CLAUSE AS MESSAGE
Text 3-9 Silver Text, showing tonality and tonicity
Manageress: // ^ in / thisjob / Anne we’re // working with / silver// ^ now / silver / needs to have / love//
{Anne: // yeah. //} you / know^ the // people that / buysilver //loveit //
Anne: // yeah// guess they / would//
Manageress: // yeah// mm / ^ well / naturallyI / mean to / say that it’s // got a / lovely / gleama/bout it you / know// ^ and / if they come / inthey’re // usually / people who / love / beautiful / things// ^ so / you / have to be / beautiful /withit you / know // ^ and you / sellit with / beauty //
Anne: // um//
Manageress: // ^ you / ^ I’m / sureyou know / how to do // that// ^ // oh but you / must// let’s hear / ^ / let’s hear / ^ /look/ ^ you say // madam// isn’t that / beautiful// ^ if / you sug/gestit’s beautiful // they / seeit as / beautiful //
An information unit does not correspond exactly to any other unit in the grammar. The nearest grammatical unit is in fact the clause; and we can regard this as the unmarked or default condition: other things being equal, one information unit will be co-extensive with one clause. But other things are often not equal, for reasons that will be brought out in the following sections. Thus a single clause may be mapped into two or more information units;
or a single information unit into two or more clauses. Furthermore the boundaries may overlap, with one information unit covering, say, one clause and half of the next. So the information unit has to be set up as a constituent in its own right. At the same time, its relationship to the clausal constituents is by no means random, and instances of overlapping boundaries are clearly ‘marked’; so the two constituent structures, the clausal and the informational, are closely interconnected.
The information unit is what its name implies: a unit of information. Information, in this technical grammatical sense, is the tension between what is already known or predictable and what is new or unpredictable. This is different from the mathematical concept of information, which is the measure of unpredictability. It is the interplay of new and not new that generates information in the linguistic sense. Hence the information unit is a structure made up of two functions, the New and the Given.
In the idealized form each information unit consists of a Given element accompanied by a New element. But there are two conditions of departure from this principle. One is that discourse has to start somewhere, so there can be discourse-initiating units consisting of a New element only. The other is that by its nature the Given is likely to be phoric — referring to something already present in the verbal or non-verbal context; and one way of achieving phoricity is through ellipsis, a grammatical form in which certain features are not realized in the structure (see Chapter 9). Structurally, therefore, we shall say that an information unit consists of an obligatory New element plus an optional Given.
The way this structure is realized is essentially ‘natural’ (non-arbitrary), in two respects:
(i) the New is marked by prominence; (ii) the Given typically precedes the New. We will look at these two features in turn.
(i) Each information unit is realized as a pitch contour, or tone, which may be falling, rising or mixed (falling-rising, rising-falling) (for the details of the tones see Chapter 4, Section 4.3, p. 121). This pitch contour extends over the whole tone group. Within the tone group, one foot (and in particular its first syllable) carries the main pitch movement: the main fall, or rise, or the change of direction. This feature is known astonic prominence, and the element having this prominence is the tonic element (tonic foot, tonic syllable). We indicate tonic prominence by a form of graphic prominence: bold type for print, wavy underlining for manuscript and typescript. The element having this prominence is said to be carrying information focus.
(ii) The tonic foot defines the culmination of what is New: it marks where the New element ends.* In the typical instance, this will be the last functional element of clause structure in the information unit. As this implies, the typical sequence of informational elements is thus Given followed by New. But whereas the end of the New element is marked by tonic prominence, there is nothing to mark where it begins; so there is
T h e i n f o r m a t i o n u n i t : G i v e n + N e w
* In some languages there may be special focus particles (as in Hindi), which may be derived from a theme predication construction (cf. Harris and Campbell, 1995).
indeterminacy in the structure. If we take an instance out of context, we can tell that it culminates with the New; but we cannot tell on phonological grounds whether there is a Given element first, or where the boundary between Given and New would be. (This is not always true; see below.) For example, in Figure 3-15 we know that on the burning deck is New, because that is the element on which the prominence falls; but we cannot tell whether the New extends also to stoodandthe boy.
Fig. 3-15 Unit with New element only
In real life we do not usually meet with text out of context, so there is other evidence for interpreting the information structure. For example, the first two clauses of the silver text were:In this job,Anne,we’re working with silver.Now silver needs to have love. The second clause was spoken as follows:
// ^ now / silver / needs to have / love//
Taken by itself, this also is undecidable: all we know is that at least loveis New. But given the preceding clause, we know that silverwas in fact Given; the New element starts at needs (Figure 3-16):
Fig. 3-16 Unit with Given and New elements
(It is not quite true to say that there are no phonological indices of the Given-New structure before the tonic prominence; this is one of the functions of variation in rhythm.
Compare the two following versions (Figure 3-17):
(a) I’ll tell you about silver. It needs to have love.
(b) I’ll tell you what silver needs. It needs to have love.
Fig. 3-17 Rhythmic indications of information structure // ^ it needs to have / love//
Given ——————————Æ New // ^ it / needs to have / love//
Given¨———————————— New
// ^ now / silver / needs to have / love//
GivenæææÆ ¨æææææNew
// ^ the / boy stood / on the / burning / deck//
¨———————————— New
In (a),needsis salient, which indicates that it is the beginning of the New; whereas in (b) it is part of the initial proclitic foot, reflecting the fact that in this instance it is Given, being mentioned in the preceding clause. But not all Given elements are characterized by this absence of salience.
The unmarked position for the New is at the end of the information unit. But it is possible to have Given material following the New; and any accented matter that follows the tonic foot is thereby signalled as being Given. For example (Figure 3-18):
You say ‘Madam, isn’t that beautiful?’ If you suggest it’s beautiful, they see it as beautiful.
Fig. 3-18 Marked information structure
Here suggest andseeare New;youandtheyare also New, not because they have not been mentioned before but because they are contrastive (in this case with each other). But ‘it + be beautiful’ is Given. The fact that the two occurrences of beautiful are both post-tonic makes explicit the fact that they refer back to the question Isn’t that beautiful? in the preceding sentence. This is an instance of marked information focus.
We can now see more clearly what the terms Given and New actually mean. The significant variable is: information that is presented by the speaker as recoverable (Given) or not recoverable (New) to the listener. What is treated as recoverable may be so because it has been mentioned before; but that is not the only possibility. It may be something that is in the situation, such as I andyou; or in the air, so to speak; or something that is not around at all but that the speaker wants to present as Given for rhetorical purposes. The meaning is: this is not news. Similarly, what is treated as non-recoverable may be something that has not been mentioned; but it may be something unexpected, whether previously mentioned or not. The meaning is: attend to this; this is news. One form of
‘newness’ that is frequent in dialogue is contrastive emphasis, such as that on youandIin the following:
//youcan / go if you / like // I’mnot / going //
There are a number of elements in language that are inherently ‘given’ in the sense that they are not interpretable except by reference to some previous mention or some feature of the situation: anaphoric elements (those that refer to things mentioned before) and deictic elements (those that are interpreted by reference to the ‘here-and-now’ of the discourse). Typically these items do not carry information focus; if they do, they are contrastive. So when we say that, for any information unit, the unmarked structure is that with the focus on the final element, this excludes any items that are inherently given. So, for example, in How’d you go at that interview today? the unmarked form, and the one actually used by the speaker, was
// how’d you / go at that / interviewto/day //
// they /see it as / beautiful //
New Given
//^if / you sug/gest it’s / beautiful
New Given
T h e i n f o r m a t i o n u n i t : G i v e n + N e w
withtoday, which is a deictic element, occurring as a post-tonic item.
Here is a little text from a five-year-old child showing clearly his mastery of the information structure: