Given and new
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P206
2025-11-12
63
Given and new
Discourse contains repeated mention of participants, objects or actions. The repeated mention could be by the same speaker or by another speaker in the conversation. A key distinction here is between new and given information. New information is information which has just been introduced into the discourse for the first time. Given information has already been established as background information. This might be as a result of explicit mention or might come about more implicitly as part of the shared background knowledge of speaker and listener.
Studies in this area have included speech production studies which have highlighted qualitative differences in how the same words are produced when they are introduced as new information compared to when they are given information. So, it is likely that there will be qualitative differences in the pronunciations of the first and second instance of bridge in the sentence in (12.36). It is highly probable that the second mention would have a reduced vowel and less clear consonant articulations (Hawkins & Warren, 1994).
The second mention of bridge in (12.36) could easily be replaced by a pro noun – They crossed over it….
There is also likely to be a difference in the prosodic status of bridge in its two uses in (12.36). In the first use it is likely that bridge will be in focus and accented, and in the second it will be unaccented, with crossed or over more likely to be in focus. It is this difference in prosodic status, with words being accented or not, that results in differences in the clarity of pronunciation of words. While new information is generally accented and given information is unaccented, this is not always the case. Sometimes given information remains important and remains accented, and therefore as clear as new information. Consider the two instances of bridge in (12.37).
Although bridge is given information in the second sentence, the implied contrast with tunnel means that it will be accented.
Comprehension studies have shown that listeners are sensitive to the appropriate level of accentedness for the information status of words. For example, Terken and Nooteboom (1987) asked listeners to verify whether each of a series of utterances was an accurate description of an arrangement of letters that they had been shown. Take as an example the sequence QPKC. If the participants heard the two sentences in (12.38) and (12.39), in that order, then they were faster in verifying the accuracy of (12.39) if’ was not accented, i.e. was appropriately treated as given information in the context of the preceding utterance of (12.38). So even though accentedness increases clarity and should make processing easier, when it does not match the information status of items in the utterance, it can actually slow processing.
Accentedness can also affect the interpretation of anaphora. For instance, in the classic examples in (12.40) and (12.41) (Lakoff, 1971) if he and him unaccented, then they are likely to be taken to refer to Jhon and Bill respectively, i.e. to the antecedents with the same grammatical role (i.e. Jhon and he are both subjects of their respective verbs). If he and him are accented, as in (12.41), then the antecedents are reversed, as shown by the subscripts liking anaphors and antecedents.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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