How Do We Signal What's Important When We Talk? Information Structure

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How do we focus on crucial information in our conversations? What methods do we have for moving things into the center of discussion? In this week's episode, we talk about information structure: how we build up the common ground in discussion, what we do to bring up topics and signal our focus, and how different languages use varying strategies to bring new ideas to the fore.
This is Topic #75!
This week's tag language: Lingala!
Related episodes:
The Rules of Conversation - Gricean Maxims: • Pragmatics and Gricean...
Building Common Ground - • How Do We Create a Sha...
Last episode:
Why Can't Any Go Just Anywhere? NPIs: • Why Can't "Any" Go Jus...
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Sheepish Semantics: The Lambda Calculus - • How Can One Greek Lett...
Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - • How Do We Decide What'...
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: Generalized Quantifiers - • What Does "Most" Even ...
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: / thelingspace
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And at our website, www.thelingspace.com/ !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com/
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at www.thelingspace.com/episode-75/
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
A couple of papers:
Krifka (2006): amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3...
Féry and Krifka: amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3...
Some slides and notes:
From Andrew McIntyre: www.angl.hu-berlin.de/departm...
From Richard Xiao: www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/xiao...
From Kordula De Kuthy and Arndt Riester: www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~kdk/...
From Frank Kügler: www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~kuegl...
Also, the Wikipedia pages for these topics are pretty good:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informa...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(...)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_a...
See you all in two weeks!

Опубликовано:

26 июл 2016

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Комментарии : 26

@hiroyukitsujii350 8 лет назад

たしかに、文章の組み立て方によって、同じ情報でも伝わり方は変わってくるね。

@yeetshea 8 лет назад

Hungarian conveys the topic by always putting it right before the verb. I think that's such an efficient way of doing things!

@elderscrollsswimmer4833 8 лет назад

As does Finnish.

@SirCutRy 8 лет назад

How? Can you give an example?

@thelingspace 8 лет назад

I hadn't known about this either, but I've been reading about it this afternoon! Try checking example (9) in the following article for a few cases: www.researchgate.net/publication/225354715_A_new_look_at_information_structure_in_Hungarian

@Valdagast 8 лет назад

Topicalization is used and over-used by journalists, at least in Sweden. On a side note, it's interesting how we have produced replacements for intonation in writing, like italics or bolding a word to mark it as important. Or the famous ALL-CAPS INTERNET USER.

@jimnewton4534 8 лет назад

Hi Moti, great explanation. Thanks for posting. You commented that we use the definite vs indefinite articles in English to emphasize (determine?) which things are presupposed and which are asserted. That's really interesting. I have noticed in technical writing that we tend to use the definite article on things which are foreign, dubious, threatening, or unfamiliar, whereas we tend to drop the article altogether on things we know and trust. E.g., I recently worked on a piece of software called OODI and someone in another country worked on another component of the project called DTL. I regularly called my software "OODI" but referred to "the DTL". Whereas my remote colleague called his software "DTL" an mine he called "the OODI". Another example, I once heard someone's grandmother referring to her neighbors son with the phrase: "He spokes that marijuana". Undoubtedly she made a funny face when she said marijuana, and the "that" emphasized "I have no idea myself about that stuff". After learning to speak French I'm still puzzled often when to use the definite article and when to drop the article. The rules are different than in English. And I'm sure Russian (having no articles) must be able to express the same things but in a very different way.

@oakleywyatt1717 2 года назад

This is an excellent explanation!

@ciclopropano 3 года назад

Thank you

@austinholmes96 8 лет назад

I love person of interest!

@thelingspace 8 лет назад

It's a pretty cool show! ^_^

@icedragon769 8 лет назад

Perhaps there could have been a better example for a thing that doesn't exist than "the government's top secret super-intelligent surveillance system", considering, you know, since 2013 we've known that it does :P

@thelingspace 8 лет назад

Yeah, but I hear it's really bad at Dutch. ^_~ Anyway, joking aside, while I do take your point, I hope you'll agree that within the context of a conversation that's not already on the topic of surveillance or the like, coming out with a sentence about one's dog probably will make it more easily into the common ground and be accepted than the surveillance system. Although yes, maybe since we know such a thing does exist, it'll be easier to make it in now than it would have 5 years ago, I agree.

@icedragon769 8 лет назад

The Ling Space Sure enough. It might be that it's one of the things that I'm always thinking about, so hearing it as a topic is unsurprising :P

@thelingspace 8 лет назад

Fair enough! That's why common ground building in conversation comes from knowledge of everyone involved - if I know a topic you care about, and I care about it, too (which I do, actually), then throwing it out there shouldn't cause any problems between us for these purposes. But it may be less salient and harder to bring into our discourse with other people. ^_^

@GregSanders 8 лет назад

Neat, it makes sense, but it was new information to me that linguistics is able to tell us so much about the content of language. Is there a straightforward answer to the question of what takes the place of intonation in written language? Obviously bold, underline, and italics are all fairly straightforward there, but much of written language gets by without those methods. I"d guess that punctuation internal to a sentence is also a workhorse there, although I suspect that also varies from language to language.

@thelingspace 8 лет назад

This is definitely an interesting question! Obviously, there's going to be variation in this from language to language; the way that Japanese marks emphasis and intonation is definitely different from English. Although languages do often have ways of showing things like bolt, underline, italics, etc.; Japanese will put little dots next to characters that are supposed to be emphasized, for example. And as you note, if a language does have punctuation, that can definitely also serve as a very strong marker. Strong enough of one, really, that in cases where you want to preserve ambiguity in a sentence in an experimental setting, you have to leave it out. Much of the time, though, the words or morphemes themselves will give you a cue as to how to pronounce it. As we discuss in the video, changing the word order or using phrases that show you what's new and what's given, etc., is a solid tactic, and it comes across in reading as well. But it's also just the case that in writing, it's also much easier to lose someone, in part because the information given by intonation is so much weaker. This is why misunderstanding sentences and getting garden pathed is much more common in writing than in speech. It's not to say that speech is perfect, but in writing, we're that much further off, and it's hard to get across exactly what you want. Hope this helps! ^_^

@narayan61 8 лет назад

is it possible that the paucity of intonation in written language constrains written communication to achieve the same ends in other ways (when bold, underline, punctuation, etc, don't achieve the desired effect)? for example, the "John and Harold" sentence in its written form may be ambiguous but can be reworded slightly to indicate which of the possible meanings is intended.

@12tone 8 лет назад

I feel like if you were designing a top-secret, super intelligent surveillance systems, one of the first features you'd want is a translator, but that's probably why they don't pay me to design top secret, super intelligent surveillance systems.

@12tone 8 лет назад

Or do they?

@thelingspace 8 лет назад

Only time will tell! Maybe you'd be right, though. Or maybe you want it to be harder to access! Who knows? I think you could argue it either way. ^_^