Belgian Journal of Linguistics - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2012

Adopting Berrendonner’s (1990, 2002) and Berrendonner et al.’s (forthcoming) distinction between “micro-syntax” and “macro-syntax”, as well as the orthogonal dichotomy between foregrounded and backgrounded discourse segments (cf. Khalil 2005), this paper aims to examine certain “non-canonical” interactions amongst these domains. In particular, it analyses instances where a potential referent is evoked within a highly presupposed, discursively backgrounded text segment, but where that referent is targeted via an “anadeictic” indexical expression and may be made into a discourse entity in its own right. This last-mentioned use is characteristic of discourse deixis, but not of anaphora as such. The paper also examines larger stretches of text, which relate to each other discursively in terms of “macro-syntax”. The overall aim is to characterise the limits of discourse-anaphoric reference as a function of the degree of backgrounding or foregrounding of the discourse units in terms of which the referent is determined and targeted.

This paper investigates, from the point of view of role and reference grammar, the formal and the functional side of SLF (‘subject gap in finite/frontal clauses’) coordination on the basis of a bidirectional parallel German-Dutch corpus. The main research question is how relational and referential coherence are mapped to the syntactic structure of SLF and coordination constructions alternating with it. A typology of the alternative constructions is proposed. Since both relational and referential coherence at the discourse level, as well as the nexus types at the syntax level, are composed of more or less prominent states of affairs, the paper defines a relative concept of prominence on both these grammar levels and examines whether and, if so, how this concept influences the mapping between discursive and syntactic structure. In particular, it looks at absolute and relative frequencies so as to find potential trends in this mapping. There is a tendency that the more prominent the discursive states of affairs are, the more syntactically prominent the chosen coordination alternative is. The states of affairs linked by the interclausal coherence relation seem to affect the distribution of the coordination alternatives both in German and in Dutch. The state of affairs expressed by the information-structural status of the first subject seems to affect at least the distribution of two types. To a certain extent, both German and Dutch strive to iconically map discursive to syntactic prominence.

In this paper we investigate the temporal and rhetorical relations in complex sentences with clauses introduced by quando ‘when’ in European Portuguese. We put forward a proposal for a semantic treatment within a theoretical framework which is grounded in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher and Lascarides 2003), with some extra stipulations to deal with specificities of complex sentences related to: (i) the directionality of rhetorical and temporal relations; (ii) the fronted or final position of the adverbial clause and its implications for text-structuring rhetorical relations. We show that the directionality of both the temporal and rhetorical relations is from the main situation to the subordinate situation, regardless of the order of the discourse. We argue that each complex sentence with a clause introduced by quando describes situations that are connected by rhetorical relations at two distinct levels: at the level of content and at the level of text-structuring. At the level of content, we resort to SDRT’s list of rhetorical relations. As for the text-structuring relations, we propose two new relations: Frame and Specification. Finally, we compare the complex sentences with their non-complex counterparts to demonstrate that the rhetorical mechanisms used in both types of discourse are not always the same. To sum up, the investigation carried out allows us to conclude that an analysis which takes into account the temporal and rhetorical relations leads to a better semantic and discursive understanding of complex sentences with clauses introduced by quando.

Adverbials are well-known to form a rather heterogeneous class in multiple respects. Here we examine their ability to bear focus and their ability to be embedded in subordinate sentences. For focusability, the distinction between informational focus and contrastive focus proves to play a role. We discern six main classes of adverbials, identified by their base position. As expected, not all classes (or subclasses) can bear (informational or contrastive) focus, and also not all (sub)classes can be embedded. Among those that can, it is still only a proper subset that may simultaneously be embedded and focused. A general finding is that the lower in the syntactic tree an adverbial is base-generated, the more likely it allows for focusing as well as for embedding. The distinction between proposition-internal and proposition-external adverbs is shown to be helpful in determining which adverbials may bear (informational) focus. Also certain extrinsic factors like the type of the embedding verb or the general context are discussed that influence focusability and/or embeddability. An analysis is given in presuppositional discourse representation theory that can account for our observations.

While concessives are well-known for their special semantic characteristics, most research has so far been oriented towards hypotactic construction types (although etc.). The present article seeks to complement this trend by investigating the paratactic zwar … aber-construction in German (roughly equivalent to English ‘true … but’), with a special focus on its patterns of variation. The aim is to document important aspects of this variation from a combined qualitative/quantitative perspective. The basic thesis is that zwar … aber constitutes the core instantiation of an emergent constructional schema zwar … aber whose surface variation is structured in a prototype-like fashion. Several functional regularities and statistical correlations are analysed and discussed from the point of view of grammaticalisation theory. The data consist of ca. 10,000 parsed tokens of zwar, mainly from newspaper usage, in the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo).

In a recent paper, Biber and Gray (2010) provide empirical evidence for the dramatic increase of compressed structures in English academic writing over the last 100 years. According to their corpus findings, the grammatical complexity of academic writing displays a phrasal rather than clausal character, the corollary of which is a compressed rather than elaborated discourse style (the latter one being typical of spoken registers). Given this finding, the question arises as to how far the traditional view that information structure should be viewed as a single partition of information within a given utterance adequately accounts for genre-specific information packaging strategies. To provide an answer to this question, the current study sets out to explore and compare information structuring within what will be referred to here as ‘compression strategies’, namely the use of adverbial subordinate clauses, -ING constructions, and complex NP constructions across two different genres: the highly compressed genre of research article abstracts, and fiction. The findings reported here suggest that in more compressed discourse styles such as academic writing, there is a higher probability of encountering information structure partition not only at the clausal but also at the phrasal level. The present paper highlights the importance of genre variation as one predictor of variation in information structuring within constructions.