Semantic and pragmatic contributions to information status
Betty J. Birner · Acta Linguistica Hafniensia · 2006
This paper examines the range of semantic and pragmatic inferences that contribute to the classification of information as ‘old’ or ‘new’ for purposes of information packaging. It surveys current research into information status and discourse function, focusing on the problem of so-called ‘inferrable’ information, and investigates the distribution of inferrable information in a corpus of noncanonical syntactic constructions. The class of discourse-based inferences is shown to comprise three distinct categories — identity, bridging, and elaborating inferences -with different distributions in discourse: Identity and non-identity relations are treated as a single broad class of inferential relations, while within this class identity and elaborating inferences are distinguished from bridging inferences in their discourse distribution. A preliminary list of semantic ally and pragmatically based inferential relations is offered, and the problems inherent in delimiting the set of such relations is discussed.