The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

(19) a. What happened?
b. Přijel vlak.
arrived train
‘A train arrived.’
(20) a. What happened to the train?
b. Vlak || přijel.
train arrived
‘The train arrived.’
This is basically the story. 14 There are still many questions that need to be addressed –
and I will address them in the coming sections and chapters – but the core of the argument
is as simple as this: If a given element α G is asymmetrically c-commanded by a non-G
element, α G needs to move. If there is no offending c-command relation, G-movement
does not take place.
Before I approach developing the syntactic system in more detail, I want to shortly address
what I mean by given.
In the literature on information structure it is agreed, at least since Halliday (1967), that
an utterance may be divided into two parts, one of which is more established in the discourse
(common ground, context. . . ) than the other. While the terminology and the actual
approaches vary widely (see for example Kruijff-Korbayová and Steedman (2003) for a
recent overview), there is a strong intuition that the two parts are complementary to each
other. Thus, it is a reasonable assumption that a grammar might refer only to one of the
parts. The question then is which part is relevant.
The approach I take here is based on the idea that the part encoded in the grammar is
the given part (on given/new or given/focus scale). For arguments for this type of approach
see, for instance, Williams (1997); Schwarzschild (1999); Krifka (2001); Sauerland (2005);
Reinhart (2006).
As to the question of how exactly given is defined for now I will adopt Schwarzschild’s
definition of givenness, stated in (21). The definition is based on the observation that
for element α to be given, which in English roughly corresponds to being deaccented, α
must be entailed by the previous discourse and α must have a salient antecedent. Since
entailment refers to proposition, the definition ensures that entailment can be stated for any
α (not only propositional but also referential and predicational), (21-b).
(21) Definition of Given (modified from Schwarzschild 1999, p. 151, (25))
α is interpreted as Given in an utterance U iff there is a salient antecedent A such
that
a. α and A corefer; or
14 There is one crucial piece missing: dependence of G-movement on head movement. I will discuss this
property in section 1.3 and 2.3.
16