In this and the next three chapters I will analyze the concepts which I consider fundamental to the study of information structure. These concepts are: (i) propositional information and its two components presupposition and assertion (Chapter 2); (ii) the identifiability and activation states of the representations of discourse referents in the minds of the speech participants (Chapter 3); (iii) the pragmatic relations topic (Chapter 4) and focus (Chapter 5). Many of the observations in these chapters have been made by other linguists before me, and I will acknowledge my predecessors whenever possible. Other portions, I believe, contain new insights, such as the analysis of the pragmatic relations “topic” and “focus” and of the relationship between the two. In particular, what I believe is new in my treatment, and what prompts me to call it loosely a “theory,” is the idea that an account of information structure must include all three of the sets of concepts listed above and must explain how they relate to each other.

The universe of discourse

I will begin by sketching a simple model of the universe of discourse. In this model, I presuppose the primacy of spoken language over other forms of linguistic communication (see Lambrecht 1986b: Ch. 1). I will therefore always refer to “speakers” and “hearers” (or “addressees”) not to “writers” and “readers.”

Definition of topic

Topic and aboutness

Let me begin with a few remarks about what I will not take “topic” to be in this chapter. First, in keeping with the decision to restrict my research to pragmatic phenomena with grammatical, in particular syntactic, correlates in sentence structure (cf. Section 1.1), I will restrict my attention to sentence topics or clause topics. I will have little to say about the notion of discourse topic, which has more to do with discourse understanding and text cohesion than with the grammatical form of sentences (cf. Halliday & Hasan 1976, Ochs Keenan & Schieffelin 1976b, Van Dijk 1977, Reinhart 1982, Barnes 1985, Van Oosten 1985), although I will sometimes informally use that term to designate a topic expression whose referent is pragmatically salient beyond the limit of a single sentence.

Second, I would like to emphasize from the outset that the concept of topic developed here does not coincide with that of topic (or “theme”) as the “element which comes first in a sentence.” In the framework adopted here, sentence-initial elements may either be topics or foci, hence cannot be identified with either of these categories. The notion of topic/theme as the first element in the sentence is extensively discussed in Prague School research (cf. e.g. the summary in Firbas 1966a) and has been adopted e.g. by Halliday (1967) and Fries (1983).

What is information structure?

There has been and still is disagreement and confusion in linguistic theory about the nature of the component of language referred to in this book as information structure and about the status of this component in the overall system of grammar. The difficulties encountered in the study of information structure are in part due to the fact that grammatical analysis at this level is concerned with the relationship between linguistic form and the mental states of speakers and hearers and that the linguist dealing with information structure must deal simultaneously with formal and communicative aspects of language. Information-structure research neither offers the comfort which many syntacticians find in the idea of studying an autonomous formal object nor provides the possibility enjoyed by sociolinguists of putting aside issues of formal structure for the sake of capturing the function of language in social interaction.

Negative or defeatist views of information-structure research are therefore not uncommon, even among linguists who emphasize the importance of the study of linguistic pragmatics. The following quote concerning the role of topic and focus in linguistic theory illustrates such views: “Terminological profusion and confusion, and underlying conceptual vagueness, plague the relevant literature to a point where little may be salvageable” (Levinson 1983:x). In his own book on pragmatics, Levinson explicitly excludes the analysis of the relationship between pragmatics and sentence form, in particular the analysis of topic-comment structure.

Discourse referents

In the present chapter I will be concerned with the nature of the representations of the referents of linguistic expressions in the minds of interlocutors. In particular, I will be concerned with the changes which these mental representations may undergo in the course of a conversation and with the linguistic forms which code these changes. The set of representations which a speaker and a hearer may be assumed to share in a given discourse will be called the discourse register. As indicated in the remark in Section 2.1, I will tend to neglect the terminological (but not the conceptual) distinction between referents and the mental representations of referents in a discourse. It is primarily the latter that I will be concerned with in the following discussion.

Discourse referents may be either entities or propositions. A proposition may acquire the status of a discourse referent once it is assumed by a speaker to be known to the addressee, i.e. once it has been added to the set of pragmatic presuppositions in the discourse register. The mental representation of such a propositional referent may then be stored in the register together with the representations of entities. Like expressions denoting entities, those denoting presupposed propositions may serve as arguments of a predicate.

This book proposes a theory of the relationship between the structure of sentences and the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts in which sentences are used as units of propositional information. It is concerned with the system of options which grammars offer speakers for expressing given propositional contents in different grammatical forms under varying discourse circumstances. The research presented here is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects in systematic and theoretically interesting ways a speaker's assumptions about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of an utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and the formal structure of the sentence is taken to be governed by rules and conventions of sentence grammar, in a grammatical component which I call information structure, using a term introduced by Halliday (1967). In the information-structure component of language, propositions as conceptual representations of states of affairs undergo pragmatic structuring according to the utterance contexts in which these states of affairs are to be communicated. Such pragmatically structured propositions are then expressed as formal objects with morphosyntactic and prosodic structure.

My account of the information-structure component involves an analysis of four independent but interrelated sets of categories. The first is that of propositional information with its two components pragmatic presupposition and pragmatic assertion. These have to do with the speaker's assumptions about the hearer's state of knowledge and awareness at the time of an utterance (Chapter 2).

In this book, I have tried to present an integrated account of the relationship between the formal structure of sentences and the communicative situations in which sentences are used to convey pieces of propositional information. The account is based on the assumption that this relationship is governed by principles and rules of grammar, in a component called information structure. In this information-structure component, propositions, as conceptual representations of states of affairs, undergo pragmatic structuring according to the discourse situations in which these states of affairs are to be communicated. The pragmatic structuring of propositions is done in terms of a speaker's assumptions concerning the hearer's state of mind at the time of an utterance. Pragmatically structured propositions are then paired with appropriate lexicogrammatical structures.

The assumption that information structure is part of grammar, rather than of general human communicative competence, is based on the existence of a great number of grammatical features and feature combinations – morphosyntactic, prosodic, lexical – which have the unique purpose of signaling information-structure distinctions. These features are grammatical in the sense that the relationship between them and their interpretations is determined by linguistic convention rather than by general principles of communication. Information structure is thus to be distinguished from the general domain of conversational pragmatics, in which context-dependent interpretations of sentences are often determined by non-linguistic factors.

Definition of focus

Focus, presupposition, and assertion

In Chapter 4, I used the term “focus” as a convenient shorthand to refer to the status of certain sentence constituents which systematically differed from topic expressions in their pragmatic function and in their formal expression. It would therefore seem natural to define focus as the “complement of topic.” The complementarity of the two notions is suggested e.g. by the alternative concept pair theme/rheme, whose members are often seen as complementing each other. Using Chafe's characterization of the (topical) subject as the “hitching post for the new knowledge” (cf. Section 4.1.1), we might then say that the focus of a sentence is the “new knowledge hitched to the topic post,” i.e. the new information conveyed about a topic.

Within the present framework, there are at least two reasons for not adopting such a definition. First, if we assume – as I do – that focus has to do with the conveying of new information, and that all sentences convey new information (Section 2.3), all sentences must have a focus. However, not all sentences have a topic (see Sections 4.2.2 and 4.4.4.1). Therefore focus cannot simply be defined as the complement of topic. Second, in the present framework the terms “new knowledge” or “new information” are loose equivalents for the term “pragmatic assertion,” which I defined in Chapter 2 as a proposition that is superimposed on and that includes the pragmatic presupposition (see Section 2.3).

In this chapter we outline the approach to lexical meaning adopted in this study. This approach is basically that of the lexical semantic field, in particular as developed by Lyons in his work on lexical semantics (cf. Lyons, 1963; 1968: 400–81; 1977: 174–335). Broadly, the meaning of an item of the vocabulary is seen as being specifiable in terms of the various types of intralingual semantic relations which the item contracts with other items in the language, and in terms of its applicability to phenomena outside language (extralingual meaning).

The scheme described below constitutes the basic framework for the subsequent semantic analysis of Japanese taste terms. Intralingual and extralingual meaning are discussed in 2.1 and 2.2, respectively, while 2.3 briefly takes up some aspects of basic and extended meanings from the viewpoint of the present framework. 2.4 discusses the treatment of stylistic factors in the vocabulary.

Intralingual meaning

By intralingual meaning we refer to semantic relations which hold between lexical items in a given language.

Paradigmatic relations

Here we are concerned with semantic relations which hold between lexical items that can occur in the same linguistic context. Paradigmatic relations in general hold for a particular range of such contexts, rather than for the language as a whole.

Relations of this type rest upon the notion of implication holding between sentences containing the lexical items concerned. As a simple example, a sincere utterance of the sentence This apple is sweet will be held by speakers of English to imply the denial of the sentence This apple is sour, while no implication of any kind will follow with regard to, say, the sentence This apple is crisp.

Our purpose in this first chapter is to provide relevant background information on the study of taste and taste terms. 1.1 presents a brief introduction to the scientific study of taste, and existing studies of taste terms are surveyed in 1.2. Compared with taste the neighbouring field of colour has been widely explored by both psychologists and linguists; in 1.3 we discuss some areas of contrast between the two fields and consider their possible linguistic implications. Finally in 1.4 we take up the specific topic of taste norms.

Taste: narrow and broad perspectives

This section is intended as a brief introduction to the work of physiologists, psychologists and food scientists in the study of taste. A comprehensive survey of the field, apart from being outside the competence of the present author, is unnecessary for our purpose: our main emphasis is on the distinction between narrow and broad approaches to the study of taste, and on the implications of this distinction for linguistic studies.

In considering scientific work on taste one must begin by recognizing that the sense of taste is there generally defined in terms of a given set of sense organs or receptors, namely the taste cells. These are largely concentrated in thousands of taste buds found in papillae located predominantly on the tip, sides and back of the tongue; a small number of taste buds are also present in other sensitive parts of the mouth, including the pharynx and soft palate.

In this chapter we continue our treatment of the semantics of the lexical field of AJI. The remaining systems, AJI II and AJI III, are analysed in 6.1 and 6.2, and the overall field is reviewed in 6.3. Finally, extended meanings of descriptive taste terms in Japanese are surveyed in 6.4.

The lexical system AJI II

AJI II contains two terms, AKUPPOI ‘harsh’ and AKU GA ARU ‘have a harshness’.

Extralingual meaning

Focal exemplars given by the informant for both terms are GOB00 ‘burdock’, NASU ‘aubergine’ andSATOIMO ‘taro’. The dictionaries surveyed in 5.4.1 all define AKU as a component of plants/vegetables, though without reference to specific examples. One dictionary (Kindaichi et al., 1989: 11) defines AKU as shokubutsu nifukumareru, egui seibun ‘the harsh (EGUI) component found in plants’; as we have seen in 5.2, EGUI and associated terms are part of the taste vocabularies of some speakers but are not used by the informant, and this area is clearly characterized by considerable variation (cf. Chapter 5, note 8). Other dictionaries refer to astringency (SHIBUMI) in plants: although the present terms and SHIBUI belong to separate systems for the informant, this suggests some extralingual similarity as (unpleasant) tongue sensations.

Intralingual meaning

The sequences *akuppoi kedo aku ga nai ‘is harsh but doesn't have a harshness’ and *aku ga am kedo akuppoku nai ‘has a harshness but isn't harsh’ are both adjudged as contradictory by the informant, indicating that the expressions are (cognitively) synonymous: the colloquial status of the suffix in AKUPPOI has been noted in 5.2, and some stylistic differentiation in terms of formality is likely.

In the following two chapters we treat a set of descriptive taste terms in Japanese, defined by our delimitation procedure as constituting the lexical field of AJI ‘taste’. We will see that, extralingually, the members of this field range over a domain wider than that of ‘taste’ in the scientific sense (i.e. gustation), but narrower than that of ‘taste’ when it is equated with the whole of the ingestion experience, including parameters such as texture, consistency and temperature.

The present chapter is organized as follows. In 5.1 the lexical field is delimited, and the grammatical characteristics of the member terms are described in 5.2. In 5.3 the initial field is subdivided into the lexical systems AJI I, AJI II, and AJI III, and the semantic structure of AJI I, the largest system, is analysed in 5.4. The semantic structure of the remaining systems, and other semantic aspects of the field, are described in Chapter 6.

Delimitation

As outlined in 3.1, the general strategy adopted in this study toward the investigation of lexical fields is, by asking appropriate questions, to determine what lexical fields and systems, with what members, are present in the language, and subsequently to examine the semantic relations which hold among members. That is to say, the question of what a lexical item means is approached by considering what basic question(s) it occurs in answers to, what other items also occur in such answers, and how the items are semantically related to each other and to aspects of extralinguistic reality.