Non-Pronominal Coding of Active Referents in Message Structure of Sentences

Non-Pronominal Coding of Active Referents The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of English sentence structures with regard to non-pronominal coding of active referents. In order to do this, it is important to have a baseline definition of non-pronominal (NP) coding and active referents. We look to recent literature and case study of not only English but other languages examined to understand sentence structure. Upon reviewing the literature, it was found that definitions for the pronominal approach were plentiful and easy to understand.

As a means of comparison an understanding the NP application, we are also exploring the pronominal approach that acts as a framework for literature. Once these definitions are established, we will look at active referents and their role in sentence structure. Available literature suggests non-pronominal coding is used for active referents. As part of this analysis, it is important to look at other languages as they tend to reintroduce referents sooner than English.

These languages vary greatly from the English's structure which can provide a whole different meaning to what is written or spoken. This study looks to languages like Hebrew, German, Maltese, Russian and Wardaman for examples of this theory. In order to check this theory, a piece of literature has been selected to see if non-pronominal coding of active referents and reintroducing referents in languages other than English is a viable theory. The piece of literature chosen was Hans Christen Andersen's The Princess and the Pea, written in English.

For the sake of comparison and contrast, it is important to look to real life situations to see if this theory happens there as well. These findings will be compared to the original theory in the hopes acquiring new insight into sentence structure and possible oral and written meanings. Non-Pronominal Coding of Active Referents Hartwell Francis et al., establish a direct relationship of the grammatical role of subject is the syntactic expression of the discourse role of the topic (1).

Making this clarification allows for the referent to be identified so that a status can be established with regard to the topic of the sentence. A referent may be established in the topic role in the very act of commenting about it. Topics tend to be associated as textually evoked referents. Evoked status is prominently found in pronominal coding. It is logical that active referents would be associated with non-pronominal coding. For example, "my sister has a, she just had a baby.

He's about five months old and she was worrying about going back to work" (Hartwell et al. 3). In this sentence, the baby is introduced as an indefinite referential non-pronominal in object position and then reference to the baby is continued with pronouns, beginning in the subject position as a clause topic. Lambrecht concludes, the speaker exploits the potential for easy activation of the family member referent and "conveys a request to the hearer to act as if the referent of the NP were already available" (114).

Outside the familial pronoun, the use of NP functions as a reactivation of a topic for which there exist competitors in the intervening discourse. According to Baumann and Grice, "a referent is already active in the listener's mind at the time of the utterance" (1). A referent can also become active from a previous inactive state or even active from a semi-active state. A referent is accessible if by text or situation opportunities. It is contingent on the speaker or writer experience.

In this respect the utterance will be different depending on focus (pronoun), pitch or accent. Understanding an expression comes down to coherence and focusing. These factors and their differences have been ignored by language interpretation. Such approached as PA and NP may work in well-formed familiar texts but do not aid in cross cultural or cross generational coherence active or non-active referents (Grosz, et al.

45) This method is called the Pronominal Approach (PA) because of the role it assigns to paradigms of pronouns that are proportional to constituents containing lexical (i.e. non-pronominal) elements. (The relation termed proportionality is defined below.). The PA first examines the set of "pronominal sentences" and their internal relations. It thus is based on language-immanent observations such as those to which Harris's procedures are applied. We will also show how it furnishes a constructive proof2 of basic syntactic concepts, and in particular reinforces Harris's String Analysis (Harris 1965).

Whereas traditionally syntax and lexicon were viewed as two independent domains of grammar, in modern syntactic theories syntactic information is almost completely integrated in the lexicon. Consequently, the investigation of the relation between syntactic constructions has gained interest during the last decade. This led to many interesting insights into the syntax-semantics interface and to proposals for a highly structured and hierarchical design of the lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995). Harris exploited a pair-wise equivalence relation between constructions (e.g. Harris 1969a [1970:615]).

He suggests entailment between constructions as a criterion for establishing construction groups or networks leading to a syntactico-semantic typology. Recent work in the PA combines both aspects: it establishes relations between two or more constructions of a verbal predicator, based on the observation that terms are shared in those constructions; moreover relationships are classified according to criteria such as the following: is syntactic function of terms preserved or not, is the relationship predicator-specific or not, is one construction implied by the other.

This results in a network of relations between constructions, some of which may be combined. For an application to French. In Harris's and Whiteley's approaches, construction slots are usually filled by lexical phrases. In Whiteley's approach this contains a risk: the relations of implication or entailment might be established only for particular lexical items on a more or less ad hoc basis, and therefore would not prove the existence of systematic relationships (of logical implication) between the constructions as such, independently of the lexical items filling the slots.

Whiteley reduces the risk of establishing unjustified implications between constructions by using variables representing referents of the constructions (Whiteley 1960 150). The PA takes this approach one step further by using pronominal paradigms instead of variables. In this way it applies the principles underlying the following quotation from Quine: "To be is to be in the range of reference of a pronoun.

Pronouns are the basic media of reference; nouns might better have been named pro-pronouns" ( 19964, 13) In order to obtain a workable definition of the pronominal paradigms for syntactic analysis, the notion of proportionality is essential for the establishment of construction groups. This concept is procedurally defined by establishing the ratios between the lexical (sub) syntagms of a sentence and their pronominal counterparts (cf.

Harris's String Analysis provides a series of systematic tests for the identification of syntactic elements, among which the excision or omissibility test, but as shown in Eynde (1998:147-150) this test in fact presupposes the foreknowledge of the correct structure, based upon the proportionality with minimal referentials. Contrary to concepts as NP, VP..., to syntactic functions (subject, object,...), or to roles (agent, patient,...), pronouns are elements that belong to the language itself and pronominal sentences are directly observable: they are open to judgment of grammaticality or acceptability.

Moreover, the inventory of pronouns is finite and constitutes a closed set. These observations constitute the basis of the PA: when establishing the valency of a predicator, we exploit this proportionality in order to reduce the huge number of combinations between lexical elements to a much smaller number of combinations with pronouns. In other words, the finite nature of the list(s) of pronouns makes it possible to examine their combinations with predicators (in our dictionaries the full verbs, i.e.

lexical as opposed to function verbs such as auxiliaries or modals) in a systematic and exhaustive way, without having to appeal to particular semantico-interpretative features. The possibility or impossibility for a particular pronoun to appear is indeed meaningful: the pronouns reveal the primary (i.e. basic) characteristics a predicator imposes on its dependents. This presents the basic notions of the PA progressing from the basic elements, the pronouns, to paradigms of pronouns and relations between paradigms and predicators forming constructions.

It considers relations between constructions with a view to verb classification. Examples from French will illustrate the basic notions. It will be clear that pronouns and pronominal paradigms can be used in many different contexts such as discourse analysis, prosodic analysis and text cohesion. However, we will concentrate exclusively on aspects related to verb classification. In the first part of this section, we describe how the basic elements, the pronouns, are identified, delimited from lexical elements, and further classified. Next we present the organization of pronouns in paradigms.

Furthermore, we describe how paradigms are related to predicators, thus forming constructions, and finally how relations between different constructions of the same predicator can be established. Referents and types of referents Degree of referential specification The degree of specification distinguishes pronouns from lexicalized constituents, i.e. constituents containing lexical elements. The degree of lexicalization coincides with the degree of specification: the pronouns are generic elements with minimal reference; the lexicalized forms are necessarily more specific.

Thus, (1) below is more specific than (2) which is more specific than (3): (1) Our French readers buy Harris's books (2) Our readers buy his books (3) They buy them. Put differently, the denotation of a pronoun (the set of objects it may refer to) is larger than the denotation of a lexical item. As opposed to nouns which may function as hyperonyms or generic concepts such as man or human, pronouns can be delimited as those elements which have the largest set of lexicalization possibilities.

The group of pronouns thus defined can be further subdivided according to their degree of referential specification. If the referential specification is suspended we use the term suspensive pronouns, which correspond roughly to the traditional category interrogative pronoun and adverb. These pronouns are the ones that have the smallest or at least a smaller set of syntactico-semantic features. Furthermore, there exists a category of paranouns (e.g. someone, something, everywhere, never, ...), involving extra features of quantification.

Finally, even more specific are assertive pronouns such as he, she or these characterized by the presence of a number of syntactico-semantic features labelled as number, gender, sex, etc. For a more detailed account of feature analysis of French pronouns, see Eynde et al. (1988). Since proportionality is most appropriately observed between constructions, we will focus on constructions instead of isolated forms.

Clitic -- non-clitic The Pronominal Approach presupposes a complete inventory of the pronominal system which reveals different properties for each language because the specific properties of pronouns are language specific. In the analysis of French, we have to make a prosodic distinction between clitic pronouns, which are never stressed, and non-clitic pronouns, which may be stressed. This distinction is important for the establishment of more general (reduced).

The term construction is used in its broadest sense referring to a verbal, adjectival or nominal predicator and its dependents, whether in pronominal or lexical form. In the following, however, we will focus on constructions with verbal predicators. The relations between constructions with lexical elements are prefigured by the relations between the corresponding proportional sentences containing only the predicator and pronominal referents. Sentence (1) is proportional to (3) since our French readers is proportional to they, and Harris's books is proportional to them, and so forth.

The relation of proportionality differs from the concept of substitution, commonly used in linguistics, cf. Eynde et al. (1988 178). First, it disregards the linear order of the elements in the construction, as seen in the French translations of (1) and (3) given in (4) and (5) below: (4) Nos lecteurs francais achetent les livres de Harris. (5) Ils les achetent.

(6) the baker offers the boy a sweet he offers him a sweet (7) the baker's wife offers the boy a sweet -- he offers him a sweet Next, proportionality is more specific than substitution: in (6) the constituent the baker may be replaced by the string he but there is no proportionality between he and the baker's wife cf. Proportionality indeed implies the unification with a subset of the (morpho-syntactic) features of the related strings, which is not the case with substitution.

The concept of proportionality is well compatible with the concept of unification as it is used in current unification grammars. Reintroduction of Referents in Other Languages Happen Sooner Than English Languages differ worldwide in how they function both orally and written. Many languages can be different to learn and understand they use an alphabet unique to that language with symbols and letters different from English. This symbols and letters create words and sentence whose structures are very different from English.

This brings up the notion that pronouns and referents might be treated differently within the sentence structure and as a result may be stressed, accented in a way that allows active referents to be introduced faster and with more repetition than in English. Clear examples of these languages can be found mainly in the East, including the Middle East and Slavic countries. With this in mind, one can see the clear differences between English, the Romance language and Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew.

One vast difference is how these languages use nouns and adjectives. Romance languages and English have sentence structure where the adjective follows the noun. Semitic languages have both nouns and adjectives take the definite article. This makes for differences in coding (Maltese Grammar 1). One language that has successfully incorporated both Romantic and Semitic aspects into its grammar is Maltese as it sits on the cusp of where East meets West. The language has created a duality in under to embrace both forms of sentence structure and verb tense.

Pure forms of Hebrew and Arabic rarely do this but Arabic dialects can. This type of grammar usage allows active referents to be reintroduced again and again, more often than in English but contingent on which form Maltese used. Russian Lambrecht (1994) suggests that the formal structure of sentences is related to the communicative situations in which sentences are used. He states that "this relationship is governed by principles and rules of grammar, in a component called information structure" (334).

The term information structure is used to refer to various ways in which information, includingpropositional information and real-world knowledge, is linguistically encoded. That is, information structure examines how information is encoded, or packaged, in language and why certain structures might be selected to convey a given piece of propositional knowledge. Word order differences, for instance, provide prime examples of information packaging in Russian. According to Lambrecht, propositions undergo pragmatic structuring in accordance with the discourse situations and are then matched with appropriate lexicogrammatical structures.

He divides a proposition into "pragmatic presupposition" and "pragmatic assertion." The pragmatic presupposition is "the set of propositions lexicogrammatically evoked in an utterance which the speaker assumes the hearer already knows of believes or is ready to take for granted at the time the sentence is uttered" (52). The pragmatic assertion is "the proposition expressed by a sentence which the hearer is expected to know or take for granted as a result of hearing the sentence uttered" (52).

The focus of the assertion is "the semantic component of a pragmatically structured proposition whereby the assertion differs from the presupposition" (213). Thus, the presence of focus makes the proposition into an assertion, i.e. A potential piece of information. An important aspect of Lambrecht's theory is the concept of focus structure that conventionally associates sentence form with focus construal (336). "The syntactic domain in a sentence which expresses the focus component of a pragmatically structured proposition" is the focus domain (241).

This concept of focus structure is further developed into the concepts of potential and actual focus domain. In RRG, the potential focus domain refers to the syntactic domain where focus can possibly occur. The actual focus domain is where the focus is occurring in a given structure. This framework provides an alternative to FSP when considering the issue of word order alterations. As in FSP, it incorporates the discourse status of referents into syntactic structure.

Pragmatic presupposition is similar to the FSP concept of theme; both rheme and focus are associated with the sentence-final position in unmarked utterances. As with rhematic information, focus is not always restricted to the final position in a sentence and can occur anywhere. Researchers point out that a given language may have a specific position, called the unmarked narrow focus position; this is where focal material of the length of a single constituent is usually placed (1997: 209).

When such focal material occurs in other positions, the marked narrow focus structure is evoked. In fact, focus construal is determined by how information is distributed within a sentence. A crucial difference between Lambrechtian and traditional FSP approaches, however, is that the former treats information as a separate level of linguistic representation. Lambrecht's theory as adopted by Van Valin no longer segments propositional information into 'old' and 'new' parts which are mapped onto syntax.

Rather, information is seen as a property of denotata, not of lexical items and/or syntactic constituents. This method allows RRG to take the problem of "free word order" beyond syntactic linearization of sentence constituents in FSP and rather to explore the relationship between form and function in order to determine how different word orders are motivated in grammar. Van Valin is specifically interested in the types of focus.

Wardaman The morpho-syntactic encoding of information structure in Wardaman is known for intrinsic interaction between the semantic / syntactic role of NP, on the one hand, and grammatical properties of constructions that signal its information-structure role, on the other. Thus, this language provides an interesting test case for Lambrecht's theory of focus-structure types, which is intended to capture universal principles of such interactions.

The analysis of this paradigm of focus structures presented here demonstrates that Lambrecht's subject-oriented classification of focus structure types must be enhanced in such a way as to accommodate the special role of object in structuring transitive propositions, or, more generally, to take into account cross-linguistic variation in the degree of grammaticalization of subject-topic correlation.

The encoding of semantic and pragmatic macro-roles The morphosyntactic means of encoding information structure in Wardaman are confined to the core of finite clause, that is, to the finite verb (V) and its core arguments, S (sole core participant of intransitive clause), A and O ("active" and "inactive" participants of transitive clause), and distinguishes two grammaticalized pragmatic macro-roles, Topic and Focus.

These terms (with capital initial letters) are intended to refer to language-specific grammatical phenomena, which can nonetheless be assumed to instantiate cross-linguistic types of information-structuring strategies captured by the theoretical notions of topic and focus (with small initial letters) 1. The basic facts underlying this assumption have been described in the earlier works. The syntactic role of NP is determined by the combination of its semantic and pragmatic macro-roles; there are no other (voice or voicelike) oppositions which would allow for distinct morphosyntactic encoding of identical propositional structures.

Formally, the Focus syntactic roles are distinguished from Topics by two properties: (i) they must be filled by overt NPs for the construction to function as a finite clause3, and (ii) the Focus NP must precede the finite verb. To put it the other way round, the term Topic subsumes syntactic roles that can be linked to previously established -- discourse topics -- without overt nominal reference.

Thus, the semantic clause core consists of an obligatory -- communicative core -- (indicated by curly brackets in schemes (2) and (4) below) and, possibly, one or two Topic NPs. Morphological means employed to encode the pragmatic role of a core participant differ depending on its semantic macro-role. The pragmatic role of S. is signaled by its own case form and by the verb inflection. In the S-Topic (ST) construction, S takes the Nominative case and controls Number and Person suffixes on the verb.

In the Sfocus (SF) construction, S takes one of the Focus case forms4 (see Table 1) and controls only Number agreement. The paradigm of transitive information-packaging variants encodes two binary oppositions, A-Topic (AT) vs. A-Focus (AF) and O-Topic (OT) vs. O-Focus (OF); there can be no more than one Focus NP per clause.

The OF role is encoded by the Focus case, i.e., in the same way as SF; the AF role is incompatible with the nominal Focus markers and takes zero case marking, which consistently differs from the Nominative form only for third-person pronouns (see Table 1). The AT role is encoded by the Nominative case. The case form of OT is governed by Person hierarchy (Locator >> Non-Locator): if A has a higher rank than O, then the latter takes the Nominative form, otherwise, one of the Accusative forms (see Table 1).

Analysis of Literature Sample of The Princess and the Pea In Hans Christian Andersen's childhood classic, reintroducing of the active referent in non-pronominal coding happens quite often throughout the story. In this case, it is not sentence structure under analysis but more structure of paragraphs and the story itself. It seems rather natural of English that this pattern is created over time to add an inter-textual richness only found in description. This takes the story to different dimensions while remaining simple and easy to understand.

There are two characters in the story which in the text can be identified as nouns; the prince and the princess. In the first paragraph, it is established that the prince is searching for his princess. The active referent of princess is reintroduced within the third sentence as Andersen describes how the princess will have to be a real princess. The coding between princess, she and her is meant to add description of the situation as it refers to the princess.

This also happens for the prince as well throughout but in the first paragraph, the prince is searching and he travels all over the world to find one (princess). The character of the princess, the real one is introduced in paragraph three as she stands in the doorway coming out of the rain. Active referents act to describe her appearance such as wet clothes and hair but also act to emphasize her presence and character.

Really it is dramatic in the sense that after his search, she just shows up one night to everyone's disbelief of her true identity as a princess. The state of her appearance: her look, her hair, her toes offers dimension to the story but also emphasizes their disbelief that she is a princess. Referents establish that she should not be a princess.

As the short story continues as many are familiar, the princess proves her true identity because she can feel the pea within the twenty or so mattresses and blankets. The references return to focus on the prince and work to describe action as he takes her for his wife. This also continues to refer to her character as she is labeled a real princess and the prince's wife. It is interesting to see how the referents shift according to the noun but still work for both.

Situations Found in Reality The purpose of this study is to look at samples of literature that as evidence found referents reintroducing in other languages faster than English. Due to the way sentence are constructed in other languages than English, this is a distinct possibility however, the way in which this happens is dependent on people's personal choices in accenting and word emphasis. In a language like Russian where the structure is free, reintroducing referents can happen more than other languages.

The interactions of semantic and pragmatic factors with centering and their effects on referring expressions are more complex than the preceding discussion suggests. In the examples given above, the NPs that realize Cb(S) also denote it., but this is not always the case: we used the term "realize" in the above discussion advisedly. In this section, we consider two kinds of examples in which the center of a sentence is not simply the denotation of some noun phrase occurring in the sentence.

First, we will examine several examples in which the choice of and interaction among different kinds of interpretations of definite noun phrases are affected by the local discourse context (i.e., centering}. Second, the role of pragmatic factors in some problematic cases of referential uses of definite descriptions (Donnellan 1966) is discussed. As just described, the referential-attributive distinction appears to be exactly the distinction that Barwise and Perry formulate in terms of the value-loaded and value free interpretations of definite noun phrases.

But this gloss omits an essential aspect of the referential attributive distinction as elaborated by Donnellan. In Donnellan's view, a speaker may use a description referentially to refer to an object distinct from the semantic denotation of the description, and, moreover, to refer to an object even when the description has no semantic denotation. In one sense, this phenomenon arises within the framework of Barwise and Perry's treatment of descriptions.

If we understand the semantic denotation of a description to be the unique object that satisfies the content of the description, if there is one, then Barwise and Perry would allow that there are referential uses of a description D. that contribute objects other than the semantic denotation of D. To the propositions expressed by uses of sentences in which D. occurs.

But this is only because Barwise and Perry allow that a description may be evaluated at ~ resource situation other than the complete situation in order to arrive at its denotation on a given occasion of use. Still, the denotation of the description relative to a given resource situation is the unique object in the situation that satisfies the description relative to that situation.

The referential uses of descriptions that Donnellan gives examples of do not seem to arise by evaluation of descriptions at alternative resource situations, but rather through the "referential intentions" of the speaker in his use of the description. This aspect of referential use is a pragmatic rather than a semantic phenomenon and is best analyzed in terms of the distinction between semantic reference and speaker's reference elaborated.

External topics in Russian are either a left-dislocated or right-dislocated structure that is set off from the rest of the sentence as a distinct intonation group. RRG theory permits us to incorporate external.