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12 - Information Structure and Argument Linking

from Part Two - Topics in RRG: Simple Sentences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

By
Anja Latrouite  and
Robert D. Van Valin
Edited by
Delia Bentley ,
Ricardo Mairal Usón ,
Wataru Nakamura  and
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Delia Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Ricardo Mairal Usón
Affiliation:
Universidad National de Educación a Distancia, Madrid
Wataru Nakamura
Affiliation:
Tohoku University, Japan
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
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Summary

The RRG approach to information structure (IS) was laid out by Bentley (Chapter 11), and the linking between syntax and semantics was explicated by Van Valin (Chapter 1), Watters (Chapter 6), Guerrero (Chapter 14) and Paris (Chapter 15). These discussions did not emphasize the role of IS in linking, and it is to this topic that we turn in this chapter. We begin by presenting the representation of IS in the layered structure of the clause, and then we show how context can be represented using a version of Discourse Representation Theory and the different focus types derived from these representations. The next section illustrates the importance of IS for the analysis of grammatical phenomena, and this is followed by an analysis of conjunction reduction, which presented problems for an RRG analysis in purely syntactic terms. Finally, the interaction of IS and the linking algorithm will be explored, showing that IS interacts with it in important ways.

Keywords

topic–commentfocus–backgroundimmediate common groundfocus domainslinking
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar , pp. 488 - 522
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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