of a pragmatic presupposition on syntactic

The Effect of a Pragmatic Presupposition on Syntactic Structure in Question Answering

Michigan State University

This paper investigates the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. It was hypothesized that alternative surface structures are used differentially in order to array the information in sentences with given information preceding new information. This hypothesis was supported in a question-answering task. Results showed that answers to questions retained the syntactic structure and the order of given and new information from previously presented sentences when the original sentences placed given before new information. However, when the original sentence positioned new information before given, an alternative syntactic form was used and the order of information was reversed in subjects' answers.

In recent years significant progress has been made in the study of language comprehension toward understanding the relationships between the surface forms of texts and sentences and the cognitive representations that result from comprehension of these materials. Much less is known about relationships between cognitive representations and the production of texts and sentences. This paper reports evidence for one such relationship.

The distinction between given and new information is an important one in traditional linguistic analyses (Chafe, 1970; Halliday, 1967, 1970). Given information is information which the speaker treats as readily available to the hearer on the basis of their shared knowledge of the linguistic and

This paper is based on portions of a dissertation sub- mitted to the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the doctoral degree. I would like to thank the members of my thesis committee, William F. Brewer, Don E. Dulany, Jerry Morgan, and Edward J. Shoben, and the chairman, Charles E. Osgood, for their helpful advice through all stages of this research. I also thank Ellen Brewer for assistance in programming and data analysis, and David Irwin, Elizabeth Maier, Gordon Wood, and Rose Zacks for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Send requests for reprints to Kathryn Bock, Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824. Copyright 0 1977 by Academic Press, lnc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Printed in Great Britain

extralinguistic context; new information is treated by the speaker as unavailable to the hearer, that is, as knowledge possessed by the speaker which is not shared by the hearer.

The decision to treat something as given information constitutes a pragmatic presupposition (Bates, 1976) on the part of the speaker. Bates points out that pragmatic presuppositions differ from logical presuppositions, which are the best-defined presuppo- sitional class. While logical presuppositions are conditions which sentences must meet in order to have a truth value, pragmatic presuppositions are conditions on sentence appropriateness: In order for a sentence to be used appropriately in a given context, the pragmatic presuppositions of that sentence must be met. Insofar as having a truth value is an appropriateness condition as well as a logical one, it can be argued that logical presuppositions are simply special cases of pragmatic presuppositions. For example, for a sentence like The one who ate the pie was Bertha to be used appropriately, it must be true that someone ate the pie (logical presupposition), and the speaker must believe that the hearer knows that someone ate the pie (pragmatic presupposition). Deciding which information in a sentence to treat as given or new thus

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724 J. KATHRYN BOCK

affects the appropriateness of the sentence to the context in which it occurs.

The most frequent and noticeable effect of the decision to treat something as given or new is on the choice of the definite or indefinite article. The definite article (in its nongeneric use) indicates that the speaker believes that the hearer knows the specific referent of the noun phrase accompanying the article, while the indefinite article does not carry this pragmatic presupposition.

Another, less obvious way in which this pragmatic presupposition might affect the form of an utterance is in the positioning of given information. In general, it has been claimed that the optimal arrangement of the information in English sentences is with "givenness" decreasing from left to right (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1972). Thus, given information should occur earlier in a sentence than new information.

Although the positioning principle appears to be generally accepted, there is remarkably little experimental evidence for it in English. This is due partly to the fact that the principle was first established for languages other than English and partly to the relative word order invariance of English sentences. A major exception is the literature on passive and active sentences, which suggests differential use of these forms as a function of subject or object focus or emphasis (e.g., Turner & Rommet- veit, 1968). However, emphasis and givenness are not necessarily the same, and may often be opposed: Something may be emphasized because of its unexpectedness (its newness).

Passives and actives are exemplary of types of sentences which prompted one of the most compelling observations of early versions of transformational grammar (Chomsky, 1957): that certain sentences are syntactically closely related and nearly identical semantically. The primary focus of linguistic theory, as well as much psycholinguistic research, was to show how such sentences are essentially the same at abstract levels of analysis. Because of this emphasis on the underlying similarity of such sentence types, very little consideration has

been given to the question of how such sentences might differ. Although it has been reasonably well established that active and passive sentences function differentially (Olson & Filby, 1972; James, Thompson & Baldwin, 1973), no general principle has been proposed to account for the wide variety of structural pairs found in English, which includes actives and passives, but also other pairs, such as datives (Alfred gave his girlfriend a diamond ring vs Alfred gave a diamond ring to his girl-

friend), verb-plus-particle constructions (The beggar held out his cup vs The beggar held his cup out), conjuncts (Corn and wheat are the major crops in Kansas vs Wheat and corn are the major crops in Kansas), and equative constructions (The Old Water Tower is the oldest building in Chicago vs The oldest building in Chicago is the Old Water Tower).

It seems unlikely that the "variety of expression" afforded by these surface structure pairs serves no special function. Since the primary difference between the members of such pairs is in the word order of the constituents, a likely candidate for a general principle governing differential use of these forms is one which makes use of word order differences, in particular, the principle which says that given information should occur earlier in sentences than new information. Thus, a major function of alternative surface structures may be to array information in the most appropriate order, with given preceding new.

The purpose of the experiment reported below was to determine whether several alternative surface structures characteristic of English are sensitive to the distinction between given and new information; that is, whether different forms expressing the same underlying idea would be chosen as a function of differences in contextual givenness of different parts of the sentence. In order to investigate this problem, a modified question-answering paradigm was employed. Subjects heard a set of questions which was designed to manipulate the givenness of target noun phrases in sentences which answered the questions. These sentences were presented in a list following the

GIVEN-NEW AND SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE 725

question set. The subjects' task was to re- spond, after a second reading of each question, with an answer based on the previously heard sentence. It was hypothesized that the syntactic structures employed by the subjects in answering the questions would be sensitive to the distinction between given and new information, and that this sensitivity would be reflected both in the number of correct responses and in the number of shift responses. Correct responses-answers which maintain the syntactic structure and information order of the sentences on which they are based-should be more frequent when the order of the original sentence is appropriate for the question (typically with given information preceding new). Shift responses-answers which employ an alternate structure and reverse the order of given and new information from the original sentence-should be more frequent when the information order in the original sentence is inappropriate for the question (typically with new information preceding given).

METHOD Subjects

The subjects were 64 undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who participated in partial fulfillment of a course requirement in introductory psychology. They were tested in groups of 6 to 1 1.

Materials

The materials included two question lists and two sentence lists. The sentence lists were constructed from 80 sentences of the following 10 syntactic types: Adverb Proposing, Cleft, Conjunct Movement, Dative, Equative, Par- ticle Movement, Passive, Phrasal Conjunct Reversal, Pseudocleft, and Subject-Object Reversal. Four sentences of each type were written using one of the alternate syntactic structures for the type. Each of these was also converted into the other alternate structure for that type, to make four sentence pairs. An example of a pair of each syntactic type is given in Table 1,

Forty sentences were randomly assigned to one sentence list with the following constraints: (a) Each of the 10 syntactic types was represented by exactly four sentences; (b) of the four sentences, two were untransformed sentences and two were transforms; and (c) each of the four was from a different pair. List order was random, with the constraint that at least one sentence of a different type inter- vened between occurrences of sentences of the same type. The second sentence list was constructed parallel to the first by assigning the remaining sentences of each pair to corre- sponding positions in the second list, so that the members of each pair were in the same serial positions on the two lists.

A question consisting of a context-setting declarative sentence followed by a wh- ques- tion was constructed for each of the 80 sentences. The questions for all sentences on the sentence lists (except Cleft sentences) were written so that they mentioned the portion of the sentence which could be moved to the right (making that constituent given) and did not mention the constituent which could be moved to the left (making that constituent new). Thus, for those sentence types in which two noun phrases could be inverted (all types except Conjunct Movement, Particle Movement, and Cleft), only the leftmost noun phrase was mentioned; for those in which only one noun phrase could be moved (Conjunct Movement and Particle Movement), the noun phrase was mentioned if it was in the leftmost position and not mentioned if it was in its rightmost position. For example, the question for the Dative sentence, Alfred gave his girlfriend a diamond ring, with two mobile noun phrases, mentioned Alfred's girlfriend, but not the diamond ring, while the question for Alfred gave a diamond ring to his girlfriend mentioned the diamond ring, but not the girlfriend. For the Particle Movement sentence, The beggar held out his cup, with only one mobile constituent, the question omitted reference to the cup, but the question for The beggar held his cup out did refer to the cup.

Cleft sentences differ from the other types of

J . KATHRYN BOCK

TABLE 1

Syntactic type Questions and sentences

Adverb Proposing Question Appropriate sentence Inappropriate sentence

Question Appropriate sentence Inappropriate sentence

Cleft Question

Appropriate sentence Inappropriate sentence


Conjunct Movement Question


Question


Dative Question


Question


Equative Question


Question


Particle Movement Question


The minister's face suddenly blushed a deep red. What had happened? The minister blushed when the streaker ran through the church. When the streaker ran through the church, the minister blushed.

In the middle of the sermon, a streaker ran through the church. What happened'? When the streaker ran through the church, the minister blushed. The minister blushed when the streaker ran through the church.

Mrs. Himmelmeyer was angry because someone had eaten the pie she had baked for the fair. Who was it?

It was Bertha who ate the pie. It was the pie that Bertha ate.

Bertha ate something yesterday that she wasn't supposed to. What was it? It was the pie that Bertha ate. It was Bertha who ate the pie.

Billy Jean King sometimes gets together with an old buddy for a friendly poker game. Who does she play with?

Billy Jean plays poker with Bobby Riggs. Billy Jean and Bobby Riggs play poker.

Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs met in a famous confrontation on the tennis court, but now and then they get together for a more friendly game. What do they do?

Billy Jean and Bobby Riggs play poker. Billy Jean plays poker with Bobby Riggs.

When the doctor gave the child a penicillin shot, the child began to cry. What did the doctor do?

The doctor offered a child a lollipop. The doctor offered a lollipop to a child.

When the doctor deposited some money in his savings account, the bank teller gave him a lollipop. What did the doctor do?

The doctor offered a lollipop to a child. The doctor offered a child a lollipop.

Michigan Avenue was built around the Old Water Tower so that it wouldn't have to be destroyed. Why?

The Old Water Tower is the oldest building in Chicago. The oldest building in Chicago is the Old Water Tower.

Because of the Chicago fire, there are very few old buildings in Chicago. What is the oldest building?

The oldest building in Chicago is the Old Water Tower. The Old Water Tower is the oldest building in Chicago.

A husband and his wife were having an argument because he refused to do something. What was it?

The husband refused to take out the garbage. The husband refused to take the garbage out.

GIVEN-NEW AND SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE

TABLE 1-Continued

Syntactic type Questions and sentences


Passive Question


Question


Phrasal Conjunct Reversal Question


Question


Pseudocleft Question



The garbage had been piling up in the house for days. Why? The husband refused to take the garbage out. The husband refused to take out the garbage.

A psychologist acquired fame and fortune after his appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. What happened?

A psychologist cured a neurotic poodle. A neurotic poodle was cured by a psychologist.

The interior decorator was afraid she would have to get rid of her neurotic pet poodle because it was ruining the furniture, but she was able to keep it after all. What happened?

A neurotic poodle was cured by a psychologist. A psychologist cured a neurotic poodle.

A man went into a bar and ordered a screwdriver, but the bartender said he was out of vodka. What difference does it make?

A screwdriver is made with vodka and orange juice. A screwdriver is made with orange juice and vodka.

A man went into a bar and ordered a screwdriver, but the bartender said he was out of orange juice. What difference does it make?

A screwdriver is made with orange juice and vodka. A screwdriver is made with vodka and orange juice.

The first man who won the lottery claimed he couldn't afford to take off work for the drawing. What was he?

The one who won the lottery was a steel worker. What the steel worker won was the lottery.

A steel worker won something a few months ago that made him rich. What was it? What the steel worker won was the lottery. The one who won the lottery was the steel worker.

sentences employed, in that their syntax requires an order in which new information is followed by given information. Questions for these sentences were written so that they mentioned only the rightmost, instead of the leftmost, noun phrases. So, for the sentence, I t was the night watchman who discovered the burglary, the burglary was mentioned in the question, but not the night watchman, while for I t was the burglary that the night watchman discovered, only the night watchman was mentioned.

Each sentence was both with the question which was written for it (appropriate sentence) and with the question written for the pairmate of that sentence (inappropriate sentence). The two questions written for a

sentence pair constituted a question pair. Questions are presented for each of the sentences in Table 1.

Questions were assigned randomly to two question lists, with the constraint that half of the sentences on each of the two sentence lists were appropriate for half of the questions on each question list; the remaining half of the sentences on each of the sentence lists were inappropriate for the remaining questions on each of the question lists. The order of the questions was random, with the constraints that (a) questions written for the same types of sentences could not appear consecutively in a list, and (b) the two question lists were ordered so that the alternate members of a question pair appeared in the

728 J. KATHRYN BOCK

same serial position on the two lists. The order of the question lists did not correspond to the order of the sentence lists.

Design

Each of the two question lists was used with both sentence lists, so that each question was paired with both an appropriate and an inappropriate sentence. Sixteen subjects were assigned to each of the four list combinations. Two starting positions were employed for each sentence and question list, so that approxi- mately half of the subjects in each cell received sentence and question lists in the order 1-40 and the remaining subjects in the cell received the order 2 1-4011-20.

Procedure

The question and sentence lists were read by the experimenter. The entire question list was read first, followed by the entire sentence list, followed by a second reading of the question list. Questions and sentences were not read together, in order to avoid the possibility of subjects noticing the occasional awkward- ness of the question-inappropriate sentence sequence. After each question was read during the second reading of the question list, subjects wrote down an answer to the question, based on a sentence from the sentence list. The mean of the estimated elapsed times between hearing a sentence and responding to the question which it answered was 5.1 min.

Subjects were instructed that they would hear a list of questions, followed by a list of sentences containing the answers to the questions, and then the list of questions again. They were told that their answers were to be based on the sentences heard between the two readings of the question list, but that the wording of their answers did not have to be exactly like the wording of the sentences. However, they were told not to use any pronouns or intentionally delete any information which they were sure had been contained in the sentence they heard, and to make their answers complete sentences. A warm-up task was then presented, consisting

of four questions and four sentences similar to those employed in the experimental lists. Subjects recorded their answers on blank pages of a booklet, one answer per page.

Scoring

An answer was scored correct if it was identical to the input sentence, with the following deviations allowed: (1) changes from plural to singular nouns, or vice versa; (2) synonym substitutions in which one word was substituted for another; (3) changes from the indefinite to the definite article, or vice versa; (4) context-supplied deletions not affect- ing syntactic structure or violating the pro- noun rule given in subjects' instructions, for example, school buses, mentioned in the question, contracted to buses in the answer; and (5) context-supplied insertions which did not change the basic syntactic structure of the sentence, for example, pie in a sentence expanded to pie for the fair in the answer, where the phrase pie for the fair was used in the question.

An answer was scored as a shift if the input sentence was produced in its alternate surface structure. Deviations equivalent to those allowed in the correct category were permitted.

If no answer was given to a question, it was scored as an omit. All remaining answers were counted as errors. Answers which were corrects or shifts, but given in response to the wrong question, were also counted as errors, but such confusions were extremely rare.

Sentence Rating Previous studies of reconstructive recall

(Bock & Brewer, 1974) and sentence production (Osgood & Bock, 1977) have shown asymmetries in the frequency of use of alternative surface structures as a function of stylistic preferences. In order to assess this factor in the present sample of sentences, 28 subjects performed a forced-choice rating task on the 40 sentence pairs.

The sentence pairs were randomly assigned to eight pages of a booklet, five pairs per page, with the constraint that two pairs of the same

GIVEN-NEW AND SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE 7 29

syntactic type could not appear on the same page. Half of the pairs of each sentence type were presented in the order untransformed/transformed, and the other half in the opposite order. Half of the subjects received the pages in the order 1-8 and half in the order 8-1. They were instructed to indicate which of the two sentences in each pair "sounded better."

The percentages of corrects and shifts in appropriate and inappropriate sentence conditions for both preferred and nonpreferred sentences are given in Table 2. Each correct and shift answer was given a preference classification on the basis of the number of subjects choosing the input sentence in the preference rating condition. Those sentences judged by the majority of the subjects to be the most natural member of the pair constituted the preferred sentences; the alternate members of each pair were classified as nonpreferred. Pref- erence ratings for two pairs were tied, and the members of these pairs were classified as preferred or nonpreferred according to the majority classification of sentences with the same structure in the same syntactic class.

Analyses of variance, treating both subjects and items as random effects (Clark, 1973), were performed on the data for both corrects and shifts, with appropriateness and preference classification of the input sentences as factors. Data for corrects and shifts were analyzed separately. Fl refers to the test

TABLE 2

PERCENTAGES OF CORRECTS AND SHIFTS FOR

PREFFERRED AND NONPREFERRED SENTENCES IN

APPROPRIATE AND INAPPROPRIATE CONDITIONS

Preferred Nonpreferred

Corrects Appropriate 58 4 1 Inappropriate 3 1 12

Shifts Appropriate 2 17 Inappropriate 2 7 4 7

statistic with subjects as a random effect, F2 to the test statistic with items as a random effect, and min F' to the lower bound of the appropriate quasi F' ratio.

As predicted, there were more correct responses in the appropriate sentence condition than in the inappropriate sentence condition, F l ( l , 63) = 245.9, F,(l, 39) = 58.9, min F'(1, 58) = 47.5, p < .001. There were also significantly more shifts in the inappropriate sentence condition than in the appropriate sentence condition, F l ( l , 63) = 237.5, F2( l , 39) = 59.0, min F1(l , 59) = 47.2, p < .001. Together, these results strongly support the hypothesis that alternative syntactic structures are used to place given information earlier in sentences than new information.

There were significant preference effects, with more preferred sentences correct than nonpreferred, F l ( l , 63) = 126.0, F2( l , 39) = 17.6, min F1(1, 51) = 1 5 . 4 , ~ < .001, and more nonpreferred than preferred shifts, F l ( l , 63) =

180.6. F,(l, 39) = 22.3, min F1(l , 49) = 19.9, p < .OO 1. None of the preferencelappropriate- ness interactions approached significance.

Although the primary analysis rules out the possibility of gross item inequalities, some differences may exist in the sensitivity of the various syntactic types to the givenlnew distinction. Table 3 presents the percentages of corrects and shifts for appropriate and inappropriate sentences of each syntactic type. While the response rate varies across classes, the general pattern found in the overall analysis is preserved: in all cases, there are more appropriate than inappropriate corrects and more inappropriate than appropriate shifts.

The two syntactic classes which appear least sensitive to the manipulation of appropriateness are Cleft and Pseudocleft. This result is somewhat surprising, since both these classes mark the distinction between given and new information very strongly in surface structure, even when the sentences appear in isolation. Since the inappropriate forms of Cleft and Pseudocleft sentences are grossly inappropriate [e.g., the Cleft sequence

J. KATHRYN BOCK

TABLE 3

Sentence type

Dative

Passive

Conjunct Movement

Subject-Object Reversal

Phrasal Conjunct Reversal

Particle Movement

Adverb Proposing

Cleft

Equative

Pseudocleft

Appropriate1 inappropriate

--

Appropriate Inappropriate










Correct Shift -

12 70

14 29

5 5 7

5 3 5

14 52

1 1 43

11 22

0 6

20 5 3

0 4

(question) Bertha ate something yesterday that she wasn't supposed to. What was it? (inappropriate sentence) I t was Bertha who ate the pie], the incidence of failures to modify inappropriate sentence answers would indicate the degree to which subjects were rote- recalling the sentence presented, rather than constructing an answer to the question. Table 3 shows that there are fewer inappropriate than appropriate corrects for both Cleft and Pseudocleft classes, but the overall response rate is so low that this comparison is not very meaningful.

The low response rate for Cleft and Pseudocleft sentences is at least in part due to their complexity: There was a marked tendency to simplify the sentences, so that actives and passives were substituted. There were also some confusions of the two types, resulting in Clefts being transformed into Pseudoclefts, and vice versa. All these responses were scored

as errors, which resulted in high error rates for these classes.

When these errors of confusion and simplification are inspected, the pattern which emerges supports the claim that the sentences were functioning as answers to questions, and not as memorized linguistic objects. Confusion errors will be considered first. These should show preservation of the given-new structure of the input sentence in appropriate conditions and changes of given-new structure in inappropriate conditions, if subjects made their answers agree with the structure required by the question. There were 11 cases in which Pseudoclefts were transformed into Cleft structures; of these, 6 preserved the given-new structure of the input and 5 changed the given-new structure. Of the 6 which preserved the given-new structure, 5 were in the appropriate condition, and of the 5 that changed the given-new structure, all were in the inappropriate condition. There were 4 cases in which Cleft sentences were transformed into Pseudocleft-structured answers. Of these, 1 preserved the given-new structure of the presented sentence, and it was in the appropriate condition; 3 sentences changed the given-new structure, and all 3 were in the inappropriate condition. Thus, 14 of the 15 confusion errors were in the predicted direc- tions.

A similar pattern is found when structure- simplifying errors are considered. In order to classify these errors, it is necessary to break down the Cleft and Pseudocleft sentences into two types. The two alternate forms of Cleft sentences used as stimulus materials were Cleft agents (It was Bertha who ate the pie) and Cleft objects (It was the pie that Bertha ate). The simple surface form to which a Cleft agent sentence corresponds (considering word order only) is an active (Bertha ate the pie), and the simple surface form to which a Cleft object corresponds is the passive (The pie was eaten by Bertha}.

Transformations of input Cleft sentences to actives or passives can be considered appropriate in the context of the alternate question.

GIVEN-NEW AND SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE

TABLE 4

PERCENTAGES OF CLEFT AND PSEUDOCLEFT SENTENCES ~ I M P L I F I E D TO ACTIVE AND PASSIVE STRUCTURE IN ACTIVE- AND PASSIVE-APPROPRIATE CONTEXTS

- - -

Cleft agent Active-appropriate Passive-appropriate

Cleft object Active-appropriate Passive-appropriate

Pseudocleft agent Active-appropriate Passive-appropriate

Pseudocleft object Active-appropriate Passive-appropriate

Active Passive

(Note that the Cleft structure reverses the normal order of given and new information, so a change to active or passive structure makes the opposite questions appropriate.) Thus, the original Cleft inappropriate condition was subdivided into a Cleft agent active-appropriate and a Cleft object passive-appropriate condition; the original Cleft appropriate condition was subdivided into a Cleft agent passive- appropriate condition and a Cleft object active-appropriate condition. Table 4 presents the results of this classification of structure- simplifying errors. It shows that the answers employ the given-new structure appropriate to the question asked: More simplifications to actives are found in active-appropriate than in passive-appropriate conditions, while more simplifications to passives are found in passive-appropriate than in active-appropriate conditions.

A similar analysis of Pseudocleft agents (The one who won the lottery was a steel worker) simplified to passives and Pseudocleft objects (What the steel worker won was the lottery) simplified to actives revealed the same pattern, which is also shown in Table 4.

Another index of the degree to which subjects modified the input sentences to make their given-new structure compatible with the questions can be found in article shifts. In all sentences in which an article accompanied both of the noun phrases in the sentence whose given and new status could be changed by a question, the sentences were constructed with

indefinite articles, so that subjects were not predisposed to treat either noun phrase as more given or new than the other. However, subjects' responses showed marked article shifts when a noun phrase became given information in the context of the question. The percentages of indefinites that remained indefinite and that shifted to definites when the accompanying noun phrase was given versus new was calculated for the five sentences in which there were two article-accompanied noun phrases. These calculations were based on occurrences of each of the sentences in each of its two versions in both appropriate and inappropriate conditions. Thus, each noun phrase in each sentence functioned as both given and new information in each position an equal number of times. In order for a subject's answer to be included in this tabulation, both noun phrases had to appear in the answer, each accompanied by either article. Of the input indefinites, 4% remained indefinite when the accompanying noun phrase was given and 39% shifted to the definite article; when the accompanying noun phrase was new, 40% remained indefinite and 2% shifted to definites. The remaining 16% were either omitted or occurred in sentences which were excluded from the tabulation.

These results strongly support the hypothesis that given information tends to precede new information in English sentences, as well

732 J. KATHRYN BOCK

as the suggestion that alternative surface structures-structures which allow reordering of sentence constituents in a way that does not significantly change the semantic structure of the sentence-are used to accomplish this ordering. It thus seems that, in English, givenness is associated with earlier sentence constituents and newness with later constituents, and non-meaning-changing syntactic alterna- tives can be used to array the constituents in this order. This conclusion is supported by the findings that: (a) When constituents are already ordered with given information preceding new information, subjects tend to maintain that ordering (there were significantly more appropriate corrects than inappropriate corrects); and (b) when constituents are ar- rayed with new information preceding given, subjects tend to change the ordering (there were significantly more inappropriate shifts than appropriate shifts). Except for Cleft sentences, which require new information to be followed by given, these findings were consis- tent across sentences as well as sentence types: When the data were broken down by syntactic class, there were no changes in the general pattern of the results.

Although low percentages of correct and shift responses for Cleft and Pseudocleft sentences made it unclear whether they were being used differentially, inspection of confusion and simplification errors in these two classes indicated that the distinction between given and new information was being ob- served, but in different or simpler syntactic structures.

The significant preference effects replicate earlier findings (Bock & Brewer, 1974; Brewer, 1975). As in previous studies, this effect suggests that subjects tend to employ natural-sounding surface structures more fre- quently than less natural structures. The absence of interactions with appropriateness suggests that these factors contribute indepen- dently to sentence production.

While it might be argued that the findings reflect memory and not production processes, the confusion errors for Cleft and Pseudocleft sentences and the patterns of article use point

to the operation of normal sentence production processes in the reconstruction of the sentences. The Cleft and Pseudocleft confusion errors were strongly influenced by the question asked: Having heard an appropriate Cleft sentence like It was the night watchman who discovered the burglary, if a subject changed his response to a Pseudocleft sentence, it was to The one who discovered the burglary was the night watchman, and not to What the night watchman discovered was the burglary. The former answer preserves the correct given-new structure for the appropriate condition, while the latter, although closer to the surface order of the input sentence, changes the given-new structure. Since Cleft and Pseudocleft sentences explicitly mark the difference between given and new information in surface structure with subordinate-clause versus main-clause placement, preservation of the correct relationship between given and new information, despite changes in syntactic structure, is especially compelling evidence that subjects were sensitive to the difference between given and new information in making their responses. They were answering questions, not just remembering sentences.

The form of the article used with given versus new information also suggests that subjects' answers were responses to the questions asked. Since article shifts reflect changes in the information value of noun phrases (Osgood, 197 1; Grieve, 1973), they would not be expected to change if subjects were simply trying to recall the sentences. However, articles in the present experiment were extremely sensitive to changes in the information value of the accompanying noun phrases.

The strength of the given-precedes-new effect suggests that the given-new distinction must have considerable information- processing value. As Haviland and Clark (1974) have shown, simply providing an appropriate antecedent for information in a sentence significantly reduces comprehension time: It takes longer to understand a sentence like The beer was warm following The picnic supplies were in the trunk than following The

GIVEN-NEW AND SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE 733

beer was in the trunk. This indicates that the process of comprehension is aided by having a structure already available to which incoming information can be linked, and the more clearly that linkage is marked, the more rapidly the integration can be carried out. This process is not a function of simple repetition of lexical items: it requires that the lexical items have the same referent.

Since comprehension and memory are aided by explicit surface structure linking of the elements of discourse (devilliers, 1974; Les- gold, 1972), it is plausible that the earlier the relationship between antecedent and subsequent information is established, the more quickly and easily the process of comprehension should proceed. Thus, from the point of view of the hearer, the given-new order should facilitate comprehension.

While the adaptive value of a given-new ordering is evident from the hearer's viewpoint, it is not clear that it is equally adaptive for the speaker. Since salience tends to produce earlier positioning in sentences (James et al., 1973; Osgood & Bock, 1977; Turner & Rommetveit, 1968), the simplest explanation may be that given information is more salient for the speaker and is therefore uttered earlier. However, salience seems to be something that would be more likely to attach to new information than to given. Bates (1976) cites developmental evidence that children tend to employ new-given orders for precisely the reason that the new information is more salient, although perceptual salience and information value appear to be confounded in this work.

However, there may be other processes which affect memory representations and, indirectly, sentence production, in ways similar to salience. In the present paradigm, as well as in everyday language use, the lexical expression in a question may prime the lexical expression in the answer, which is the same in form, reference, and denotation. Since the effects of priming (Collins & Loftus, 1975) include shortened reaction times to subsequent presentations of the same and related stimuli, as well as time decay, use (and concomitant

activation) of a lexical expression in text should facilitate earlier production of the activated information relative to other, par- tially prepared information (Lindsley, 1975). The decay factor in priming suggests that if treating something as given depends (at least in part) on temporal factors, the effect of givenness should diminish over time. Osgood (197 1) has shown that the frequency of use of the definite article to describe an object de- clines as a function of the delay between presentations of the object. Priming, or semantic activation, is therefore a potential explanation for the given-precedes-new principle in sentence production.

In summary, the present experiment demon- strates a surprisingly strong tendency on the part of English speakers to order material within sentences so that given information precedes new information, and to use various alternative surface structure ordering rules to do so. What makes this result particularly interesting is that English is often regarded as a "rigid word order language" which exhibits only a weak tendency to reorder constituents as a function of information value (cf. Bolinger, 1968). This study also suggests an information-processing rationale for the use of the large class of devices for reordering information in sentences. The given-precedes- new principle thus appears to be an important one in the production of sentences.

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(Received February 3, 1977)

the effect of a pragmatic presupposition on syntactic

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