Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-b5k59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-08T03:56:21.322Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Functional compositionality and the interaction of discourse constraints

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Betty J. Birner ,
Jeffrey P. Kaplan  and
Gregory Ward
Betty J. Birner
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois University
Jeffrey P. Kaplan
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
Gregory Ward
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We argue for the existence of functionally complex constructions whose elements compositionally impose discourse-functional constraints on the use of the whole. In particular, we examine th-clefts (as in That's John who wrote the book), equatives with epistemic would and demonstrative subjects (as in That would be John), and simple equatives with demonstrative subjects (as in That's John). We show that, contra previous approaches, the latter two constructions need not be analyzed as truncated clefts. Rather, the properties that these constructions share with th-clefts can be straightforwardly accounted for as the sum of the constraints on their shared elements—that is, the equative construction, the demonstrative subject, and the presence of a contextually salient open proposition. The convergence of these elemental properties in each of these three constructions results in the possibility of the demonstrative being used to refer to the instantiation of the variable in the open proposition, which in turn predicts a complex of distributional behaviors shared by precisely the constructions that share these properties. Because these distributional behaviors can be straightforwardly explained in terms of this functional compositionality, the motivation for a truncated-cleft analysis disappears. These results support the view that not all functional properties must be learned on a construction-by-construction basis; instead, the discourse functions of an utterance are built up compositionally from those of its parts.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 317 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by the Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Abbott, Barbara. 2004. Definiteness and indefiniteness. Handbook of pragmatics, ed. by Horn, Laurence R. and Ward, Gregory, 122–49. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing noun phrase antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 2001. Accessibility theory: An overview. Text representation: Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects, ed. by Sanders, Ted J. M., Schilperoord, Joost, and Spooren, Wilbert, 29–87. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ball, Catherine N. 1977. 77z-clefts. Penn Review of Linguistics 2. 57–64.Google Scholar
Ball, Catherine N. 1978. It-clefts and th-clefts. Paper presented at the summer meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Champaign-Urbana, IL.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty J. 1994. Information status and word order: An analysis of English inversion. Language 70. 233–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Birner, Betty J. 1997. Discourse constraints on PP + there in English. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty J., Kaplan, Jeffrey P.; and Ward, Gregory. 2001. Open propositions and epistemic would. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty J., Kaplan, Jeffrey P.; and Ward, Gregory. 2003. Epistemic modals and temporal reference. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Atlanta.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty J., and Ward, Gregory. 1993. There-sentences and inversion as distinct constructions: A functional account. Berkeley Linguistics Society 19. 27–39.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty J., and Ward, Gregory. 1994. Uniqueness, familiarity, and the definite article in English. Berkeley Linguistics Society 20. 93–102.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty J., and Ward, Gregory. 1998. Information status and noncanonical word order in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breivik, Leiv Egil. 1981. On the interpretation of existential there. Language 57. 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Büring, Daniel. 1998. Identity, modality, and the candidate behind the wall. Proceedings of SALT 8, ed. by Strolovitch, Devon and Lawson, Aaron, 36–54. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.Google Scholar
Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erdmann, Peter. 1976. There sentences in English. Munich: Tuduv.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. 1999. Inversion and constructional inheritance. Lexical and constructional aspects of linguistic explanation, ed. by Webelhuth, Gert, Koenig, Jean-Pierre, and Kathol, Andreas, 113–28. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J., Kay, Paul, Michaelis, Laura A.; and Sag, Ivan A. 2003. Construction grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Freeze, Ray. 1992. Existentials and other locatives. Language 68. 553–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele, and Guidice, Alex Del. 2005. Subject-auxiliary inversion: A natural category. The Linguistic Review 22. 411–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Adele, and Jackendoff, Ray. 2004. The English resultative as a family of constructions. Language 80. 532–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K., Hedberg, Nancy; and Zacharski, Ron. 2005. Pronouns without NP antecedents: How do we know when a pronoun is referential? Anaphora processing: Linguistic, cognitive and computational modelling, ed. by Branco, Antonio, McEnery, Tony, and Mitkov, Ruslan, 351–64. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hedberg, Nancy. 1990. Discourse pragmatics and cleft sentences in English. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota dissertation.Google Scholar
Hedberg, Nancy. 2000. The referential status of clefts. Language 76. 891–920.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Higgins, F. Roger. 1979. The pseudo-cleft construction in English. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Janda, Richard, and Joseph, Brian D. 1999. The modern Greek negator mi(n)(-) as a morphological constellation. Greek linguistics '97: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Greek linguistics, ed. by Babiniotis, George D., 341–51. Athens: Elinika Gramata Press.Google Scholar
Kay, Paul, and Fillmore, Charles J. 1999. Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What's X doing Y? construction. Language 75. 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levin, Nancy, and Prince, Ellen F. 1986. Gapping and clausal implicature. Papers in Linguistics 19.351 -64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maclaran, Rose. 1982. The semantics and pragmatics of the English demonstratives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University dissertation.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Laura, and Lambrecht, Knud. 1996. Toward a construction-based theory of language function: The case of nominal extraposition. Language 72. 215–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mikkelsen, Line. 2005. Copular clauses: Specification, predication, and equation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nuyts, Jan. 2001. Epistemic modality, language and conceptualization: A cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Penhallurick, John. 1984. Full-verb inversion in English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 4. 33–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1978. A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. Language 54. 883–906.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given/new information. Radical pragmatics, ed. by Cole, Peter, 223–54. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1986. On the syntactic marking of presupposed open propositions. Chicago Linguistic Society 22.2.208–22.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1992. The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information-status. Discourse description: Diverse analyses of a fundraising text, ed. by Thompson, Sandra A. and Mann, William C., 295–325. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stone, Matthew. 1994. The reference argument of epistemic must. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computational Semantics, ed. by Bunt, Harry, Muskens, Reinhard, and Rentier, Gerrit, 181–90. Tilburg, NL: ITK.Google Scholar
Välimaa-Blum, Riitta. 1988. Finnish word-order as a set of syntactic constructions. Proceedings of the fifth Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, ed. by Powers, Joyce and Jong, Kenneth de, 500–511. Columbus: Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Ward, Gregory. 1988. The semantics and pragmatics of preposing. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Ward, Gregory, and Birner, Betty J. 1995. Definiteness and the English existential. Language 71. 722–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Gregory, Birner, Betty J.; and Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Information packaging. The Cambridge grammar of the English language, by Huddleston, Rodney and Pullum, Geoffrey K., 1363–447. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ward, Gregory, Birner, Betty J.; and Kaplan, Jeffrey P. 2003. A pragmatic analysis of the epistemic would construction in English. Modality in contemporary English, ed. by Facchinetti, Roberta, Krug, Manfred, and Palmer, Frank, 71–79. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Gregory, Hirschberg, Julia, Gravano, Agus, Sneed, Elisa; and Benus, Stefan. 2007. The effect of epistemic would on the perception of speaker certainty, ms.Google Scholar
Ward, Gregory, Kaplan, Jeffrey P.; and Birner, Betty J. 2007. Epistemic would, open propositions, and truncated clefts. Topics on the grammar-pragmatics interface: Papers in honor of Jeanette K. Gundel, ed. by Hedberg, Nancy and Zacharski, Ron, 77–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Webber, Bonnie Lynn. 1988. Discourse deixis: Reference to discourse segments. Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 113–22.Google Scholar